1 20 46 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3662b8e6f4e1530866a12610fd68a0ef.pdf 8d1bd808f3b82f25383eeb3a20ea0e13 PDF Text Text Winter 2022 ��letter from the editors Energeia has always been about collecting the art of the community here at St. John’s. We know that there is good art here and we know that you also know that. Our job is to bring all of it together in a place where it is accessible to the polity. We hope that Energeia gives you the opportunity to sit with this art; to visit and revisit it. We are excited to begin our time as editors of Energeia and hope that you will trust our hands to shape this collection for the next two years. We encourage you to find your friends who are published in this issue and have them autograph their piece! Make this magazine a memory of the time and place it was made. - Allyson and Kelly �Contents Liz Dowdy 3 ...only asses hide weakness Daniel Nathan 4 Kirkland Brand Whiskey a Go-Go Liz Dowdy 5 Sexy Grandma Collection II Aaron Shelsby 6 If I Can Tell Helen Wagner 7 Spiral Stairway to Heaven Helen Wagner 8 Almost Anonymous 9 Faeth Fiadha Aaron Shelsby 10 Cleopatra by College Creek Hain Cho 11 Three Lions for Ana-Sofia Liz Dowdy 12 Bark, bitch Liz Dowdy 12 fragments from a barking bitch Zeinep Kyzy 13 Kyrgyz girl on a horse Eli Zitler 14 Waiting on the Bench Zeinep Kyzy 15 Ennui Candyce Jones 16 In Search of God in Dreams Esther Beland 17 Hotel Kelly Kane 18 i have this dream where i’m screaming underwater Daniel Nathan 19 Grandboy Rat Zeinep Kyzy 23 Flowers Still Life �Nicholas Bellinson 24 In Memory of Rolly Phillips Henry Hills 25 The House of the Rising Sun Max Anthon 26 Io Esther Beland 27 Aaron’s Rod Hain Cho 28 Bamgashi Ornament Hain Cho 29 Fruits of Paradise Daniel Nathan 30 The End of the No Look Behind the Back Pass James Reeher 31 June Bug Riley Ferver 32 I think about my father and the way he used to drive Henry Zheng 33 Cicero, Hortensius Lysithia Page 35 Lunatic Hain Cho 36 Untitled Kai Gyorki 37 To Stay Bridget Mace 38 Castle Aaron Shelsby 39 Interview Audrey Fox 40 sketches Rory Goode 41 Somewhere I am a Chimey for an ugly black �Polish original by Marta Podgórnik (...) tylko dupki ukrywają słabość tylko dupki ukrywają słabość. ziarna nie sieją. fala podnosi się, topi ich. we śnie, kurewsko nie fair, zawodzą zawory bezpieczeństwa. wartość ma tylko to, co właśnie tracisz. w co brniesz dalej. nie będziesz miał nic, co można by ukraść, zniszczyć, nic, czym można by zabić. dasz sobie tyle czasu — stąd do tamtąd. ruszysz. w niemal każdą wiarygodną jutrzejszość. w tego boga uwierzysz, który tu, teraz, za ciebie. i wyjdziesz z tego jak spod prysznica. nago, wyzwolony z formy, pusty w treść. poślizgniesz się na kafelkach, co się zdarza — złamany ładniej będziesz wyglądał na zdjęciu. po zdjęciu z tego, powieszony na następnym, krzyż pęknie o kant sedesu. (...) only asses hide weakness only asses hide weakness. they sow no seeds. the wave rises, drowns them. in sleep, fucking unfairly, they let down the safety valves. only that, which you lose, has any worth. what you keep wading in. you won’t have anything, which could be stolen, destroyed, nothing, with which you could kill. you’ll give yourself so much time — from here to there. you move. in nearly every reliable tomorrow. you believe in that god, who here, now, is for you. and you’ll get out of it like from under the shower. naked, released from form, empty in content. you’ll slip on the tiles, which can occur — you’ll look prettier broken in a photograph. after being taken from this one, hung on the next, the cross Liz Dowdy | 3 �Kirkland Brand Whisky a Go Go Lubricated and dressed up in alabaster rubber soles, spattered with someone else’s Thirsty Thursday night vomit, painted in pinpricks of rinsed pantomime sick, dripped over him like Jackson Pollock’d skin. Dispensing that same old same old variety of slurred volatility with an everyman’s touch for decommissioned thinking. Doing the Twelve Step shuffle, wobble, tumble through the front door, drinking in just the same way that deadbeat painter did. Thoroughly, the alcoholic thrashed, downing swimming pools of turpentine gin, preaching the babble of practiced abuse. Paternalism-comme-chaos, steady hands don’t spill. Gulling themselves onward and toward their black diamond slope to a blacked out hell at the bottom of the hill. And they blame the existence of what or whomever they happen to neglect on bad genes too Irish, too diseased, too rare. Or otherwise, they blame it on their “Doing swell!” dad, too boring, too content, too gray-flannel suited, too square. Or else, the blame’s on their dad’s own down-bad shit dad, who’d come home slackjawed after his factory shift full of vinegar and piss, snarling, gnashing, flinging spit. Face turning Marlboro red, screaming, slurring, yelling at the children with a paddle in his hands demanding to know which to hit, until the day he finally up and decided to never, ever quit. Warm fluid, grain alcohol! rinses off the debris of daytime despair. Back again off the saddle, too lonesome to bear. 4 | Daniel Nathan �Liz Dowdy | 5 �If I Can Tell I know not where my Beatrice leads me and whether hell or heaven’s where I’m bound, but tied to her am I, we move without a sound intent on home, wherever that may be. Though we be quiet, music’s all around. There’s either holy hymns or moans of hell and oh! I do not know if I can tell. 6 | Aaron Shelsby �Spiral Stairway to Heaven I could pull a Sisyphus and push a suitcase full of hopes and dreams up an endless spiral staircase, but I’d laugh, because every time it falls, it plays the steps like piano keys and sometimes the notes make a melody. And I drag the suitcase back up thump thump thump thump So I can hear it again. Helen Wagner | 7 �Almost Winter comes, always and again, but something cannot stay which never quite made an appearance in the first place. It’s just like those words you dropped long ago onto your faded kitchen sofa like throw pillows, expectant, and my response, which has been resting on the other side of my lips for all these years. Winter comes, but Bayou City in February can never quite keep a frost. It’s soon ousted by climbing jasmine and April-sweet oleander conquering my driveway with perfume’s shadow. We, too, had that moment of autumn— not a fever-quenching cool, but a brief dip into reality (our Achilles heel), then back to the invincibility of the incomplete. Now my mind drowns in dog days, The Mississippi in the sun, stuck at the start of these long lonely summer years. Back when everything would happen, because nothing had— before unasked questions expected answers. 8 | Helen Wagner �Fæth Fiadha “Deer’s Cry” Crist lim. I unbind from myself What I have seen. Such sorrow no song has sung No writing written No painting painted No poem named. Not even this one. To watch a Father is to Learn. To lose a Father is to Love. To watch a Father lose is to Lose Hope. Falling. All one can do. All we All will do. Crist remam. Crist imm degaid. Crist innum. He blessed Him! He did His duty! In one strangled sentence He commended His son’s spirit onwards To a God felt cold by warm blood. The Hand fell Limp and unflinching. Strangled by the same Cancer We gazed, unblinking. The sign of the Cross On a forehead gone cold as The Stone rolled away– He lives! Why do we? Anonymous | 9 Crist ísum. Crist úasam. Christ with me. �Cleopatra by College Creek We walked again where nights before we walked, though closer now, and what you wore reminded me of Cleopatra. The sky was blushing, so was I, you turned and asked me how, above, the sky would seem a pinkish human cheek. Perhaps I was a witness to my own imaginings: the amorous hue of sky betraying inner wishes. The water too had turned from blue to match its mate above, and on our view we said “horizon kissed the sky”. 10 | Aaron Shelsby �Hain Cho | 11 �Bark, Bitch! words i cannot remember words that dismember reports of disharmonies reports of tired bodies like a bitch goes larking like a bitch goes barking fragments from a barking bitch fragment I One morning I will wake up and I will have killed him. In some way or the other. In my dream or in my life or in my delusion. But he will be dead and it will have been my hand holding the dagger. And his blood will cleanse me of my guilt. fragment VIII It’s snowing out and the ground is being covered up. The world is being resurfaced. And I pray that I begin to snow. 12 | Liz Dowdy �Zeinep Kyzy | 13 �Waiting on the Bench A good samaritan should pluck this spot up and arrange it so: no bushes, no old, ivy-tresteled walls propped against its land, no chatter, no smooth inclined path, and no clothes. Let a mattress be put in the scene, like a large white brick, and another mattress, a harsher one with weaker supports, with significant cold springs coming out of it by an inch on the sides and the top, so that the first bed, in an honest comparison, can’t be complained of. Someone could always say, “Just this; haven’t been shanked just yet!” Anything could be adequate then–tear down all the buildings, take the lights, and even so, long as there is one person present with a stake of ruined light quivering in their eyes. Not important who. Why criticize this? It’s fine enough as is. There is the ashy dawn smoking into a lawn, dry. A bicyclist rolls on. I ask myself what came first: the artist or the critic? A symbol that is obvious is in its obviousness, selfreferential, and so not obvious at all. A bicyclist rolls on. A wedding wanes in the cellar’s wine-laden walls. A lamplight shines on. I leave my cigarette on the lawn. 14 | Eli Zitler �Zeinep Kyzy | 15 �In Search of God in Dreams They say, “God is made of hunger, and we are made of dreams.” But, What if I am made of hunger and god is just a dream? What if I am starved and searching, yet all the plates are clean? What if there’s no end to wanting and love’s been sliced too thin? Will perhaps my own frail bones be fed to me again? Maybe naked truth lies hidden, in fair youths’ immortal sin and maybe in my searching god and dreams may yet amend the concent of Eden leaves me blinded by its grace or if I’m only dreaming chaos lingers in its wake and every fruitless study sees me shroud in willow green Surely every longing chorus must some god somewhere demean? The distance between god and eye is an untrodden sea but I would risk a trip to Sheol if a better man I’ll be If there exists a divine presence, it remains unknown to me as the errors of free will imitate captivity Molded in the light of sanctitude, yet irreverent in the flesh we, in turn, must be so similar, two are called let one confess And if high above lays heaven, as believers’ final home Then to understand the will of God, I must understand my own 16 | Candyce Jones �Hotel There are too many towels in this hotel: guest-beds sheeted with towels to imbibe the night-sweats, tablecloth-towels miraculously wine-spared. A man today left his complementary breakfast untouched as fluffy white towels leapt from his throat like a hospitable magician’s act. And their clothes are all towels now. The floors above are buckling with the weight of too many towels, sclerosing the hallways like cholesterol, boarding in every mousehole, usurping the oxygen with a smothering comfort most homely, towels pudging windowpanes, people’s torsos turning-towel, stray towels strewn across the drizzle-slicked streets below, innumerable orphans with no hotel, towels flaming in clogged electrics yet still ghost-white “and the towel was not consumed.” There are too many towels in this hotel. Esther Beland | 17 �18 | Kelly Kane �Grandboy Rat Grandma is dying. An old immigrant from the easternmost reaches of Hoboken, New Jersey who made her way—frightened and alone on a long and perilous journey across an unforgiving ocean—all the way to Newark, New Jersey. Just nineteen years of age, with only fifteen dollars in her pocket, and not speaking a lick of the language, she soon found steady work as a salesclerk at a Sears department store. She became the queen of the cash register, the czarina of customer service, the grand duchess of the return policy—a woman who wielded power with not much more than her stare and the military march clickity-clack of her patent leather high heels. She would man the floor like a field general and quickly rose through the ranks to assistant manager. Every pleated tartan skirt that came back sans ironing, every polyester suit that came back with a cigarette burn or a sesame chicken stain, every floozy and fraudster who “forgot” their receipt, she turned away as forcefully as it was final. One such customer was a wiry little man, about thirty years of age, with almost no hair left on his head and knuckles covered with tufts of darkened steel wool, who’d brought back three pairs of polyblend flared golf pants, one pair checkered, the other two plain—burgundy and burnt orange, as was the style in those gaudy and violent years at the end of the sixties—insisting that they rode up too high in the crotch. As the story goes, Grandma gave the customer the classic return policy spiel as he pleaded with her to accept the items back, his hands waving like Gilligan with a biplane flying overhead his island, face all red, and spit falling from his egg-breathed mouth, eventually drying up on the linoleum counter. Over the course of the doomed transaction, the man, reeking of desperation, started to elevate his tone, and his unmovable, emphatic persistence—his line in the sand—pitched all the way up to a shrill yelp, yelling on about the “absolute rape of ethics being reproached.” Grandma called him a “frosty little, smallpricked, mouse-brained jackass.” The transactions turned to confrontation, and at the return desk of the Sears, the confrontation escalated to altercation as they argued and argued and argued some more. After the passing of the two-hour mark, each of them exhausted, somehow sweaty, and stubborn as ever, the back and forth finally simmered down to a low boil, all energy zapped, all willpower wiped, and they exchanged jokes and quips and bits and pieces about their lives with each other. Daniel Nathan | 19 �- h They had each met their match. Their lowest-of-stakes arbitration relenting into friendly, flirty chit-chat, their back and forth ended up lasting well past dusk, and the quickly falling darkness signaled that it was time for the store to close. The pair, each of them lost in their new-found mutual connection, maintained no thought of at all of going their separate ways, even as Grandma began her final rounds of the store, checking the inventory for missing or misplaced merchandise and potential signs of theft. And the customer, having lost both all hope and all care for a refund of any sort, reckoned where a broom was and did her sweeping for her. After the fluorescents were switched off and the glass doors were polished and locked behind them, the couple stood outside under the pale blue of the unplugged neon Sears sign and greeted the emptied vastness of the wasteland parking lot, careful not to gaze at the stars so as to appear at all sentimental. So, they looked at each other instead and quickly realized they hadn’t needed the stars to look at after all. The man then invited Grandma for a drink, to which she obliged. She got a double shot of whiskey, and he got a Mai Tai with a plastic umbrella in it. They played pool and he sunk the eight ball on his third shot. She won twenty bucks off that win, and he still laughed as he lost, not to mention he never even got that refund for those pants. Well, that man became my Grandpa, who died before I was born. But now, Grandma is dying . . . and she’s propped up in a hospital-like mechanized bed, set up in the living room of her rent-controlled apartment, with oxygen tanks and a morphine drip and a nurse to feed her and change her and overall take care of her, watching her and giving her as much of a simulation of love as a contracted hospice nurse can give for fourteen hours a day. Like Grandma’s some goddamn invalid. That’s her language, not mine. That’s what Grandma would say, not me. I don’t approve of calling people stuff like that. But she can barely move her fingers more than to buzz the nurse to fetch more drugs, much less talk, and Grandma would be cursing her condition—and often is—much more venomously than just the word “invalid”—to her that term is practically a medical evaluation of a condition of reality, as is “tard,” as was “dyke,” and “idiot” and “shvatze” (an old Yiddish term—as horrible and ugly in meaning as it is phonetically—she remembered from her youth that does not bear the need to get into in more detail) for that matter. 20 �She’s in pain, alright. I hear her groans and I use my imagination to reproduce in my mind the pins-and-needle stabbing of that lecherous tumor growing like a mold from her colon outward into the rest of her organs. God, she looks awful without her wig. My whole life I knew her presence as: spine straightened, bosom pushed out towards the six-foot man in the sky, hawkish look in her evil beady green eyes, like a Gestapo officer whose job it was to double-check “the lists.” But most of all, her presence, to me, was that of the ever so slightly curled peroxide blonde hair helmet, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor hail could move even a strand of hair out of it upright and locked position. One was unsure if the piece was a wig—and if it was a wig, if it was not but a cruel joke played on some poor unassuming, likely mentally deteriorating woman by some mean-spirited hair stylists. A caricatured tumbleweed like the ones you see in those old cartoons, rolling through empty dusty main thoroughfares in the old west but those ormous, boisterous, blinding was the gaudiness of her crown: both acquiring the color and the texture—the overall essentialness—of pissed on grass after it had dried. I’m not sure how long she has left—the doctors say she won’t make it through the month. But I don’t know how much longer I can do this. This living here with her here dying. My sneaking around because she has no clue that I’ve been living here, sleeping in a linen closet during the day, with only the sound of Nurse Marta’s immaculately white tennis shoes clomping around and the steady beep of the heart monitor machine to lull me to a soft fetal-positioned sleep; lurking in the shadows, only coming out when she’s asleep and after the nurse has gone so I can find some meager rations to sustain me: old cereal, saltine crackers, cans of spam. 21 � Oh, do I struggle! I do. And how this struggle inflicts itself upon me! It’s horrid really. How long can one live under the throw covers of life, like a stowaway, a scurrying disease-ridden rat? Grandma’s the one with the disease! The only thing I’ve got is insomnia and a nervous personality. It’s me who should be receiving sponge baths from the beautiful, sweet, utterly kind-hearted nurse, having split pea soup spoon-fed to me and having my arm injected with free pseudo-heroin. It’s me who really deserves all the pseudo-love—it sure would feel real, which is all that really matters to me. Holed-up like some sort of deadbeat, freeloading drifter in here, I can’t stand one more minute of it, though I must. So tortured after all these months from breathing in the scent of mothballs and baby powder and death, and the air that feels like the inside of a mouth from the army of humidifiers Grandma’s got set up throughout this godforsaken one bedroom, one and half bath third floor walkup. I’m her blood for crying out loud, her flesh and blood. That’s why I’m hiding out here, and as long as I stay hiding, I’ve got a roof over my head and scraps of three day old Shepard’s pie. I can live, like a Rat King, but live no less. And I will live. You can know that. 22 | Daniel Nathan �Zeinep Kyzy | 23 �In Memory of Rolly Phillips Magistrae linguae latinae When Dido, I saw, set her pyre, signaling to her lost desire, a flash of that self-same Phoenix-fire blazed in your eye on newborn wings, an after-augury of things sustained by fresh imaginings— like light from a dead star that, to live, travels far, old and young; we, too, are. 24 | Nicholas Bellinson | �Ὁ Τοῦ Ἡλίου Ἀνισταμένου Οἶκος The House of the Rising Sun Ἔστιν οἶκος Νέᾳ Ὠρλεάνῃ Ἥλιος Ἀνιστάμενος νομίζεται Πέφανται δε φθορὰ ταλαιπώρων πολλῶν Νὴ Διά, γιγνώσκω αὐτῶν μ’εἶναι There is a house in New Orleans Named “Rising Sun” It has shown to be the destruction of many wretched ones By God, I know myself to be of them Ἡ μήτηρ ἀεὶ ἔρραπτεν Τὸν οἴνοπα χιτῶνα συνέρραψε Ὁ πατὴρ ἀεὶ ἐν τῷ κυβείῳ Νέᾳ Ὠρλεάνῃ ἐν My mother was always sewing She stitched together my wine-dark chiton My father was always in the gambling house In New Orleans Χρὴ δ’ ἐρῶντα κυβείους ἔχειν Μόνον τοὺς σανδάλους Μόνον δε τέλειος φαίνεται Ὅταν ἐστι μέθυστος It’s fitting for a lover of the gambling house to be holding Only his sandals He only shows forth to be complete Whenever he is drunk Ὦ, μήτηρ, λέγε τοῖς τέκνοις Μὴ πράττειν ἃ πέπραγα Τοὺς βίους διατρίβειν κακῶς Ἡλίῳ Ἀνισταμένῳ μετά Oh, mother, tell your children Not to do what I have done Waste away your lives wickedly Among the Rising Sun Τοῦ μὲν ποδὸς ἐπί τοῦ βήματος Τοῦ δ’ ὄντων μεθ’ ὁδόν Εἰς Νέαν Ὠρλεάνην νοστῶ Ἵνα λαμβάνωμαι τὸν δεσμόν With one foot being on the pedestal And the other on the road Into New Orleans I’m returning That I may pick up the burden Ἔστιν οἶκος Νέᾳ Ὠρλεάνῃ Ἥλιος Ἀνιστάμενος νομίζεται Πέφανται δε φθορὰ ταλαιπώρων πολλῶν Νὴ Διά, γιγνώσκω αὐτῶν μ’εἶναι There is a house in New Orleans Named “Rising Sun” It has shown to be the destruction of many wretched ones By God, I know myself to be of them Henry Hills | 25 �26 | Max Anthon �Aaron’s Rod Welter of tails, slit-toungéd screams smothered by a hide of scales, split-stomached Oroborus tossed out to finitude. Eden is reborn from the blood of legerdemain, serpents of recycled miracle boiling in God’s elong stomach like bread leavening “say this to Israel: I AM THAT I EAT, serration cankering Egyptian lips.” And the serpents were consumed, Godhead’s splinters down-sanded as before Mitosis, soothsayers heaving up sheep’s-blood stirred with lithe-shelled snake-eggs, Abel dying in a back-alley and Jocheved’s boys giggling like schoolgirls. Aaron’s Rod washes down the meal with Manischewitz, Muse of Eve and Adam fat with false-gods and dead firstborns. This is the bread affliction, Its crumbly scutes unshucked; these are the aspirate snarls of Creation sated; this is where the serpent dies, embodied, blunted spine-needles tickling the innards of Redeemed Temptation. Esther Beland | 27 �28 | Hain Cho �Hain Cho | 29 �The End of The No Look Behind The Back Pass Blood stained walls, The fictional quarterback caused the impact. And the force caused the skull to crack, caving in the frontal lobe and nasal bone and ripping through the connective tissue with the fictional football he threw. And all the viscera and snot and brain matter flew like a flock of Canadian geese all across the room. A promising young career of mild concussions and playoff games, a lifetime after of pride and an underdeveloped brain. Ruined, right there and then with that fictional football he threw. That was the end of that, of his mother’s Venetian blinds and his cousin’s sorry, sunken life. Well, that was the end of that. That was the end of the hierarchy between the Hail Mary heave and The No Look Behind The Back Pass. 30 | Daniel Nathan �June bug We went up to work on the tool shed, My father and I, we talked about God. The day was a big dark peach, Juicy and sweet, it coated your fingers. Making your face a sticky mess. A June bug laid out on the floor, upside down, He swung his legs, his blood orange red Body wobbling, struggling quietly. My dad sets him upright, Sending his big, bloated body on his way. Later I saw that same June bug. He was swinging his legs, wobbling again. James Reeher | 31 �I think about my father and the way he used to drive I shower in a new place and the drops come down like bricks Fresh laid. I am led into my room by a man with a beer belly. Says “Put your key on a lanyard–tote bags are a bitch.” His badge is silver. Reads SAFETY. My father wanted to go back to college, I tell the blonde boy who is screwing the lid Off another week of bummed sips of moonshine. And I let him pierce my lips because he could take what came out. Whole time I am thinking of my father and the way he used to drive: Rev the engine, Stomp. Wrap the tendrils of your hair around the leather cover of the steering wheel. Pull. And I never got my license. I wiggle around things, mainly becoming a force that moves. I dance on a table while my leg is still broken and someone says Please stop. You are going to hurt yourself. But He says if you read all the good books, it hurts you. He says if you’re reading the bible, it hurts you. He says if you paint then the smell’s gonna hurt you. Don’t date [redacted], you know that they’ll hurt you. He says if you work for the government, it will suck the life out of your soul, Rip the springs out of your bones, wrap tentacles around every corner of passion you have, Stretch it thin, Pull. So I kiss a boy and two people and a girl and a girl and look for something to love Like a hobby. I walk around this city at night Alone staring into windows of restaurants I can’t afford. I let people touch me like a statue in search of passion I’ll never refind. It’s healing. My father once bought out an entire stand of girl scout cookies. Took a whole paycheck, Took his out of service Honda Civic for a spin speeding Down I-95 and told me he loved me. Blared the music over it so I could barely make out the words– Rev, stomp, wrapped tendrils of my hair around worlds I’ll always be too young to live in. Pull. 32 | Riley Ferver �Cicero, Hortensius Cicero: Inveneram, in magno deliciae, res quod vident se res quod cogitantes [res congitationis] sunt, non in utique res cogitantes, sed quod cogitatus transvehunt in menti indendum. Quando mens multorum viderunt corporalis rem, plerus coepiunt tortus contorquere sicut a vinculum. Attingunt comprehendunt multis alterorum corporalium rerum et procreant aliorum corporalium rerum, similibus patriae cum reges agnoscunt sui legum docere, non leges altera, sicut mathematica sicut Archimedes sui quod pronuntiata res docere non alia aliis quod pronuntiatis rebus sicut Theodorus. Ita, quam oportet quad ambones patrant eadem actiones tamen ambonum diversorum proponuntur? Nostri Terram potuit facimus in imaginationibus appellundus esse? Igitur modus scientiarum quod sunt extra corporum nostrorum exponuntur ad omnibus, non solum ei, sed etiam alterorum quoque. Igitur est quod magna etiam animi contentio adhibenda est in explicando Aristotele, si legas actiones un dialogus nobilis nominator Protrepticus. Unum docere mentis per imitando nata de imaginationum ad enim omnibus artibus videre. Pergunt energi laboribus quod similis sensibus. Et unus sensus properum sunt, sine aliquae labores cogitate dare enim secondo. At ea sensus difficilia est cognoscere properum cum videns ad unus pars artibus. Num, Hortensius, amicus meus, quid vobis videtur? Hortensius: O Cicero, dedisti nos un insigne postulatum de sensuum. In sensus, habeo imaginem de Jovis et properi cognoscam qui reor. Imprimis animus meus, Item sed mens meus. Papae! At sensi cogitationes tuae quod dividit amnis. Philosophia, quod artis est, indiget creari optime enim aliis sentire. Sensus ignotum sunt nobis sed quod sciuntur dii in Olympo. Igitur sensus facilia sunt apisci sed non capere. Difficile est agnoscere quomodo facile quod pronuntiata ostenditur en actus energias. Ita, non video ut quod pronuntiata, sed meditatas enim corpora nostra. Henry Zheng | 33 �Cicero: I had found, in great pleasure, that seeing objects are itself thinking objects, not in the sense objects are thinking, but such that it carries the thoughts that lodges into the mind. When the mind has seen much of these objects, many begin to twist and turn together like a rope. It touches one another [intertwines] with many of its other objects and create different forms, such also occurs in kingdoms when rulers recognize to demonstrate their own laws, not other laws as mathematicians like Archimedes demonstrate their own axioms instead of demonstrating others like Theodorus. And so, why must they both perform the same action yet different proposals? Could our world compose in bringing the imagination to exist? Therefore, the amount of knowledge existing outside our bodies is exposed to everything, not only from its own, but from others too. It is, then, that the great strain of mind was also previously explicit to be in Aristotle, if you read the workings of a dialogue known famously as philosophy in Protrepticus. There, one can demonstrate the mind by replicating the imagination’s creations towards an art displayed for all to see. They continue to be-at-work with such effort that almost seems identical to their senses. And one’s senses are immediate, without any effort to give thought on a second look. Yet, the sense itself is difficult to detect immediately when looking at only one part of the art. Now, Hortensius, my dear colleague, how shall you take this? Hortensius: Oh Cicero, you have given us such an interesting point about senses. For the senses, I have taken a bust of Jove and already knew what I am thinking. My soul tends on one side, but my mind believes in the other. How lovely it brings me joy! Yet, I had found your thoughts tending to the opposite of our rivers. Philosophy, which is an art, must be produced perfectly in a form sensible for others. The senses are rather unknown that only our gods in Olympus knows. There be it so, that senses must be easily reachable but never graspable. It is hard to tell how easily the demonstration appears in most be-at-work movements [activities]. So, I see this not as a demonstration, but contemplation for our working bodies. 34 | Henry Zheng �Lunatic Every song that knows your heavy tongue You owe to the love-pith of grapes. It birthed Us, whirligigs of dust. Yet ziggurats Surround you like Heaven’s remnant embers. Let down your beehives! Loose your bitter mouths! You chose this breathful motion for grave-peace, Grief’s howl for cricket sonatas, mushroom Bandoliers. Biers of longing, biers of frost. So it is. Each old face bears curlicues of such a straight-and-narrow tight-rope strut. Even stones suck upon the bitterness of this heaving flicker, dastardly life A caterpillar could darn caterwaul. I do. Meanwhile, you mount the pyramids, Mad-dash for upward passage, then confuse The posture of statues for temperance. Lysithia Page | 35 �36 | Hain Cho �Bridget Mace | 37 �To stay No ending in pining I cut through the woods As if short cuts make wandering quicker I’ll read it in the indentation Left on the back of pages Annotation that somebody somewhere Loved almost more than what they read I will not forget Or at least I haven’t Cooling water isn’t anything on coals Except for steam It will rise It won’t really ever dissipate It moves into the air like candles breathing slow No chances for wishes or recollection When everything spins while unraveling Look at these threads I know I know I asked for fabric spun in bone But my mother told stories Where the dresses spun gold I’ll believe her a little While I pull at loose knots I also believed in blue sky She was right when she told me why it was Holding the color she hated the one I don’t mind So I think I’ll keep choosing Belief in stories this time Gold gold gold I’ll pretend that I’m dripping in gold Bare riding bareback Please someone remember You love me and look at the ground Gold gold gold I’ll pretend that you dressed me in gold Shivering as the town passes Beneath naked stares Nothing passes It matches my pace Not quite dogging my steps I pursue it all from ahead Something about leading where You ask to be lead Forgive me for turning The spinning wheel while he holds me Forgive me for tickling threads I knot in my hair To kiss me Is fine But it’s wonderful kissing the air 38 | Kai Gyorki �Interview Do you read books with long titles? Do you smoke while you write or write while you smoke? And from whom did you assume that sad archaic smile? The interview is over. Now, left to solitary reflection, the pleasure has left with the lights and eager eyes, pranced away to entertain a crowd of people you will never know. You’ve birthed a creature you can’t control which will wander the earth with your name and will sadly be all that remains. Now, giving up the ghost, there’s nothing left to do but slide between the sheets and sleep. Aaron Shelsby | 39 �40 | Audrey Fox �Somewhere I am a warm chimney for an ugly black bird Somewhere I am a warm chimney for an ugly black bird. It must be true; boys’ eyes slip away like fish. I reach in the river to eat. Shiny alien fish like bugs buried in murky waters In red and white, To find a snake each time. I watched this morning as the small birds sat on the branches. Winter is each time a womb waiting for spring. A bird moves frantic. Have you watched them turn their heads? I think of bugs. Watching an ant move after it’s been smashed into the rug. I think of the mouse in the cupboard, So timid and greedy. What hides behind softness and eats what it likes? So timidly? What is round and warm? The feeling of a mammal. Rory Goode | 41 ��Editors Allyson Brink Kelly Kane Review Staff Esther Beland Linda Bellamy Valerie Brady Acacia Burnham Riley Ferver Grace Calk (A’22) Ian Glueckert Emerson Graves Catherine Greer Louise Harden Alexandra Jacobs Candyce Jones Craig Koch Sarah Lieberman Max Mersmann-Jones Daniel Nathan Yukyeong “Judy” Seo Aaron Shelsby Henry Zheng Front Cover Fruits of Paradise by Hain Cho �Energeia is the student-run literary and visual arts magazine of St. John’s College, Annapolis. Energeia is published twice a year, in the Winter and Spring. St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 Submit to energeia@sjc.edu �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. 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For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Winter 2022 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Winter 2022. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2023-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2022Winter Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0c5e79e776f89d6a39ba234d9af0bd03.pdf 43c4c2ae96ffd0681f8eadd072fc8b75 PDF Text Text Winter 2019 �Energeia | St. John’s College Literary and Visual Arts Publication | Winter 2019 ��Editor’s note We have included a few blank pages in this edition for you to use as you see fit. Write down a few notes or sketch your friends. Perhaps you could add something that you felt this edition was lacking. A blank page has limitless potential. What does it mean to you? �Contents Sheba Delaney Genesis and Exodus, Condensed 1 Elias Christian Invocation to the Muse 3 Anna Seban Seated Woman, 2019 ( watercolor) 4 Nortaute Grintalis Voro Testamentas/ The Spider’s Testament, 2019, (translation) 5 Nortaute Grintalis Voro Testamentas interpreted in four pieces, 2019 ( watercolor) 6 Jean Hogan The Spatial Ambiguity of Forks, Washington, (poem) 7 Kesi Dremel Nesting Dolls 8 Sheep Pluck Dissection, (poem) Lysithia Page 9 Christopher Cohoon 10 Daryl Locke Rockfish Scale Magnification No. 2 Eros in Bones, Blood Moon, Stargaze 11 Sophia Cote 12 four horses for mourning, 2019, (plastic bags, plastic safety eyes, alcohol ink) Louis Petrich 13 What Keeps People Together?, (sonnet) Keaton Jahn 14 20 homies, 2019, (ink on paper) Nihya Davis 15 Scenes of Fall, (poem) Cora Clark 16 Untitled, (quilt, cotton, scrap fabrics, 45 x 11’’) Daryl Locke 17 I told most to fuck off, (poem) Gabriela Sanchez 17 youth in form and content, 2019, (charcoal and pencil) Anne Brong 18 it’s better than drinking alone, 2018,(acrylic on canvas) N.A. Hale 19 Adam Schulman 20 Julia Cooper 23 Theo Martin 25 Elias Christian 27 28 Omnis, (poem) Luminous Creature 24 William Braithwaite Nicholas Thorp a golden mess, 2019, (poem and drawing in ink on paper) 22 Tyler Mazur The Yoke, 2019, (crayon) Three cat drawings, (pencil) 21 Juana Melendez HERON, (poem) EUCLID’S BOOK I DEFINITIONS (essay) Reading Jean Genet and Nicholas Thorp, 2019, (oil on wood board, 11 x 14”) �Reuben Morris Ripple, (poem) 29 Soojin Lee Untitiled, (photography) 30 Elaina Bowman Elaina Bowman To Mother (poem) 31 one mood: disorder, 2019, (pencil) 32 Amy Porter Kesi Dremel Marshmallow, Cinnamon (poems) 33 Catching Fireflies, 2019, (watercolor) 34 Jake E. Stief Portrait of a Woman in Type 2019, (typewriter) 35 Nicholas Thorp Jake, 2019, (oil on panel, 8 x 10”) 36 Liam Marshall-Butler The Leibniz Machine (short story) 37 Theo Martin poor robot is stuck in a spot of bother 37 Untitled, 2019, watercolor and ink on paper (two paintings) Amalie Christensen 38 Amalie Christensen 39 Grace Phan Jones 40 that night in the city, (short story) Kyla Murphy 42 A Story Without Using that Obnoxiously Common Fifth Symbol of Our ABC’s Grace Calk 43 Marielle Morley 43 (painting) Grace Calk 44 Lines by the Forest Window (poems) Peter Kalkavage 45 Translation of Petrarch, Sparse rime (Scattered Rhymes) Gabriela Sanchez 46 Anne Freeman 47 Yingzi Zhang 48 Glenn Burns John Verdi Brandon Wasicsko 49 50 51 9/22/19, (poetry) The Ear, 2019, (plastilina) Untitled, 2018, (ink and graphite on paper) Of Course, I Understand, (short story) EULOGY FOR THE VOYAGER, (poem) Untitled, 2019, (photo) “As I Give You to the Changing World” (poem and photo) �Genesis and Exodus, Condensed Nothingness was boring So God created stuff, Creation really wore him out And then he said enough. Look out Adam, here comes Eve She’s gonna wreck your life, The days of wine and roses Will turn to toil and strife. An apple was the problem, They ate it to the core, And had to leave the garden And roam forevermore. Cain brought God some taters Which he knew how to grow Abel brought a little lamb Its fleece as white as snow. Then there was a little town, They used to call it Sodom And if you went to visit there You had to guard your bottom! Lot’s poor wife just had to look And ended up as salt But all of us are curious So why is that a fault? Abram gave his wife to kings And made a lot of money Then he took her home again To be his special honey. When they both were very old And rocking on the porch Abel found approval God told them it was time for kids But Cain was turned away Our world became a crime scene when To carry on the torch. His brother he did slay. Isaac almost bit the dust On top of Mount Moriah God was thinking to himself But Abram killed a ram instead Humanity’s a dud And burned him in the fiah. I think I’ll wash them all away And turn the world to mud. The animals were rescued By Noah and his kin They built a giant floaty boat And stuffed the critters in. 1| Sheba Delaney Esau was so hungry He had to have some stew So Jacob stole his birthright And took his blessing too. �Judah slept with Tamar He thought she was a whore But when she had his baby He bothered her no more. Joseph was a dreamy boy, But Jacob loved him best His brothers couldn’t stand the fact That he was better dressed. They didn’t treat him very well But still he rose to fame And when the times were really bad He saved them just the same. The family stayed in Egypt For several hundred years And all the things they built there Were watered with their tears. Then when it was time to go Old Pharoah didn’t get it Oh yeah said Moses watch your back I think you’ll soon regret it. God sent Egypt awful things That finally made them weep Get out of here the Pharoah said, You’re dangerous to keep. Moses climbed a misty hill To get some dos and don’ts And bring them to a stubborn crowd Inclined to wills and won’ts. The people made a golden calf But all it said was moo When Moses saw it he was mad And slaughtered quite a few. So then they wandered all around Until they got to Canaan But Moses couldn’t enter in Cause God said “You’re remainin.” And then begats begat begats And all the land did fill The patriarchs became a horde For Cecil B. Demille The apple also has a tale From Eve to Isaac Newton And now it is a glowing brand. For us to do computin. When Moses led them to the sea Continue on they couldn’t The water made a path for them By doing what it shouldn’t. | 2 �Invocation to the Muse I. It is the aftershock of a violent dream and the soul’s afterbearance that stills me this morning, and it is the light, bright and pale, that opens into me as though I am some newborn thing, fresh to the world. What question was posed to me last night with such a -- such a clarity as to frighten me? Wandering down the winding nighttime paths alone, I came across two Sisters, standing hand-in-hand. One was eyeless, and her name was Beauty. The other mouthless, and her name was Truth. Beauty spoke of her blindness and Truth could not speak, nor did she need to. These Sisters are the daughters of Life: may they guide my hand. II. I write, sitting naked on a wind-worn bluff, as in the beginning, with the wind and the spring sun against me, waiting for that old dream to come to me, for a god to speak, pen poised, thinking, Oh, I could use a Muse, I could use a Muse Muse, mary of the wind, take me, I beg you, dance the invisible dance with me, may I have this dance? may I kiss your hand? what do you take me for? what do you see in me? I am sick; the artifice of my own life and the life of my people, my culture, my great illuminated world, is eating at me. I am made moth-cloth. I need to get all of this shit off me. Muse: may I write, may you grace me with purity of purpose. Bring me to madness at least, if nothing else. I would not mind lunaticking for you if it is a performance you require of me. Drive these crows from my shoulder. Blister my fingertips. I want you to force my hand, make my stomach ache, my eyes dark. I am desperate for grace. I am not magnificent when I pray. I am desperate for grace. I let the breath spread thin out of my lips, I lick my lips, I go back to my work. 3| Elias Christian �Anna Seban | 4 �Voro Testamentas/ The Spider’s Testament Grižtu namo. Ant mano stalo Advokatas mėnulis Rašo vorui testamentą. Baltimore, 1970 Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas I return home. On my table the adovcate moon writes the spider his testament. Annapolis, 2019 5| Nortaute Grintalis �| 6 �The Spatial Ambiguity of Forks, Washington [Reader, note: The supermassive black hole guitar riff is of course blaring] allows us to situate it in, say, a TGI Fridays parking lot I am of course wearing the beanie Hayley wore in the “Decode” video huddled in an atm nook an irrelevant detail - I won’t pay for this summer for months & between the front seat and the barstool we are three beers in & my tongue is getting restless as usual Behind the trees the camera sways like a voyeur behind our backs & sometimes I wish everything you needed to know about me could be summed up in a poorly edited research montage It’s funny in it’s own way, get this: I’m surprised a co-worker hasn’t found me on grindr so I open up all my filters My throat is too ticklish to be bitten for long so i bare what i can Close up on my bio and the word “undead” or a word which might as well read: “undead”, read: a bio unto itself co-worker reads it out loud and an eyebrow is raised are” Okay but I’m kind of tired of having to “I know what you “Say it” Later A cigarette is lit and I almost forget to flinch I’m doubly fucked – I never learned how to inhale breathe & now I have to pretend even to fluorescence” when I got bit I let all the air in my lungs go free and I have been trying to convince it to come back to me ever since I overestimated – I thought that just because my body was a pretty home it was a good one 7| Jean Hogan “It’s the �Babe once upon a time I glittered like a diamond very glam every other morning i would flaunt myself in front of the vatican I still get out there when I can the problem with a body made out of diamonds you never do get used to others sharpening their teeth on you and they all will remark on the taste of it – never agreeing on the particulars, never realizing that the taste Is just the echo of spit Heads up, due to budgetary reasons I will be collapsing into dust at the end of the night Kesi Dremel | 8 �Sheep Pluck Dissection To fall asleep beneath the knife A heart that pumps its fill of life The waterways that bear the read Are flowing now with voiceless dead Lungs that kissed the sweetest airs Remember not the mortal wears And time pulls back the fleshy pews Inheriting pastoral views Of sleep the scalpel plays the pipes Which whistle tunes of many types Motion fills the hollow parts The melodies of broken hearts Deduce the life this sheep once held The fields and hills in which it dwelled Breathe in and shepherd now the song Night as dark as wool is long 9 |8 Lysithia Page �Rockfish Scale Magnification No. 2 Christopher Cohoon 8 �Eros in Bones Here he is, before me Eros in bones, near the Breakfast plate North Star beautiful Eyeing me like a cloud Wondering what one does not know I look at the sun and ask who he is The sun looked back and said Love Stargaze After the setting of Eros Love has moved the clouds And turned the moon off As the roses of the night are seen That are seemingly light years away But still close to home Blooming in the eyes of the romantic 11 | Daryl Locke Blood Moon A great gore Is on the horizon Colossal A rathe rose A circle of bright wine A uterus leaking of Maroon And that intense sun Now a black heart Dead in the sky Warmth and shine gone �Sophia Cote | 12 �What Keeps People Together? She asks me, “What keeps people together?”-her mother thrice wed, she hand-wrought by sperm donation, driven fond by youth’s fair weather to climb famed peaks of fun and sweet unburned— ‘til conversion. No wonder they become run-down and Christian: fearless born to make God’s children fatherless, soft eyes hearts strum ‘till shoulders curl and tongues of men forsake. Oh, why’d God make His lords of all Creation depend on dreamy play and kisses gone for birthright, tending, and continuation? Delights fast-fading be the Master’s pawns. Her name is Kalysta, most beautiful: Odysseus she’d wild, while dutiful. 13 | Louis Petrich �Keaton Jahn | 14 �Scenes of Fall Marigolds of morning Ascend my sweet September’s Honey hues mate magenta sunsets Embers of October excite my wonders With cinnamon sweet that suckles my pleasures Susan’s of black-eyed encompass this entity Lilacs comfort, Ivory oh cozy A sweet alyssum My asylum of protection Nirvana nights next through November Chrysanthemum cues Grace of my awing Autumn 15 | Nihya Davis �Cora Clark | 16 �I told most to fuck off I’ve had a trillion men who couldn't fuck me Not one could screw the pipe hole, at least correctly Not one could put the cherry on the shake I told most to fuck off Only a few, a couple tens have given me The tour of France, not on a trait du nord or catamaran But I rode them as it was Occasionally I told them to fuck off Rarely has one ever gave me An appealing excursion or cushty gallop Once while reading Twice in an art gallery I didn’t tell them to fuck off I put in picture for them to fuck me harder I can’t bear a slow fucker I want to be fucked fast If you fuck me like a tortoise Then you can fuck off 17 | Daryl Locke Gabriela Sanchez �Anne Brong | 18 �HERON “Hello, Heron,” I might have whispered then when I saw it sitting so still. I might have looked at it twice, then again, it was over my senses still or I might have walked further when I was pulled by one Autumn chill. I could have said something too loud or I might have been too quick to stay when it speared into the water-soft quick and flung unto the pier a fish and looked at me with blood on its beak and I could say no more by the corpse on the pierfloor bloody and was all still alluring, alluring still and it might have told me in savage accents: “goodbye” 19 | N.A. Hale �Adam Schulman �21 Julia Cooper �a golden mess There were times on earth when roaming colors in the wind and waves coming slow gently seduced my faith. Those were times of naked madness, pearl walls were built from the bottom of the sea and all beauty was cursed for birds to crash; amused and helpless. Soon that unkind earth begun its careful wrapping, for the leviathan to hide in shallow whispers crawling like a hurt beast in my dreams with its delicate dreadfulness, its magical sins. Now to your eyes alone I offer the door of this golden mess for when you grow old and weary here is all, your fingertips had put at rest. Here is to the lost tender beauty to the green upon your face. Juana Melendez | 22 22 �Omnis The nicked-ear tabby cat napping white eyed On the sun-bleached and wind-worn farmer’s porch A forty-minute drive south of Auckland. The grape shot shards of Hadean iron Flashing into naught over Neptune’s storms, Ending an eon-long narrowing waltz. The case of atrial Wenckebach block Occasioning a flutter and a skip In the pacific passage of your heart. Those little ghosts and Elysian dreams Can all keep their vaporous realms and tombs Were it that this and all the worlds unseen Be mine to witness, breathe, and consume. 23 23| Tyler Mazur �Theo Martin 24 �EUCLID’S BOOK I DEFINITIONS Euclid’s Elements begins with 23 definitions. Lists (such as this one), one of my teachers remarked, are always interesting: they have a beginning, middle, and end—an order. Any order, if it is an order, is a sign of intelligence at work. The order means something. The order of the Catalogue of Ships in Iliad II (Odysseus’ is in the middle) is not likely to be just happenstance. What is the principle of order of Euclid’s 23 definitions? “Principle,” from Latin princeps, “first,” is here equivalent to Greek arche, “beginning,” or more precisely, ruling source. A beginning that rules is one that points to the end (that which comes after the middle), and also somehow governs the character of the end. Is this what prompted the thought that a good beginning is half the task? Does understanding a beginning as a beginning mean we can at the start discern, even if dimly, the shape of the end, and so of the whole? Book I “begins” with the 23 definitions (along with the five Postulates and five Common Notions) in the sense that these are what’s presented first. It “ends” with Proposition 47 (and its converse, P. 48), the theorem named after Pythagoras, in the sense that 47-48 are what appear in last place. But what did Euclid think of first? Did thinking about what a point is lead him to P. 47? Or did the Pythagorean Theorem lead him to think of the geometrical point as that which alone among geometrical objects has no part? What would be a good geometrical image of Book I, of the movement of its argument (or inquiry)? A straight line would image a one-way trip, no looking back or return. A circle would suggest return to the starting-point, on the same level (in the same plane). I propose the cone; more precisely, the spiral path traced out by an ant crawling around and around the cone surface until he reaches the apex. This image represents a motion that starts with the point (Def. 1, what has no part) as the extremity of a line (the ant’s starting-point) and ends with a particular point, the apex of the cone. As we ascend in understanding (continually changing planes), we can look both backward at where we came from and forward to where we are going (P. 47). At 47, we can look back (re-view, or re-collect) and try to see how we got here from Prop. 1. At P. 1 (if we don’t chose to look ahead), are we likely to see the possibility of 47? We certainly won’t if it doesn’t occur to us to ask the question. But to ask, at the beginning, the foreseeability of the discoverable end is to ask what the governing principle of order is. How Proposition 1 leads to Proposition 47 is same question (with different material) as asking how Definition 1 leads to Definition 23. Can it be just happenstance that the middle definition is 14, a figure (Greek, schema) is what’s contained by a boundary or boundaries? If the definitions are in some order, and if 14 is in the middle, what can we say about the principle that governs the arrangement of the whole list? How are 1-13 (the “beginning,” or if you like, the “first half ”) different from 15-22 (the “end,” or if you like, the “second half ”)? [I’ll return to 23]. Definitions 15-22 classify the figures lying in a plane, according to increasing number of boundary-lines: the circle (one “side” or “boundary”), 15-17; semi-circle (two sides), 17-18; and the straight-sided figures, 19-22. The figures are also classified according to whether the boundary-line(s) are curved (the circle), both straight and curved (the semi-circle), or only straight. If 15-22 are a taxonomy of planar figures, what are 1-13? Might we say the “elements” of figures? (What, for Euclid, is an “element”?). Again the ordering is from simple to complex—point, 25 | William Braithwaite �line (2-4), surface (5-7), angle (8-12), boundary (13)—from element to structure. The singling out, among angles, of those made by straight lines (Def. 9) brings this particular sub-set of angles to the foreground of attention while at the same time implying that there are angles contained by lines that are not straight. The singling out, among rectilineal angles, of the right angle (Def.10) marks it as of particular importance for the argument of Book I. The right angle is special because it is the equal-to-itself angle (Def. 10, Post. 4) that lets us compare all other angles as either obtuse or acute (Defs. 11-12); and because it is the ordering principle of the taxonomy of rectilineal figures in Defs. 21-22; and because it is the apparatus for determining whether two straight lines in the same plane could meet if produced indefinitely in both directions (Def. 23; Post. 5). What we’re looking for is the ruling beginning of the arrangement of the definitions. Noticing the terms that are not defined may provide a clue: “part,” “extremity,” “evenly,” “inclination,” “set up on,” “adjacent,” “standing on,” “contained,” “falling on,” “bisect,” “direction” etc. And perhaps most important of all, “equal.” What is Euclid assuming his students (us) bring to the book, before we even open it to the Definitions? I propose that he takes for granted his readers’ experience of the world, its shapes, sizes, places, and motions (e.g., of the sun, moon, and stars), its samenesses and differences (spring comes every year, but not always on the same day; spears are straight, shields round, the path of an arrow curved). He takes for granted, that is, that we know, albeit imperfectly, not only that order is, but also what it is. If this speculation is sound, we might say that Euclid’s principle of order in the Book I definitions, the source or starting-point that governs the subsequent direction of the inquiry, is order itself. On this view, his project would be to give an ordered account of order—to show the bones of order, so to speak, and therewith the reasons why the elements of order hold together as ordered in the Elements. Is Book I the beginning of a logos of order itself? | 26 �Reading Jean Genet and As I slipped into further imagined degradation, I began to read and write in a new way. I saw the dirt on my invisible soul and saw that it gave my soul form and I, being far gone as one who is always doubting, flung upon it in ceremony more dirt and thus buried my soul as I gave it form. In this day and hour, I am a student across the long wooden table; I have just defeated myself. I saw myself as nothing, under my gaze, and where intersecting impossibilities collided, a second self was birthed from that nothing and I became again something new. (If I continue to writhe in this shell of skin, I will be free from it and what tormented me before will torment me no longer.) I am a student across the long wooden table, I am reading the work of a French vagabond, I am realizing the weavings of self and language, myth and double, real and imagined spectacle, long wordless in me: I have a word for the grotesque holy shadow of implication that has haunted me: the word is psychology. At this point, I am just living at the speed of thought. Each poet writ what I could not but craved to: post-verbal, enfevered, stuck dumb in my senses, leaning into each great wind that came down around me. This cold finds you anywhere in all this wind: it’s straight bitter. Things are not so sterilized by the cold now: long distances made shorter, sharp light made somewhat softer. It’s odd that someone of such marmoreal beauty could eat with such ugliness. I had violent dreams last night but I can’t remember them. My measurements are a half-smoked cigarette and a single sock sleepless. Too many bodies on the high wall. Am I too grotesque for the world today? I want to be shot dead. Shoot me dead. I said. I said. I Knew how bad she wanted to fuck me, swear to josh. The god-shaped space in your brain. The task of granting grace. Self-portraits in a river’s ripple. 27 | Elias Christian �Nicholas Thorp | 28 �Ripple “Rhymes with Cripple” Ripple’s gone past faster than a vessel Struggle for to pace up with the stream Missed the bus at six past two another Hour til the next one comes and Credit card says you must wait As shrubs that grew before you thresh All Timothy, Buckwheat and Wheat The rain I speak fell not today but Last year when the rain fell plenty So much so the tomatoes were Ravaged and the field slid sideways Bristle up against the earthwave That hill moves but it moves slowly And if ever it moves on fully That will be just one more ripple When the bus comes no one pays The one who gets on is not me Against the cold the window’s rapped on We see that I am undressed under dressed and so smile cus the winter falls this day and not any other I am outside under black sun, beneath cold sun, burning trash Rippling heart when I leave his house Nothing more than when I came Southern Malus, prune, and dogwood Lost their leaves unrecognized He artist or a student who did art but hasn’t done none art in two whole years he’s always online Now I was cold and one night homeless Though I would never claim the struggle We had pizza without wheat And rapped the door outside Penn Station A gambler who’d been at casino Made to me humane complaint “Man, they would not treat a dog Like this it’s too damn cold We wait outside they cops inside Why not open we won’t pay?” 29 | Reuben Morris �Bored as when small a man’s pleasure Rippled as the ice outside had Jacked up clover grass and such I packed up found phone charger And returned to class unconscious Gave my only coin to Charon Never spent one more night frozen Although outside grasses brown On the outskirts of our town High waves gather Small ones ripple Soojin Lee | 30 �To Mother Not to my Mother, but to this, will I realize the binding I create for her and me: Mother’s touch from her words. Wanting spine to spine that she might embrace me beyond imagination. Must her love practically be? In her deepness, her earnesty, she tries. And is it thought, or this thinking of me, that she herself connects? I want her to be different, Maybe revel beyond herself, maybe not the harshness of father and sister against my throat, Maybe an “I understand” without eyesight. Nevertheless, I defend. Because I know her so well, and she knows me so well, and that I, not, in any changing vision, Forget this fact. But, like a somber light, I fix a careful gaze, a punctious feeling that in our closeness, I barely understand, Like a memory I know exists, but cannot recall, Feel for us. Yet, No one else would I adopt so fast. No one else I would beg to be revealed to. Is it wrong, is it awful, to want a different warmness Mother? One that perhaps I would receive and cause me to flutter like a brand new human being? Please, bring us back to what you had learned. And face me as the woman you truly are. Let me promise to hold you as I learn. When you were a child, would you think about me the way I think about you? Not an itch, not an echo, but life. 31 | Elaina Bowman �Elaina Bowman | 32 �Marshmallow A sticky-soft suspended web, Two cheeks chub-full of air and sweet And ev’ry empty calorie. My childhood, gone as quick as I Can swallow down, just leaves a taste To make remembering regret; Then Dad says doing right takes time And not too high a heat. Cinnamon You must think fragrance, warmth, and A hint of apple-pie. Mulled wine and a hug From someone who you’ve missed. It is the pleasure of their presence now, And the hot pain of them gone again. Spicy-sweet is our nostalgia, or very much like Cinnamon. 33 | Amy Porter �Kesi Dremel | 34 �Portrait of a Woman in Type 35 35| Jake E. Stief �Jake Nicholas Thorp 36 �The Leibniz Machine Jack was accustomed to drinking his coffee with cream, but when Emma, the Leibniz technician, handed him his coffee black, he didn’t think to question it. The coffee, like all things in John’s life had been predetermined by Leibniz, and Jack had never thought to question Leibniz before. “So, what’s the problem then?” Jack asked. “Oh, there’s no problem, sir.” Sarah replied. “No problem? It wants me to go to the Mars colony!” “Oh, and how lucky you are!” “I don’t want to go to the Mars colony.” “Well, I don’t really see what that has to do with it. Leibniz is very sophisticated and knows how to mold us into the best of all possible worlds whether we want it to or not” Jack sipped his coffee. It was was too bitter and hot to drink, so he put it back on the table. “The best of all possible worlds?” “Yes, that’s our job. We’ve built a machine that can process an inconceivable amount of information and make highly accurate predictions. Why, I can’t imagine that Leibniz didn’t predict this entire conversation. Now, whether you like it you not, you are going to have to catch the next launch to Mars.” “It’s just that the best of all possible worlds isn’t one with me in it. I see” “Now sir, we have been experimenting with giving Leibniz more leniency, allowing it to give what may seem like more drastic commands. You are just one of the lucky few who get to benefit from this as quickly as possible. I understand that you might be upset, but the Mars colony isn’t bad and this really is in everyone’s best interest” “You don’t know what you are asking. I have a family here; you can’t just ask me to leave them behind. You might as well ask me to kill myelf.” “Now sir, you really aren’t being fair. We-” He stood up quickly knocking the table, causing his hot coffee to spill onto the Leibniz technician’s lab. Jack laughed. It, the machine, knew what was going to happen; it knew that he was going to be angry, to go to the technician, not drink the coffee and spill it on her, burning her. It knew he was going to be forcibly strapped onto the rocket after being arrested for assault. It knew the schadenfreude he would feel. It knew he would go to Mars whether he liked it or not. 37 | Liam Marshall-Butler Theo Martin �Amalie Christensen 38 | | 38 �39 | Amalie Christensen �that night in the city 自暴者不可與有言也 With those who do violence to themselves, it is impossible to speak. -Mencius She shrieked within herself and imagined that she might return completely torn up and above everyone else with sadness. They would all be forced to feel remorse for hurting her because they wouldn’t understand what she had done and because they wouldn’t be able to see through her actions. Furious and alone, she marched into a glossy department store. She then turned and went back outside, wondering for a moment if she should stay out and enjoy the cold night. She might walk back to The Bund, but thought to herself that if she did, she might cry forever and be lost until morning when the night would lift and the light of the cityscape would dim. For now, everything felt intense, as though an vivid dream. Come morning, people would hurry to work and the magic of the night would doze beneath the coverlet of a grimy, grey sky. And she would go back to her group of fellow travelers to apologize saying, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t myself...” They would be so worried about her that she would be untouchable. They would fear that she might go off and scare them again if they said the wrong thing or upset her. So she would get off without being chastised in the least and without having to answer any questions at all. It was true that she had not been “herself ”. That night in the city, she had not been the self that her peers had come to know. But in those moments she had spent alone to “clear her head” after a long hectic day, she was more the self she was accustomed to than she had been in a long while. This felt easy. This felt welcoming. The only frightening thing was how unafraid she was to be back. She savored her discomfort and basked in every second that her skin crawled and that her lungs felt tight, ready to pop. She went back inside the department store decisively. She knew that the wind from the avenue had tossed her hair and flushed her cheeks and that she looked beautiful. A woman cannot not do things alone if she does not look proud and beautiful. She rode the long, mirrored escalator upwards and pouted her lips as she felt people gaze at her, and when she arrived at a café she graced the simple barista with a toothy, genuine smile. She impressed him further by being a foreigner but ordering a tea in Mandarin. Her own arms filled with shopping bags, the barista carried the lady’s steaming cup to a table, where she thanked him and gave him another smile. She knew how radiant she was. She sat down and worked to sort through the rage that pooled within her and it occurred to her that in the midst of travel, she had not taken any medicine for several days. She doubted strongly that this was of any influence on her demeanor and reasoned to take several capsules at once when she got back to her hotel, to account for the doses she had missed. She sipped shyly at her tea, which smelled wonderful, but was still quite hot. She took a moment and muttered a scattered prayer. Thoughts pulsed fast and poked at her mind, which was dense and murky. She concluded that she had acted immaturely in leaving her friends and that when she returned to them, she would have collected herself and would be ready to apologize to the necessary parties. She fought the urge to tear her hair out, and in the end did not do it because it looked so feathery and windswept that night. Hours before, her eyes had sparkled with excitement and discovery. They sparkled again now, too. She finished her drink quietly and got up to ask the barista, whom she knew was now her friend, if he had, perchance, any disposable cutlery. Eager to be of service, the young man handed her a little package containing a thin napkin, a fork, a knife and spoon, and even a little straw for mixing coffee. She Grace Phan Jones | 40 �asked for the location of the 卫生间, which earned her even greater approval. She thanked him warmly and made her way again through the bright department store that was beginning to empty out as the hour wore on, and then found herself in the bathroom. She was swift and fluid in her movements. Not a thought was necessary for their execution. She closed herself inside a stall and crouched on the ground, hanging her handbag on a hook. Her mouth opened to let her lips curl into a silent cry. From the stall next door, she heard a woman let out a fart and blow her nose. She felt furious. “LEAVE!” she heard herself bellow, but knew she had said nothing. The other occupant made no other noise; perhaps her command had nevertheless been received. Perhaps the woman had not been there at all. No matter. She discarded the napkin and spoon and fork and even the little mixing straw. She rocked on her heels, feeling trapped by her thick jacket which she had purchased in recent response to Shanghai’s unseasonable chill. She rolled up the sleeves with some difficulty. Sweating now, but her fingers were frozen as they gripped the little plastic knife. She sawed wildly into the flesh of her forearms. Not a tear escaped. Her face screwed up into 3 a wicked sneer. She felt clear and collected and longed for this clarity to persist. So she savagely raked at the skin, succeeding only in making shallow, reddened abrasions. Angered, she attempted to bend the knife in two. She had once read an article about prisoners attacking one another. The most effective way to shank someone was a broken toothbrush to the joint; the plastic would splinter, and movement of the joint would work to aggravate the pain. Pain. She craved the pain and she needed proof that she was alive because it was life that she craved, too. She had felt happiness before, and although it had petrified her at the time, she had thought she might never let it go. She was starving for more. But this felt good, too. The plastic knife was supple and would not snap. It bent into a soft curve. She settled for stabbing herself repeatedly with the dull point until she grew bored. The knife was then dropped into her handbag. The lady stood up, and left the stall. She made her way to the mirror, where she decided she still looked beautiful. She touched up her eye makeup and went back outside into the crisp night. Things seemed somehow less magical than when she had left, but the lady found that the city was still bustling and alive and well. She consulted her wristwatch and saw that she had long missed the time of rendezvous with her friends. Alone, she took the tram back to their hostel. She engaged in lively conversation with a plump teacher man who sat adjacent. She was glad that he seemed to understand what she wished to express. They shared similar views on the education system. She quoted Mencius and felt pleased that he was impressed, and even more pleased because she had not been trying to impress him. Across the aisle, two young women kissed and laughed and saw little around them but one another. An elderly man dozed. There were several hours left before daybreak. 41 | �A Story Without Using that Obnoxiously Common Fifth Symbol of Our ABC’s Two boys stood in front of a snarling gray building, its roof turning in as a furrowing brow, and its windows sharp and hungry as if awaiting an opportunity for attack. Facing this monstrous labyrinth, Dallas’s firmly shut lips split, displaying his worry against his will and taking in hot sour air clouding up from dirty ground through iron grids. Francis was in too much shock to pay mind to Dallas anyway. His right boot had lost its bottom too many blocks back to count, and his foot was still so hot from its rhythmic, frantic pounding of city roads that it didn’t hurt. His hands ran across its burning skin wiping away sand and dirt, surfing its rough composition now donning bumps growing as drops of rain on a window following a storm. His foot was now throbbing. Grimacing, Francis took Dallas’s hand. It hadn’t got Dallas. That’s all that was important. Dallas, holding Francis’s hand tightly, thought, Francis is okay. That’s all that is important. Hand in hand, two boys stand in front of a snarling gray building. Kyla Murhy| 42 �9/22/19 in times of wandering and weariness I find myself by the evergreen forest the trills of songbirds and thundering steps of the Spirit alight here, in the soul, in the mind, in the ear and I cannot help but wonder whether I was always here I am surrounded by the dawning mist, the winter birth the pale sun in even paler ocean and I am struck my canoe is broken, traveling through crooked waters my eyes are clouded, my hair is dry, my skin is bruised blue and yet I have wandered into the lake, not yet, still yet I am violet before the emerald eyes I am fractured before the fractured whole and I am struck all beautiful things are broken in their beginning broken in living, in dying, yet not, yet still, in loving 43 | Grace Calk Marielle Morley �Lines by the Forest Window in the shadows of the evening trees I find a holy massacre of those whose silence could not be silent of those whose pulse could not push past the current of their sullied blood and in the mud of the seeming goddess I find skin shivering soul cold what cuts deeper than the color blue on a sunlit reddish morning in eyes there is no respite for she who does not love in he who cannot move in the thicket the dove has cowered moaning in a mourning song he treads the path of needles and moss entrapped by grieving, weathered wings I find myself shackled by a swirling mist the soul in me cannot shake this boundary or climb above the wall of brick between the door in the sky and the well in the sea I am held, it seems suspended by the exhale of the earth sighs weigh more in silver than speech glances more in gold than stares and fingertips are more evident of reverence than tongue on rosened lips the sun may not slight all alike but worship captures the soul as love enlightens the eyes and in love there is no hope of assuaging the crimson or curbing the blue there is no withstanding the Siren who invokes the melody of the soul's first resonant hymn Grace Calk | 44 �Translation of Petrarch, Sparse rime (Scattered Rhymes) Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore quand’era in parte altr’uom da quell ch’i’ sono: del vario stile in ch’io piango e ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore spero trovar pietà, non che perdono. Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; e del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l concoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno. All you who hear, in scattered rhymes, the sound Of sighs, wherein I once did feed my heart In youth’s first error, when I was in part Another man from how I am now found: For all the modes in which I weep and speak In th’interval between vain hopes and woe, From those who, having tasted love, love know, Pity, not only pardon, do I seek. But now full well I see how stood my suit, That long was I the talk the crowd held dear, For which I often shamed within do seem; And of delusion shame is now the fruit, Regret as well, and knowledge sharp and clear That world-got pleasure’s but the briefest dream. 45 | Peter Kalkavage �Gabriela Sanchez | 46 �47 | Anne Freeman �Of Course, I Understand The moment Emily caught her husband kissing another man in their bedroom, she was shocked. She did not know her husband was capable of being so passionate. One side of his lip curled up; moaning, whispering, he eagerly pulled the man against his chest until their bodies became one. Desire, love, and fanatic brightened his eyes, but the passion vaporized when Emily met his gaze. He panicked, trying to pick up the clothes from the floor, murmuring some words. But she did not hear anything, and ran down to the kitchen. It was a nice kitchen. She designed it herself. A local magazine planned to feature it on the next issue. The editor this morning said on the phone that she would bring the photographer to take some pictures. The news excited her, so she left Sarah’s house earlier. She used to enjoy having afternoon tea with Sarah, but today she only wanted to go home and clean the kitchen one more time. What a lovely kitchen. She said to herself. The women Bible study group came to her house every Friday, and they could not stop marveling at it. The balance among multiple colors, they said, was more than perfect. Her mother-inlaw praised the Sherwood green cabinets, insisting that she would love to have the same. Frank’s Family liked her. She was educated but not overeducated to the extent that her brain was full of progressive nonsense. As a pastor’s wife, she devoted most of her time to the community. When Hill’s daughter came out of the closet, people were terrified except her. Bring some cookies to Hill’s house, she tried to persuade the young lady not to walk towards the sin. Her effort was futile—the young lady threw angry comments on her—but she thereby became a symbol of kindness in the neighborhood. No one, people asserted, was more caring than Emily was. Would not this kitchen be the best place in the world? Glaring at the oven, retro style, bright orange color, she wondered. It reminded Emily of her parents’ house. Her father rarely talked to her, but she could be sure he was a great man. Her mother spent most of her time in the kitchen. She was a quiet woman. The sadness in her eyes forbade her from uttering. The similarities between Frank and her mother often surprised her. He was taciturn. Certainly, Emily would not doubt his love. She remembered the smile he gave when she made him pan-fried chicken with mashed potatoes. Unlike her mother, Frank could be talkative. Every Sunday, he preached in the church, enlightened his audiences. Without him, the town would not see the sin of homosexuality, the fall of feminine virtues, and the tradition would burn down like an old tree in the flame. “Em—” a low voice interrupted her thoughts. The voice continued. “It was nothing. I just got confused. Confused, you know. Confused.” The sound waves of his words traveled through the kitchen, leaving footprints all over the wall. Some were hidden under the sinks, but she saw them. “Em—” It was the voice. The footprints worried her. They could ruin the kitchen. How should she clean it? Would the editor notice anything tomorrow? Would it still be featured in the magazine? Could it? The voice kept going, and she knew she must act. “I—“ “Of course.” Before the sentence was completed, she interrupted. “Of course, Frank. Of course, I understand.” Yingzi Zhang | 48 �EULOGY FOR THE VOYAGER Who among us can walk with you? Who has measured the weighted world and found it more worthy of love since Atlas himself? Who else can lay claim to the body of the Midwestern Quotidian Dragon? And who can raise a red barn to keep guard against the gray waves of its million ghost-hungry children? Lighthouse of Man, know that I hunt the mosaic shores for sea glass beneath your shadow. Though you are a single needle in the green-stained cathedrals of the pine forests which dot my childhood, with you I sew my clothes anew. Traveling ever forward, you carry a golden pitcher With it you water the stars, and even now they still bloom beneath my feet. Forgive that we might never repay you, or that we should weakly stumble on this mountain path you carve; at these heights the paralyzing venom of desolation falls like snow onto our tongue. And for that, this Eulogy is made: Hero that you are, your mother mourns the flight of her little swift. Please, dream of her if you can - hold tightly and let not the songs of your youth be lost in the valley that marks the divorce of ground and sky.Verily, forgetting is no small death, and none can suffer to return your body home. Hero of Man, you breathe in a skin of iron but bleed with a heart of aluminum foil. Do you fear the breath of the wrinkling wind? Does your memory hold the sails on your great wandering true? You have claimed all the horizon as your holy frontier. Yet even now you shut the door as I prepare a funeral in my Appalachian mind for the wonder you gave the world too long ago. 49 | Glenn Burns �John Verdi | 50 �As I Give You to the Changing World by Flo Palmacci (1927-2007) Submitted by her grandson, Brandon Wasicsko (AGI‘20); dedicated to the memory of his parents, Dolores and Matthew. How will you survive the sea of discontent Or the wint'ry winds of worldly ways? Can you overcome confusion and chaotic days And fill your life with purpose and intent? Do you dread the day of knowing disaster and defeat And fear the force of fantasy and fact? Will you be strong enough to hold your soul intact, With strength enough to savor all that's sweet? Are you equipped to understand the urging of desire That surges forth, unbidden, unfulfilled? Will there be a moment when your thoughts are stilled, When you recall the hopes to which you still aspire? Will you try to tame the torment of humanity and conspire to conquer universal ills By seeking truth, and speaking truth at will, Suppressing lies, lamenting all profanity? Can you realize the anguish that's harbored in my breast As I give you to the changing world that waits? No more am I the Master of your fate.... You are a man, my son, and I have done my best. 51 | Brandon Wasicsko �| 52 �53 | �| 54 �Editors-in-Chief Editors Front Cover Enkh-Od Batzorig Sofe Cote Adam Schulman Grace Calk Elias Christian Kristina Dover Jean Hogan Levan Kiladze Daryl Locke Yifei Lu Lysithia Page Hengjia Zhang Praying Mantis, 2019, (charcoal and ink on paper) by Anton Kalmysh Energeia is the literary and art publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis. St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 Submit to energeia@sjc.edu �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 62 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Winter 2019 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Winter 2019. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2019Winter Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6ca0cbe21d9e57e38ce59a7ea8c96742.pdf 7ec9850663b6b393bf92b992fe984923 PDF Text Text Spring 2020 �Letter from the Editors In the Decameron, seven young ladies and three young men flee the plague-filled city of Florence in search of pleasure. Their pleasure takes the form of lying in the shade and telling stories, which, as one of the young ladies argues, “may afford diversion to all the company who hearken, [as well as to the storyteller]”. We as readers are no strangers to the solace stories bring; we remember the advice our Don Quixote of La Mancha gave to the canon: “read these books, and you will see how they will banish any melancholy you may feel, and raise your spirits should they be depressed.” We hope that this collection of your stories, poems, paintings, and other works of art can provide you with a moment in the shade, and a diversion from whatever melancholy might ail you. �Samuel Barrettini 32 sodomy is dead 33 Homo Ives Williams Natalie Walker Anna Seban Amy Porter Natalie Walker Tyler Mazur Clare Collins Brendan Reicherter John Verdi Julia Cooper Anna Seban Juana Melendez Glenn Burns Lysithia Page Eric Baker MegAnn Sara Johnson Elle Laabs Sheba Delaney Sophia Heimbrock 8 RoadKill 9 My Young Reflection... 10 Free Fall 11 Icharus 12 Antigone, Line 72 14 Hinterland 15 untitled 16 Deminished Blues 17 Good Fences 18 Icharus 19 Jess 20 the trip 21 ODE OF THE HORSEMAN 22 Yesternight..., If only... 23 The Sandelwood Kid 26 Forgive me Father, for I have been Sacrilegious 27 Sóller 28 At Least He’s Laughing 30 on parallels 31 big and little words all spelling out desire Daryl Locke 34 New Years Morning 35 Twenty Liam Marshall-Butler 36 The Innumerable Steps Amalie Christensen 38 So I Yearn Scott McCrae 39 Newton 1.3 Louis Petrich 40 Falstaff Riseth Up Chris Musick 42 A Politician Amongst Philosopher... Anne Brong 43 Welcome mattress Nortaute Grintalis 44 Kajus’ Centripetal Force 45 A year’s archetype 46 Daily Heroin Maya Sofia Lake Nicholas Thorp 47 Untitled Elias Christian 48 Variations on Sweetapple... Sofe Cote 49 Self Portrait With Lump (#5) Kristina Dover 50 Clutching Her Pearls, Unavailable Rose Zhang 51 my favorite person Jean Hogan 52 Content Warning Martha Campbell 54 Sonnet for Cordelia: From France 55 A Poem for France: From Cordelia 56 Molly (for my love) Sofe Cote �If I might but sit awhile and gaze upon the heartbeat finger tap twitch of a wounded deer by the midnight gas station antlers akimbo, thorny palms raised to the sky when it saw those headlights staring back did it see the eyes of God? 8| Ives Williams RoadKill anxious to greet the indefinite creaturepetrol pulse, parly on the weedy road My Young Reflection (on two lines from Whitman) Around my eyes does not stay crinkled yet. My cheeks resist my smile. They will remain Unsure for still a while that I’ll maintain, As life’s response, laughter is valid and set. My forehead too persistently forgets Each riddle and duress my mind does deign With momentary interest, real or feigned, And smooths each crease left by the thought it had met. I think my face misunderstands itself, And what facing this sad, strange world ever meant— As if experiences stay on some shelf, As if most deeply I am indifferent. My face does not yet look like Me Myself— Aloof, amused, compassionate, complacent. one more innocent self-sabotage in the desperate flight from ignorance Natalie Walker |9 �Free Fall 10 | Anna Seban Icharus Amy Porter | 11 �12 | Natalie Walker | 13 �Hinterland untitled A guest in a warm bed. The cold outside, in the dark. A windowsill between us, Smothered with trinkets. Euphemism for junk, shit. How many windowsills From here to the Fall Line With trinkets strewn about? Frame and photo from when? Wedding china going where? Appalachia is a junk culture. A shit culture, hoarding Bottles long after the drink. Still, better with than without In the cold and dark, I guess. 14 | Tyler Mazur Clare Collins | 15 �Good Fences Diminished Blues Brendan Reicherter bœ ˙ 4° œ & b 4 ¢ ™™ F7 5 bœn œ bœ ˙ &b œ B¨7 bœnœ B¨º7 C7 Cº7 B¨7 9 bœ nœ^ & b nœ bœ Ó C7 17 2. F7 Cº7 &b ˙ 16 | Brendan Reicherter F7 Œ ‰ bœbœnœ œ œ œnœ œnœ œbœ œnœ J bœ bœ nœ ˙ &b œ 13 F7 F7 b œ B¨º7 nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œn œ b œ bœ œ~ J Œ ‰ Œ Ó B¨7 Bº7 œ bœ bœ nœ ˙ C7 Cº7 Fº7 œ~ Œ ‰ œj œbœ B¨7 Bº7 nœ bœ bœ nœ œ œ ‰ œJ œ bœ bœ nœ ˙ 1. John Verdi ü ‰ nœJ bœbœ œbœ œ œ œbœbœnœ œj Œ nœj œbœ œnœ œbœbœnœ ™™ † B¨7 B¨º7 bœ F7 bœ nœ F©º G‹7 C7 bw 3 John Verdi | 17 �Icharus 18 | Julia Cooper Jess Anna Seban | 19 �the trip ODE OF THE HORSEMAN In the dark, I meet your skin. Your veins run like hidden rivers beneath you, Carrying the spirit of your immutable heart. It pulses, Like the light of the stars above. We run in pace with its ancient rhythm For we’ll run far away from the spying stars (where their light can not divide us)And our skin will be together, So that we are one (much like the patchwork quilt that lies in our barn). And when you breathe, Your lungs carry the stories Of forgotten beaches and snow-kissed mountains. I hear in you the wind that has passed your ears, And filled your chest. When we are together, I never worry that a merciless God should do us part, For we are already in His heaven (but dear Lord, When we’re together is not enough). We climbed up to the top to the comfort of this house made a fire now worn out after ripping all walls apart took the remains and sailed away on boats made of glass and iron. 20 | Juana Melendez Glenn Burns | 21 �Yesternight the sky was dark The Sandalwood Kid By Eric Baker I had only just arrived at Kineo Mount Yesternight the sky was dark Or so you would have thought But stolen was its inkiness, And in its place was nought. Who slurped away the jet black broth and left the stars behind, Opaque like chunks of chicken breast, with edges undefined? But really it was colorless, For contrast thus had ceased. Now everything was everything, I fell asleep apleased. I had spotted eagles, brown, as I sailed to the island “Mni Wiconi” I recite to myself I’ve never seen water so clear Nor the Milky Way so casually fixed- as if little more than some novelty “Mni Wiconi” As if my mantra would teach me something hidden About the lake When I was a boy I had asked my mother about love She tells me a story, that she had told once before How as a child she had once had a bird, and loved him so And kept him in a brass cage Her father had made Her grandmother goes up, and moves to open the cage “Will you still love, if he had somewhere else to go?” “No” she screams, but a little girl My young mother slams the cage door shut, and puts it in its lock If only we had seen the land “Leave him alone” Her grandmother turns, no anger in her soul “When we play by the stream, and pass water down the line- from me to your father to youHow do I hold my hands? Do I grip If only we had seen the land Before its skin was razed Would we see ourselves the more The wild had we gazed? But lost ourselves in skies on fire, We in bleeding wood, Alas we’ll never see ourselves, Maybe we never could 22 | Lysithia Page With a fist?” “No” “Do I hold my hand flat?” “No, you’d drop all the water!” “Ah, so cup my hands I must, never gripping, otherwise neither your father nor you will ever get to sip?” “Grandma, why are you asking me? Just leave the bird alone!” “Fix your tone, and fix your attention to my words. You cannot nourish your other, if you hold onto them tight. They are not for you to claim, but only for you to let pass along. Open the cage door, for the bird is not yours.” “But father-” Eric Baker | 23 �“We’d call him mad if he kept his hands cupped with water, and ran away from all of us with it spilling No beard in his way from outside, it was only passing through. Do you think he’s angry?” In Heaven’s Lake over his shirt and down his head. You’d be angry, because you didn’t have your fill. The sparrow came The grandmother moves towards the cage, and my mother relents her protest The sparrow, wild, darts towards a wall Her grandmother had neglected to open a window It plops to the ground and my mother screams A red round dot left on the wood board My mother’s shriek then meant nothing He just sat for a while And had flown far, far away Untethered, untouched He had owned nothing And like the tree, the finch and the stream Nothing owned him after all. Compared to her cries later I find a tree, a white pine, though not sandalwood But because her father had decided to stuff it the next morning And breathe in the world Not over the bird’s death My mother walks into their living room And avian eyes stare blank from the mantlepiece I put my forefingers together Crossing my third fingers over my forefingers I exhale, I lose the world Her grandmother knits as my mother writhes on the ground “Mni Wiconi- water is life” my mother says Until her grandmother places her half-finished shawl over the stuffed sparrow “Water can’t be called life, if it’s kept to yourself She bares her juvenile teeth and weeps And takes my mother to bed My mother pauses before me She doesn’t know how to continue “Like the water, it wasn’t mine to keep” Though the saying is not from her part of the world Nothing can be life, if it doesn’t pass you through. Life can’t ever, ever, just stop with you,” she mumbles With a cigarette between her teeth And a lighter under her thumb I stare, unsure of the lesson she’s gleamed I breathe again “Mni Wiconi” I cross my fingers I recite again As I step onto the landing And dock my boat Up Kineo I head The moon lighting my way I exhale again I cross my fingers once more I gain the world I lose the world But still, the world doesn’t lose me Or take me up with it I recall another story Again, I try, to no avail Son of the Bear I return to the world Of the Sandalwood King And first of our race Who, after his reign, Stepped under a sandalwood tree At the top of a mountain peak And found peace I depart from the mount And open up my sail Still a boy, still a kid Dreaming of the wind Dreaming of riding the gale. With no clothes on his back 24 | | 25 �Forgive me Father, for I have been Sacrilegious Sóller I used to pray every night before bed Now I sit and read Euclid instead I used to play around with play-doh Now I fuck about with Plato Whatever happened to reality? Now it’s just me and the Polity Sorry Dad, I’m becoming secular As the church no longer feels familiar Now I know the true holy trinity: Euclid, Plato, and the Polity 26 | MegAnn Sara Johnson | 27 �At Least He’s Laughing It has been raining for weeks. I pull myself around like a dog coerced outside for a piss. I unfurl my umbrella just as the rain stops and feel its extra weight in my hand. Necessity does not talk to me anymore. A telephone pole poster for anger management tells us to “find the virtuous mean” in italicized helvetica neue. “Use protection.” winks the condom wrapper kicked about on the classroom floor. Moderation is a kind of invited claustrophobia to hold in, hold together— bent umbrellas against rains already come. We talk of fragility around cornered tables and grin as though it might disappear with the hot air of speech. There is no difference between cracking and falling. We all leave all the time for smoke breaks and daydreams and trips to the restroom to slap our cheeks until our eyes decide to open again. We’re always circumscribing some shape we never take. “I am my own phantom limb!” cries a man 28 | Ellie Laabs out the third floor window. Drops keep falling. I have left my umbrella inside this time. The universe and I form dissonances whenever we touch. I never care about it until I get a glass of wine in my hands and someone asks, with over-compassion: “but how are you, really?” I think often of summer— of the early July day I discovered a wet paint sign clinging to the beach, as if to say “the creation is yet fresh.” That’s the closest I’ve come to knowing God. I think: at least He’s laughing. Ellie Laabs | 29 �on parallels big and little words all spelling out desire every morning finds something missing: the pause too long for comfort, like cold curdled coffee dregs, like letting the toast burn. all the books stand at attention (and underneath, little pieces of paper with your words written on them). i want to puncture the silence, rip the wound open over and over, wider each time. i want sugar in my tea today. i want blueberries and milk and you asleep in my bed. 30 | Sheba Delaney Sophia Heimbrock | 31 �sodomy is dead ive forgotten all the pornstars i used to know flat figures with illusions of breast thigh tenderness heartthrobs and other throbs mouldering in sub terranea passing days like the ending routine of an old age home listen the children have come to sing for you never really a song only a plastic cup of jello stained purple with lipstick— i apply it to my wrinkled mouth as if im hungry small routines create us a smear an earring leather bondage i gorge myself on myself and when i get sick i look around wearing betrayal on my sticky face— large eyes on an insufficient frame trembling for more soaking drinking sputtering in scenes of coiled mouths but they didnt gasp and pulse and lie in the dark alone they didnt taste skin and shiver and sigh yes louder or softer perhaps when they knew what was coming they only ever lay there silent with their extrusions limp and tiresome days with the halfhearted scent of sweat hanging dull and rancid over the room a flaccid mind holding hands with a stale body i watch my cut wires dangle like a magicians spoiled trick one end cant thrash without the other all the cables to my screens look so simple now i cant remember how they played strings into flesh into solid damp hot words troublesome that the words dried up and stuck around when i didnt want them anymore i emptied them all out 32 | Samuel Barrettini but the casings i couldnt let go now that ive lost most of my teeth i need something to roll around in my mouth and spit out stick words on my shell and watch them calcify build something new before the foundations give way one last peep show under spotlights flickering flickering flickering— Samuel Barrettini | 33 �New Years Morning Twenty I have never confused anything Essentially Especially two shifts Plums and oranges I have never used in the same sentence I woke up and it is a new day I walk the dogs and there is a new sky Just yesterday I was in panic Just hours ago I was counting down the numbers Today is a new day A new year, a new lifetime Everything else seems new too The urine, the bagels, the unmade bed, The honey on the counter, my black hair the silverware seems a bit funny too I grab my first breakfast in this lifetime A plum and an orange As I try and figure out what Eve met out of her New Years I sit on the balcony This cold air - new And watch the sky and wait for the next one to come With twenty rowing years and each a rowing lifetime raving with life’s pulse in the curl of its heart in the depth of its spine venturing through heaven and hell, storms and rainbows Time ages me generously It is not me that places cracks near the eyelid, but the body itself I try and betray such insults although a grey weed sprouts from the cranium With luck seemingly rooted in one Mainly on the outskirts Which makes me dote in twenty years to come I’ll be forty, ah! Time be jolly I must stay beautiful 34 | Daryl Locke Daryl Locke | 35 �The Innumerable Steps Mark Stevenson must have gone mad. After inheriting a house from his now late uncle, he had begun to organize it. His uncle, who was notoriously messy and resistant to throwing things out, had left the house a mess. Somewhat by mistake he had realized that after counting the steps to the attic multiple times, he could not find any consistent number of steps. It was his habit to count the steps as he walked up or down any staircase, however, this staircase seemed to sometimes have twenty steps, sometimes twenty one or twenty two. Once he even counted it to have twenty five steps. This discovery occupied Mark for quite a bit of time. He walked up and down the steps again and again for half an hour until he began to write the results down. Maybe there is some pattern; it must have more steps when going up then going down he thought. When Mark’s brother, who had agreed to help organize the house, came and saw that Mark had not accomplished much in his time asked Mark how he was holding up with the death of their uncle. “I think I am having a break. I swear that the staircase to the attic has a different number of steps every time you count them.” Mark answered. After Mark’s brother was incapable of comforting his distraught brother tried to count the number of steps of the staircase twice in a row in an endeavour to explain to Mark that he was simply grief stricken and exhausted. However, he was incapable of successfully counting the number of steps twice in a row. Mark and his brother found more and more people to test the seemingly magical staircase. As word got 36 | Liam Marshall-Butler around skeptics came to attempt to disprove the innumerable steps. The staircase soon became famous and quite a few scientists came to study the steps to no avail. At first Mark let them come without question, but he soon decided to charge people for the pleasure of seeing the known laws of physics and reason fell apart. Mark’s business was incredibly successful for a few months until a local with no particular religious affiliation burned the house to the ground under the belief that Mark had made a deal with the devil. While, at first, the world was distressed to find that the newest maracle had ceased to exist, a number of theories explaining why the staircase must have been a hoax were disseminated. Mark’s staircase was soon all but completely forgotten and relegated to the footnotes of history. | 37 �So I Yearn There is something about the ebbing of our thoughts The way you know me not. See me sinking deeply, feel I’m floating lightly Tears are falling freely. I crashed and crashed again, still my tide continued Blame it all on my moods. Moving forward somehow, what I seek is needed Remember what you said. One drop builds to many, many will build a pond Will you ever respond? From glaciers to the rain, mist and frost included You forgave what I did. Where there is water, our stream of life will follow. Spes mea in Deo 38 | Amalie Christensen Newton 1.3 “Every body that, by a radius drawn to the center of a second body moving in any way whatever, describes about that center areas that are proportional to the times is urged by a force compounded of the centripetal force tending toward that second body and of the whole accelerative force by which that second body it moved.” - Principia Book I. Proposition 3. Let T be a body, and L be a second body orbiting it. When body T moves towards T​1​, L moves towards L’ and also towards A. Δ​T L A​ = Δ​T1​​ L’ A’ ​ A​’ = Δ​T1​​ A’ B​ ​ (​Principia 1.1) Δ​T​1​ L’ ​ ​ ∴ ​ Δ​T1​​ A’ B​ = Δ​T L A ​ .​..and also B​’ = Δ​T2​​ B’ C Δ​T​2 A’’ ​ Δ​T​2​ B’ C​ = Δ​T​3​ B’’ C’ The actual path of body L is thus the curved line ​L A’B’C’ Scott McCrae | 39 �Falstaff Riseth Up Let’s not fit into “friends”-suit shrunk by wash. Your words out-stretched to me as mine to you have touched too much our hearts and minds; so this word “friends” too little sounds, and wraps not ‘round embodied kinds who want so much to fit inside intestined homes, no room for pride— love at high end leashing riots love at lower on death diets not to lose the fat to keep the taste-outlasting passing politic days, to likes of ours belongs the race! Yet if you would compel God’s kingdom come by disemboweling this noisome one-storming and fouling-I know an old man tried who ended howling, distilling questions from despair: love’s cause? . . . life’s cause? nothing . . . nothing there . . . dwindling air 40 | Louis Petrich broken down to barest words ever spoken, ever heard— arms holding cold his excellent never come more daughter. Enter Falstaff, old man through with storms, now lads his lusty cue to question honor thoroughly: merely air . . . tongue’s deadly fare. Him missing dear we would, if plump-veined world unchurled could be good . . . but Falstaff Riseth Up, double-backed with sup and hotly spurred by sack to sleep and snore through knocks of law that would arrest the mountain depths and make all even bored, but life that’s wet and ever spicy mines he up in hoards to share ‘mongst thieving mates racked all in laughter wielding swords, self-hacked self-bloodied, shameless glad to last reopen flaming gates of Paradise and tempt the honey Prince, never never turncoat back! Oh yes, it’s true: Paradise. All the same, put this to store: it’s not for everyone— life, I mean— fat, drunk, elevated, and loved of all the rest more. | 41 �A Politician Amongst Philosophers: A Sonnet Welcome mattress And never had there such a sadness been As he, a man who walks with head so low. How those who pass him scrutinize his sin! But if he tried to hide it still would show To bring them wealth was all that he desired, Yet they would never surely understand Just how much this man was truly tired Much like a member of a marching band Whose arms are weak as if they would fall off, But marches on despite terrific pain. So does this man march on though he’s distraught, And never will he hold his head in shame. But if you call him by this name he stirs: A Politician Amongst Philosophers 42 | Chris Musick Anne Brong | 43 �Kajus’ Centripetal Force A year’s archetype Dressed in dyed poppy, I entered the forest Led deeper by a trail of Pomegranate seeds I left Myself last year. Bare teeth, Annihilate the fruit’s bone Encouraged to go To the underground of force, Where promised years abandon seeds To bitter themselves. Thus, I leave Persephone behind My sweat, drops of pomegranate. I will see her red shawl soon, Woven of poppy and The forgetful secrets of spring, For to fall again By the sun’s drifts into New damnation Is my allotment. 44 | Nortaute Grintalis Nortaute Grintalis | 45 �Daily Heroin Untitled The harder the breath, the thicker the air The bigger the push, the heavier it gets The louder the scream, the softer the hush The clearer the sky, the foggier the mind The taller one grows, the more one shrinks inside The smarter one gets, the dumber one feels The longer one stays, the harder to leave The stronger one gets, the weaker the high The slower I live, the faster I die 46 | Maya Sofia Lake Nicholas Thorp | 47 �Variations on Sweetapple: A Fragment of Sappho Self Portrait With Lump (#5) Οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾽ ὔσδῳ ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῳ λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπνεσ, οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐδύναντ᾽ ἐπίκεσθαι. Solitary sweetapple red-dabbled on the high branch, on the highest branch, which the gatherers neglected no, not truly neglected: were incapable of grasping. Exposed on the high bough, the highest bough, sweetapple ripens, uncollected by the harvest not uncollected for lack of appeal: in faith, unable to be collected. A single sweetapple blushing on the high branch, on the highest branch, remains hidden from the hands of applepickers.  No, in fact, not hidden but unattainable.  Even as sweetapple ripens on the upper bough, on the uppermost bough, she goes untouched by industry: not precisely forgotten, but untouchable. Apple flushes sweetly in autumn light on the bough’s foremost end, its very end, and retains herself, unseen by harvesters No, in truth not unseen, simply beyond reach. When sweetapple stains red on the high branch, on the highest branch, she is not stained  by farmer’s hands because those are not well-fitted to grasp. 48 | Elias Christian Sofe Cote| 49 �my favorite person Clutching Her Pearls And her eye whites were egg shells, With broken porcelain plates made Out to be the pearls on her Neck, her neck, where my nails have been. But what I have learned is that Pain is a thoughtless thing, Minding nothing at all, Only doing, doing, doing. So leave me here where the Morning screams out my name, and The stars die before they can Catch me. I've committed to nothing and everything Unavailable all at once, I'm sorry mom That I ever touched you. I woke up to something breaking In the kitchen. Mom stood there Emptying an hourglass Onto her face. She took a Stick and drew a smile, now It's night and I watch waves of Depression leave her expressionless. She whispers, "It's time." 50 | Kristina Dover Rose Zhang | 51 �Content Warning A Translation of Baudelaire’s Au Lecteur (x) Hurt/Comfort (x) Not safe for work (x) Pining (x) Yearning (x) Anatomy (x) Wish-Fulfillment (x) Introspection (x) Homelessness (x) Rodents (x) Fixit Fic (x) Doomed Ship (x) Not Beta Read (x) Confessions (x) Fluff (x) Non-Canon (x ) Tear-Jerker (x) Redemption arc (x) Satan (Catholicism) (x) Trimegustus (Hermeticism) (x) Resolved Romantic Tension (x) Smut (x) Body Modification (x) Brain Bleach (x) Occult (x) Vaping (x) Devil (Lucifer) (x) Manipulation (x) Enemies to Lovers (x) Giantess (x) Corruption (x) Fall from Grace (x) Evil Protag (x) Optimism (x) Revolt (x) Sexual Content (x) Kisses (x) Biting (x) Sex Work (x) Age Difference (x) Voyeurism (x) POV: First Person (x)Fingerfucking (x) Fruit (x) Drugs (x) Insects (x) No Longer Taking Feedback (x) Community:Demons (x) Beach Party (x) Implied/Offscreen Character Death (x) Hiccups (x) Moaning (x) Rape (x) Poison (x) Stabbing (x) Arson (x) Everyone Lives (x) Protectiveness (x) Slice of Life (x) Tragedy (x) No Self Insert this time (x) Please be nice 52 | Jean Hogan (x) Jackals, (x) Mythical Beings and Creatures (x) Scorpions (x) Vultures (x) Snakes (x) Language (x) I don’t even know (x) In Public (x) Not Safe for Work (x) Big Bad (x) Unhygenic (x) Plot what Plot (x) This author regrets everything (x) This author regrets nothing (x) Angst (x) Tearjerker (x) Dream Fic (x) Smoking (x) Modern Era (x) Reunion (x) Fashion (x)Family (x) Reader insert This work could have adult content. If you proceed you have agreed that you are willing to see such content. [Proceed] [Go Back] | 53 �Sonnet for Cordelia: From France A Poem for France: From Cordelia The crashing waves betwixt our passing ships Push thistles in my side, sea salt to cheek, But what I want is roses on my lip; A blush sail blown all out make my knees weak. Say but wind and thus carry me away, Or say just light and guide my eyes forth. You shall give me the world if you stay, But if you turn, only pain henceforth. My affections hang in your loft sail, Yet I see a storm approaching our wake, So be like the breeze, not howl or wail, And carry my ship across this calm lake. Simply call out, my love, a tender word, And heal the wounds which I have incurred. There is a silent heartbreak which is common To the world. With hair curled, And dazzling jewels and gowns all put on. The jewelry, well fascinated, And the costumes, well fabricated, Carry only an air to the eye and not One to the heart. I can only promise no such heartbreak. I am poor, Yet no more Would I need than a quiet home to make. My love, not distant, And my love, still constant. I will be your fool so long as You will be mine. 54 | Martha Campbell Martha Campbell| 55 �Molly (for my love) 56 | Sofe Cote | 57 �Editors In Chief Enkh-Od Batzorig Sofe Cote Adam Schulman Editors Grace Calk Elias Peregrine Christian Kristina Dover Jean Hogan Levan Kiladze Daryl Locke Yifei Lu Lysithia Page Cover laundry by Yunju Park Energeia Energeia is the Literary and Art Publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis... ... St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 Thank you to all who contributed to this issue of Energeia, and a thousand thanks to our wonderful team of editors. Your dedication and effort means the world to us. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2020 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2020. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2020Spring Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/08cfc1785dbfa9ecae16ba97046d41fb.pdf 1f7d0b006fb758c29dcad9fff5419c0f PDF Text Text �Energeia Spring 2019 ����There once was a man from the Pitt Who wrote poems under his lover’s tit His rhymes would all buckle His lover would chuckle Saying “you never could rhyme for shit” Untitled, by Anonymous �Editor's Note ince spring is a time for new beginnings, we S encourage our readers to try something new: approach this edition of Energeia as if it were a seminar reading. Part of our job as editors is to publish the art we receive from the polity in a way that is engaging and cohesive. Look deeply at the art and how it all works together as a unified publication. We hope that in doing so you will come to understand something new about the common connection that we, here, at St. John’s share through the arts. �Audrey Bryant 1 to again hold Cole Caudle 2 Dialectic motion Samuel Berrettini 3 all things turning as one Kristina Dover 4 Bible Belt Bruises; Blue Green Yellow Dress Anna Seban 5 Room Study ft. Prada Ad Anonymous 6 Spirals Zihan Mei 7 The Swan/ 天鹅 Will van Engen 8 The long way back Reuben Morris 9 Untitled Amy Porter 10 If They Remain Silent.. Grace Phan Jones 11 Emerveille, ou l’homme au demi-sourire Jean Hogan 12 Story in which everything is read through a shitty night vision filter Falon Findley 13 Untitled Elizabeth Janthey 14 Library of Celsus Ephesus, Turkey Bowman 15 Flatlands Are Gold (Bonus Track) Anonymous 16 St. John's Gothic Luke Cartrite 17 Intertwined Gabriela Sanchez 18 springtime hustle Louis Petrich 19 Obituary For a Tutor Ayushma Thapa 20 Lines Adam Hurwitz 21 Moon Graph: Light Sofe Cote 22 Bodies diptych �Julia Cooper 24 Untitled Grace Villmow 25 Carex sedges R.M. Goad 26 Ode to Strange and Delicate Men Isabella Williams Dohyun Song 27 Cousin 28 Untitled Amalie Christensen 28 Golden Hour Nicholas Thorp 29 Self Portrait Tianqi (Simon) Gao 30 Holy Iron Tatum Liam Marshall-Butler Zac Cohen Enkh-Od Batzorig Grace Calk Ben Haas Theo Martin 31 72 32 Ancient Curse 33 Spheroids 34 dead 35 dandelion 36 Relics of an Unknown War 37 Droplets Mark Wittmer 38 Being Beheld Karlena Haase 39 Pound 5 Sera Johnson 40 Fool’s Day; March Mackenzie Daffner 41 Untitled Keaton Jahn 42 Too young for memoirs Sheba Delaney 43 Existential Pronouns Aisha Shahbaz 44 The beginning ��In the beginning, there were beings. Beings with an exceptional faculty; the ability to measure. The beings measured with their hands, and these hands measured with webbing connecting their parts. With these webbed appendages, and minds that worked in harmony with their hands, the beings measure was their nature. Their hands were measuring cups, and with these cups so integral to their identity, they measured to understand their environment and to understand themselves. Now as the beings grew and matured through the generations, they reoriented their nature. The beings soon valued a different sort of measurement, one impaired by the connection of their fingers. They sought both to leave their measured paths and the choice to sieve through what would be measured. With the being’s hands unrestricted, the beings began to build, create, and discern without their natural measurements, and instead distanced their knowledge from the source to calculate and rely on their surroundings. The beings, after generations of measurement-desire-departure, began to once again desire what had been taken away from their nature. They yearned to fulfill this great desire, to be connected where they once were. And like young saplings learning the consequences of sprouting out of the ground, their hands and limbs began to feel the air around them in the nakedness of uncloaked branches. Reaching out, sprawling in the air, grasping at necessities for growth, light and water. The Beings stretched their un-webbed hands and feet, measuring the length of their surroundings with straightened fingers, measuring the warmth of their loved with a cupped hand, measuring the knowledge grasped by inscribing thoughts and ideas communicating by the moving of independent fingers. The movement yearns for unity, for the webbing the beings once had. Moving side-to-side, almost hoping motion will be the successor to the natural stillness of flesh already there. They strive for something lost, for the knowledge held by a sieve is incomparable to the knowledge held by a cup. The straining and disunity of the former cups enable deception and discord. For the tree grows its leaves to connect sunlight and water through itself, producing the being and the fruit of the tree. One outstretched stem is no tree; neither are the twigs and branches that fall unneeded to the ground. The webbing of leaves necessitates almost constant connection, as even trees that wither their leaves away in winter recognize in their state of being that they must return, and so their webbing returns. So like the trees, the beings yearn to return to what they once knew and held knowledge in. The beings strive for the measure of the innate, to once have connection to the measurement. The beings long to hold and to have the measured once more with the measurer. The part is held without the whole, and the whole falls through the part. The beings, as they once were, measured and discerned and held the part within the whole. But the scales themselves morphed, and so, humanity formed on an unbalanced scale, broken and desirous of to once again hold. Audrey Bryant |1 �Dilectic Motion 2| Cole Caudle �all things turning as one -first the garish sunlight splatters on the wall broken and fragmented by ugly blinds the last jumbled utterances of what once ruled the heavens have traveled through infinity the cacophonic news for my unenlightened eyes -Last The Radiance gone with Solitary witness, Wistful knowing nothing– The Cosmos sings, But I hear weeping In the Eternal Joy, The Sound of All: ‘We once could stretch Our hands toward stars Which were not ours to touch.’ Samuel Berrettini |3 �Bible Belt Bruises Righteously wrong women rip Their wrists on dirty holy Handkerchiefs, Their daughters, poppy girls with Ponytails, are pulled and punished By the neck, Blinded with blurry bloody blots With black and blue piss, I cry Out Amen. Blue Green Yellow Dress Mother Blue blazed the moon then wrapped it up in fleece. Covering me in her hands, large, puddy palms, Mother Blue fed me arugula, mint. Praised life before her wrist rang out urea, rags of clouds carrying Mother Blue's piss. Yellow dripping down calm cottonmouths as Mother Blue tyes thyme in and out of time with basil leaves and my bleeding liver (blaming lovers for believing in love but leaving when blood levels out), into a crown of pomegranate shells I place on my head. I drink from her golden blessing in bliss. 4| Kristina Dover �Anna Seban |5 �6| Anonymous �天鹅 THE SWAN 薄雾里，有只天鹅时常出没 我知道，发颤的羽毛 从那些遥远的冬夜，还在向我 发出责备，就像有一双眼睛 曾经让黑暗羞愧，就像那脖子： 是流水、是大雪、是冰… 曾经让一匹小马 忽然垂下头，迟疑地 陷入沼泽，最终认出了这场预谋 Deep in the mist, the swan appears again. I know, those feathers through the distant winter nights quivering, still blame me, as the eyes once the darkness humbled, as the nape (it is a water without ending, it is snow swirling, it is ice) once made a colt drop his head, hesitantly into a bog sink, eventually realize the snare premeditated. Zihan Mei |7 �Untitled 8| Will van Engen �Untitled On the tipping orange Night he’d already well rehearsed Spit a grime on overtime (click-clack-uh-yeah man’s got eject-ed) Milwaukee hand proud lunaticked (the moon is big as shit) On that dock-angle this was right Missed lock-pop so my dance slid worst Wished his chance at empty mind (You seem Hellboy? That’s all true) If eyes not drunk then sad and tired He’d viced seen those scaly goobers Real demons not slick similes night we passed windows he smashed Enemies whose warpaint faces guaranteed he won’t be laid Round the table each man liked me so each woman saw his seeth tooth I asked if his rasp ever could pass Because his life seemed scary (Used to drink...hang...with she was 40) Now How would he not be a lifer My best new Buddy starred and ill Now he’s at Buddy’s bar and grill Tell me if you saw him Reuben Morris |9 �If They Remain Silent.. Museum: a temple of the arts packed with the warm, sticky tourists that dash in and out from the too-hot streets. Through the tall windows, the blinding light from outside reflects off of polished marble limbs and angel wings. Beauty, guarded by guns and crystal glass because of the hunger in every face. Slavering and lusting, the crowds come in and, panting, look at pictures of water, at statues of Love. Longing, longing for absolution, for the knowledge that there, on those pedestals, stand the true human race. They come to worship with vacant eyes, unseeing, afraid to see, because if they did they would know that it was all too bright. The lofty thoughts that man imagines themselves condemn him as dust. They are silent, their mouths hanging open. The only noise is the rustle of clothing and bodies as they roam in herds, gently nudging in closer to drink more deeply at the sights. Their hot stink spreads through the air as their living breath brushes silently against the masterpieces. Their tiny hearts pound with false illumination and misunderstanding. A huddle of them surrounds a bronze man caught in the act of dying. They gnaw at him with their eyes. Despairingly, his face reaches upward to the white light filling the room. An enormous shadow blocks the blinding rays, as if some great Being has stooped low to look in at the windows, eclipsing the sun. In the darkness, a sound like cannon-fire cracks. The dying man lives and begins to move. Splitting and breaking with every effort, now all of the statues are writhing and leaping from their pedestals. They wrest their sculpted lips apart and begin loudly to sing, their stony voices low and rumbling, like an oncoming avalanche. The sound fills every crevice of space, thrusting away the thick and silent stench of the crowd. The pillars of the hall tremble at it. With lurching, crumbling steps they knock paintings from the walls and tear at the tapestries. All the while, every colorful scene they destroy begins to add its voice to the cacophony. Portraits and idyllic scenes sing their colors loudly, egging on the statues that continue to desecrate their canvasses. Many harmonies mix into one strain. The crowds, with horror at seeing their fixations move, run madly in every direction. The guns from terrified security guards fire into the air and shatter the crystal cases, behind which hordes of tiny figurines are dancing wildly to the song. Chaos, chaos, and utter harmony reigns. They struggle to get out of the revolving doors, which spin like tops because so many people are pushing in at once. No one gets out. Like so many hamsters crammed into one wheel, they keep turning in crazy circles to get away, get away. Someone falls inward and vomits on the marble floor. The statues continue to break into pieces, singing as they go. The pillars are crumbling, the temple falling, the idols themselves destroying it. 10 | Amy Porter �Untitled Grace PhanJones | 11 �Story in which everything is read through a shitty night vision filter I I am trying to write a ghost story Rather: I am trying to write the ghost of a story Rather: I am scrambling through secret passages the hallways behind the hallways trying to convince you that I am a ghost close up on my eyes prying from the painting zoom on the painthing prying from behind my eyes It too knows what bookshelves will slide open for it what lamps it can knock over {cut to commercial} Note to Editing: Post ad break montage [a hollow doll, a discarded bottle, an exterior shot of the tinder-wood house, further cliches, the growing realization that the only full thing tonight is the moon, etc] II It’s 2019 anyone can be a ghostbuster or at least anyone can try and oh, how they line up to try Crossing our streams lighting each other up into new dimensions the only place you can find a tear in space time muscle tissue and then i am taking breaths so numerous and so shallow i think that one of these days there just might not be enough air in this town to fill me up Sarah thinks that being a ghostbuster is her favorite tv show job bc it is so rare to find people who put that much work into listening Being a ghost myself I can neither confirm nor deny this 12 | Jean Hogan �III & now the theories One thinks I’m just like that Five mention spirits; three even mean by this – ghosts One, and he doesn’t know how right he is, thinks something snuck out of someone else’s mouth mid-scream and got stuck in mine Notice how all these theories tend toward the corporeal, they would never admit it but everyone surveyed has a stake in my remaining something they can touch hold IV Anne Carson says if prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running through it Probably she means to express urgency, consumption, the way it licks at certain prosaic structures, etc (We should pause to acknowledge that not all poems have houses) Babe I have seen too many men walk out not knowing they’re on fire and light up so many beautiful things Remember, I only ever called this a story In this piece you and I lock the man inside the house Falon Findley | 13 �Library of Celsus Ephesus, Turkey "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had made, and on the labor that I had expended on it: and, behold, all was vanity"- Ecclesiasties 3:11 14 | Elizabeth Janthey �Flatlands Are Gold (Bonus Track) Look at your heart. Watch it unravel the image of her, in front of your chest. In it you know and Out of it you will grow to know. In your room that is under the sea now, Imagine the salt enter your skin. You sink and all around, the beating of the water Surrounds you. Spinning forward becoming total life. Becoming the only life. Grief of the living unloved is chain upon chain upon chain. Grief of the living loved is Unknown freedom. When she reaches her flatlands, answer to me why that is. Bowman | 15 �St. John's Gothic You hear footsteps in the hall approaching your room. They never change position, always right outside your door. There are old lighters on the quad - all of them white. You daren’t pick them up. You dream of ghosts and drowning in college creek. You mention this to your friends. They only stare at you. You don’t go near the docks, just in case. People disappear for half an hour during class and return glassy-eyed. You wonder where they go. You zone out during seminar. You tune back in. You’re talking about Odysseus. You are always talking about Odysseus. You complain of writer’s block. You overcome the writer’s block. You drown in words. You write a three-page paper. You double space it. You have written a three and a half page paper. The rune exists on the underside of the circular stone. You drink with friends and call it a symposium. You all have a problem with alcohol. You tell yourself you’ll do better this week. You skip class Monday morning. People keep withdrawing. What strength do they have that you don’t? What do they see on the other side? “Any couple that gets together before Thanksgiving doesn’t make it long,” they say, threateningly. You draw a line. You erase it. You draw a line. You erase it. You draw a line. Hearing the voices in the stairwell, you peek in. Three hunched figures stand in the dark. One peers at you curiously. There is no sound. You return to the warm light of the hallway. There was a person-sized bloodstain on the ground. They redid the carpet. Buckets sit on the steps in case the rain comes. The rain always comes. You don’t remember the last time you cried. You touch your cheeks. They are wet. Was it the rain? You sleep eight hours a night. You take a nap in the afternoon. You are exhausted. You unlock the door and turn on the light, calling out a polite hello to whatever shifts in the back corner of the room. You always make sure to say goodbye, too, so that it knows not to follow you home. You are alone in a building. You hear someone sniffing. You always hear someone sniffing. You look down and see blood on your paper. How does that keep happening? The bells ring on the 15, the 30, the 45, and the hour. Ther ring 10 minutes before class, when it starts, and when it ends. There are always bells ringing. You are unable to ignore the passage of time. The bell tolls. Someone takes your hand. You realize this is the first time someone has touched you in months. You begin to cry. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on a brick. You trip on 16 | Anonymous �You compliment someone. ‘Thanks, it's not mine!’ Nobody seems to own anything around here. You write only with found writing utensils. You don’t worry when you lose one because you know another will be coming your way soon. There’s hardwood flooring under this thick blue carpet and decades-old linoleum. You start to claw at the floor with your fingernails. Your RA approaches. “Are you alright, my dude?” The lights flicker in the wind. An eclipse occurs overhead. You are huddled with your classmates under borrowed blankets in ten-degree weather. You can’t feel your ankles or your nose so you tilt your head back further to see the red glow of all of the sunsets on Earth on the surface of the moon. At least it isn’t pain. This Monday night seminar has gone on for hours. You put your chin in your hand and blink. You are sitting in Lecture. You raise one eyebrow. You raise the other. Your eyebrows have escaped into your hairline. How did you do that? You google “how to gently bring up occult ritual to your friend group”. You sigh. They don’t even believe in ghosts. “Have you heard of Genji?” You smile and nod. All you do is nod and smile. You don’t know anything or anyone but Odysseus. The quietest person in seminar speaks. Everyone collectively shifts in their chairs, drowning out all other sound. Everyone moves on. ‘Be careful. He has a Title IX.’ The food is rotting. Go get it. It is April. You ask for someone’s last name. You miss home. You think of the last time you visited. You miss who you once were. “Why?” you ask; a child again. Seminar is over. One of them has still not yet returned. You know not to think about it too much or else you will be the next empty seat. They say that The Program makes you a better conversationalist. You stutter and blush. The Program has failed you. Or have you failed The Program? Luke Cartrite | 17 �18 | Gabriela Sanchez springtime hustle walnut ink on paper �Obituary For a Tutor He spent his whole life reading books, the kind containing truths ne’er done, and teaching students how to look for questions. Side-by-side they run. He showed us life goes good that way. But late he lost internal text, not even his Spinoza stayed to introduce him to what’s next of things provided reason for. He kept up outwardly himself, still copied pages, followed score of conversation, losing health, but not his affability. Too awful fitting, lacking hard the answers, soft in brain to be. So ended mind before the heart. Sure death’s not proud of his conquest-the city was abandoned first and slowly left to burn, detest of body hitched no more to nurse. I lost my way to funeral site. I heard it lasted long past noon, as rabbi talked about his light of learning . . . hope . . . th’all-keeping tune. I wonder if we get it back, not what death takes, but life can’t keep. I wonder if death sides with Jack and Jill crowned, ‘gainst the crack runs deep. I wonder if Montaigne is right: that we do what he did to move, to exercise our mental sight, that getting lost is to improve the short way, bare, and late to class. I should have writ his last address, like answers finely versed, to pass the time that’s left me with the best. Louis Petrich | 19 �Lines Coarse palms infused with lines All of them crossing each other’s paths, We were told those lines can speak And if this is true Those coarse palms tell a story Of hills climbed and long summer days In the field. My father’s palms are softer They tell different stories Of rough days in the field Holding metallic objects. Those Palms are recognizable to me. Yet he says, They are not the same palms he used to have They have morphed into something else So now the lines do not tell the stories of clutching the dirt Instead they tell stories of caressing the soil. Winter has left my palms rougher than they were, I cannot feel certain textures But they still tell their own stories Neither of clutching nor caressing the soil But of faraway lands. 20 | Ayushma Thapa �Adam Hurwitz | 21 �22 | Sofe Cote �| 23 �24 | Julia Cooper �Grace Villmow | 25 �Ode to Strange Untitled and Delicate Men This is an ode to strange and delicate men, men sincerely deeming sights and moments lovely; with cambering brows, with relish gleaming from between their lashes. Readily bewildered, the delicate man treats truth like charity; he seeks what lurks behind predictions but puts no stock in prophecy. His charitable truth eludes, ducks behind widthy oaks and willows, clasps palm over chuckle-packed mouth; she hides because the seeker hunts, but for him, she’s no peddler of delusions. This is an ode to strange and delicate men, housing rampant hearts in unpuffed chests; men for whom reverie inevitably comes, whose time enraptured spent is time embraced. 26 | R.M. Goad Freely enthralled, the strange man in love beholds; he concludes his beauty’s intrigue quite detectable by every rod and cone; he detests the yellow tape of esoterica. His beauty sings, and all ears scramble for vicinity; his beauty laughs, and mirth swarms under every sternum. And here he has no instinct to brandish corks and trunks, his rampant heart untempted by memento. �Ives Williams | 27 �Golden Hour Here our golden hours last only minutes, and we all take the time to bathe in it. The beauty before us, our eyes shut tight, since senses are idle to see the light. At the end the gold sinks into our skin, a confusion of clarity sets in, and fiction gives birth to our convictions. 28 | Amalie Christensen Dohyun Song �Nicholas Thorp | 29 �Holy Iron 30 | Tianqi (Simon) Gao �72 Having time in dark, quiet places warm with peace, having warmth in thoughts, pliant minutes pass that gladly cease strife and trouble, troubling on I warm turn to me lonesome guest in paradise of trouble lacking me: "Me, have we lacking trouble stumbled blessedly upon our rest, here to stay us and happily?" Here in me and all about the gentle staying shade, I trouble me with answer, not to trouble but to rest, lay: "I, happy we remain the 'lotted time we feel the sameand troubles not the troubleless the times troubled we regress to thinking here, lack of strifefor here and then our moving life can move, trouble back again if peace be our trouble's end; endevor us (or stay in being) then to this the peace we're seeing by peace's rest, the struggles stop, so our thoughts fight not to know strife, but know rest, And by these know peace best." I, my heart beated these and churned mind churning pleas to keep close calming words, I listened and I gladly heard what I and trouble said, hoping now and then heart growing for such a council in quiet. Tatum | 31 �Ancient Curse The archeologist stood before the monument to Death. They had spent their entire life studying the Plastic Age Collapse, which had become as mysterious as that of the bronze age. The ancients had abandoned writing by the time the plague came. They burned many of their cities to ash, in riots. Pestilence and famine had left them deranged. They waged wars over the remaining food. Although, many of the cities had maintained civility; now, they remained, monuments to a former greatness, filled with bodily remains. The doctors of the Plastic Age were ineffective. Lacking proper medicine, they poisoned their patients in the hope the sickness would die before the patient. The Ancients abandoned their religious practices. Their churches and temples were replaced with bunkers to hide from the Angel, who they believed could shed a single tear on a city and turn it to dust. The archeologist had discovered the first temple of the Angel. On its walls was inscribed a warning to all who entered, of a great illness. However, the archeologist knew better than to lend the primitive Ancients credence. The substance they thought caused this illness must have been nothing more than a trick to scare thieves. This substance they called plutonium. 32 | Liam Marshall-Butler �the Pictured are roughly 10000 cancer cells, split evenly into two spheroids. A spheroid is a tightly compacted grouping of cells, formed in the case by spinning cells in a centrifuge. These spheroids were then injected into collagen, and allowed to invade their surroundings 3 dimensionally. This mimics a metastatic tumor spreading. The above picture was take 72 hours after the spheroids were introduced to the collagen. The image was captured with a laser scanning confocal microscope. The cells are labeled with fluorescent proteins that release light when struck by a laser. The released light is of a different wavelength, which allows the emitted light to be filtered from the original laser light. The color indicates where the cells are in the cell cycle. This specific protocol is called FUCCI. Green cells are S, G2, or M phase, while the red cells are in G1. For a brief period between G1 and S, cells will appear yellow. Lasers of differing wavelength are needed to excite each type of protein (2in this case). In addition, images are taken at any different heights, because of the incredibly short focus length of the lasers. In total, 15 different heights were imaged, each 10 m above the last. Each height, or slice, must be imaged with both lasers, as well as ambient light (omitted), for a total of 45 images over the course of 10 minutes, all to form the single image above, which is unusable for research because the spheroids were erroneously placed in the same dish, and have interacted. Zac Cohen | 33 �dead 34 | Enkh-Od Batzorig �What will I do when love has left me? Will I remain the same unchanged and bright? Will I fall and shimmer fractured and unpraying? dandelion What will I do when life has vanished? when in my stomach a fire grows And burns me whole from the inside out? Will I cease to breathe when the cold water drowns me? Will I cease to touch when my skin crumbles, ashen and grey? Will you refuse to love me when Babylon has visited my tongue? Will you arrest your stare when the moon is no longer behind my eyes? I don’t believe the earth will stay the same I have no faith in the current of the stars The red will not bleed when I cut the sky open Isolation will not submerge under the raging crest of the open ocean And I do not believe that shadows will stay hidden Or that scars will remain unopened All must run wild just as the eight year old in a dandelion field lopes through the milky bleeding sea of flowers Grace Calk | 35 �36 | Ben Haas �Droplets When imagining the mind, I see thoughts that cascade like water does, one leading to the next, to the next, to the next, until they collide and form oceans from pools. And I suppose the mind functions rather like all that water does, with its expansiveness and storms and waves. Both have cycles. Saltwater droplets rise as one, then fall as one, then combine as one, crashing deep into unspoken depths of the seafloor as naught but the gentlest of energy. We recede into our minds with a similar tentativeness, unearthing old memories again. At the surface, we remember—and it feels like the cresting of waves. But I am getting ahead of myself. I am no oceanographer nor a psychologist; the motions of our earth and moon and seas are a mystery to me. But I have studied sediments and seen how they fall, read books on time and light and the dance of the heavens and the ground. Our minds are filled with energy, yes? Zaps! and collisions of information gathered from whatever we see or touch or hear. Those connections cross space and time like wormholes do, losing the "here and now" insisting on occupying some imagined "could they be––?" Energy is the force which makes shells and bones and rocks crumble into one: a sediment made of muck, that watery ooze which animals then eat, and die in, and live in, and mate in. Everything becomes something else, eventually, and everything becomes something new. Like the sea, this cycle lives within us. It is a life-bringing brew. And as we wonder about the universe, this too we seek to understand. Theo Martin | 37 �Being Beheld 38 | Mark Wittmer �Karlena Haase | 39 �Fool's Day The flowers are the heralds of Spring, Trumpeting daffodils and trilling tulips, Push forth from the dark dirt and call out in color to be ready— to prepare— The trees are waking from their long sentential. If you stand still on the stone, the wind will whisper weightless words For you— only you— and the birds— and the foxes— and the squirrels— and the beetles— to hear. The clouds rush back forth across the sky scrubbing the rusted iron blue of winter from the stars. The pale young sun casts commands upon each and every green blade, unsheathing arms freshly sharpened. Young blossoms look out shyly as buds line branches in neat rows, anticipating the charge. The rolling green hills of Summer will soon be conquered— Hark, for the kingdom of God is among us! 40 | Sera Johnson 40 | �Mackenzie Daffner | 41 �42 | Keaton Jahn �Sheba Delaney | 43 �TheUntitled Beginning Cars stand still on a bridge rushing by them. At 5:15 footsteps were silenced by the wind and, Disoriented by a cacophony of honks, The river down below moved in the opposite direction Away from the frost of the winter air vainly Inflicting itself upon the skin of the water, And holding frozen streams of thought, which The sun meekly acknowledged. But the frost slips away from its grasp As the river slips too... As Disquietude maps onto itself, The wind changed course midway And the sun disappeared behind the horizon. A story yanked the one thinking Back to a Night When rivers, feet, cars and wind Effaced the beginning into a series of accidents. 44 | Aisha Shahbaz The sun rose around a different hemisphere, Molding gold on concave waves On days that burn brightly when the solstice Swings by, and similarly, when the equinox Follows closely behind. And it always breaches through the mist that hides it. Lingering on long, The golden sands of this desert Escape the time that attempts to confine it– An eternal beauty which the Atlantic envies and admires In its attempts to meet it, While the sand seas undulate on the surface of the Namib. A story yanked the one thinking Back to a Day When sun, oceans, seasons and deserts Rescued the beginning from a series of accidents. ��Editors-in-Chief Enkh-Od Batzorig Sofe Cote Patrick Ensslin Adam Schulman Editors Dorothy Bowerfind Jean Hogan Dahye Kim Gabriela Sanchez Anna Seban Front Cover Green Multiverse Seascape by Adam Hurwitz Energeia is the literary and art publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis. St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 energeiasjc.com Submit to energeia@sjc.edu �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 57 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2019 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2019. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2019Spring Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d114eed6c536e818fdb3886050d7d1a5.pdf 5fee3b20c161dd835e46c59937143215 PDF Text Text �Amy Porter 1 Invitation, We Are Togehter 2 Home, The Hollow Dark 3 Eye Contact, 2am Bleakness 4 Me and the Bugs Anonymous 5 Untitled Louis Petrich 6 Yanked, Over Here, Over There Natalie Walker 7 Untitled Louis Petrich 8 To Those Commencing Young Ellie Laabs 8 a slight embrace of time Lysithia Page 9 Ode to the Stroll Elizabeth Dowdy Raphael Rose 11 Heron on the Dock Daryl Locke 12 Can you see me?/ Deep in the Red Sea 13 Self Portrait 2020, The Unnameable’s Sera Johnson 14 Bedford Samuel Berrettini 15 An End 16 Sofe Cote 17 Seal Attacked by Polar Bears restless Raphael Rose 18 Red Light Sunset Eric Baker 19 The Dry Cleaner 20 Han XVII: Back Home in Isolation �Zeinep Kyzy 20 Untitled Jay Tram 21 Undersell Clare Collins 21 Untitled Avery Laur 22 trapped John Verdi 23 The End Is Nigh �Editor’s note This fall we have endured the stagnant and fought against a common enemy. The enemy is not a body, but is microscopic — almost non-physical. It is an enemy we can unite against in isolation. We have stood in a tableau, we have seen each other framed in vignettes. Temporality has descended to the forefront of general consciousness. The collective sentiment reflects variations of confusion and despair. Finally, we can openly share our anxiety, our solitude. This sharing liberates and we present our tools of liberation. As we retreat, we lose touch; we could easily forget about the world beyond the confines of our four walls. We sometimes find comfort in our undisturbed solitude. Yet, we unite in a far more profound way as we share the experience of the present time in this undefined space. Energeia hopes to be that space as we push forward to new grounds. Our long-discussed experimental issue has come to realization under the theme “Isolation”. With this issue, we hope to give voice to our collective consciousness, and find comfort and connection in our shared loneliness. We would like to thank all our members of Energeia for their hard work and the undying creative spirit that holds us together. �Invitation Welcome, welcome to my mind. Don’t be afraid, come in! They only attack if I’m alone. Come in! Come in! I’ve put my monsters in cages, And labeled them nicely for you. We Are Together We are together in being alone. We are together in loving the lonely. (I hear the blunt taps of water on leaves. I feel, in the quiet, a peace which comes in An unobserved expansion of my old catacombs, For once unfolding, stretched wide without pain.) We are together when company’s not a cage, And the silent distance brings us closer To where presence is not perspective, And nearness not a threat. Amy Porter 1 �Home I have kept your hearthfire in a jar On my cold and barren mantelpiece. It has lit and warmed the room, while I struggle With damp matches and clumsy fingers. If I stop and wrap my hands around this kind, kind gift, I hear your voice, your home, and promise still to live. The Hollow Dark At midnight, here, I find myself To wander after long-lost stars; For any small guide lights my way ‘Tween twisting thoughts of time and me, Reflection of the hollow dark. 2 Amy Porter � Eye Contact, 2am Bleakness Elizabeth Dowdy 3 �Me and the Bugs I like to sit outside in the summer and pretend that I am sitting there with someone and as the sun sets and it gets darker I watch the sky change, listening to the bugs come out of hiding. I like to imagine the feeling of an arm on my back or lips on my lips. It’s hot outside already, but I welcome the extra heat. I like to think that I wouldn’t get so many mosquito bites, because someone would be there to share them with me. I like to realize how the darkness wouldn’t scare me as much if I wasn’t alone, how the bugs wouldn’t be my only company, how comfort in the dark would be good, how a companion in the light would be too. But here I am, another summer passing and nearing its end, sitting outside. I’m wearing a dress and my hair is wavy, everything is in place for my fantasy, except I am alone. 4 Elizabeth Dowdy �Anonymous 5 �Yanked, Over Here, Over There (After William James, George Cohan, and a Cypriot Crier) Feeling conscripted? Under authority? Whose--all together now--is this?-knock the childishness out of you give you standings to weigh proud of more than college privilege gone nostalgia trip this pan of nature mostly pawns off you-so wipe that whining, get to work show your grit, do your bit and tell your sweetheart not to pine keep stead your faces shined on screen for me to see youth all the time on tap— no blacking out for beers or naps— I know your tricks and counterfeits! Maggots! take one for the old home team-whoe’er they are that would count more-you’re the cream of isolation corps who save, of country, burning poor, last beds for those breath-ridden toward, you heard them say but one’s too dear, so brave full hospitality--to fear! Until it’s over here and over there don’t think of norming back ‘till all our care has overcome the rum-tum drummed beware! But yet the pity of it, how it goes! A piteous pearl unsaved—O sweet ago! See sky, how’t caves! See how we make behave! 6 Louis Petrich �Natalie Walker 7 �To Those Commencing Young When first rehearsed, this character of evil worked so strong the actors, our venturing story lurched and heeled like dog- then dervish, tranced and keeled by curving skirting caving fears— their center spread--sky disappeared . . . Here let us not mistake the signs, You handed me your plate to stir: taste-tested dust—e’en this it dures-all questions faced all readiness as house lights invite black. Bereft, but staged for life, you feed my want of sun to break the chains and burn. Warm freckles—come! Chaste moon--return! for time would modesty confine Like this, to tan well always went. good tangling threesome—worth a try. to tongues in proof, so earn kiss meant this to, and efforts honest kind-- All bulge from teeming information. It muscles darkness—fashions creeds to falter springs of laughter free. Disaster’s peelings, caffeine stares addict to disaffection’s bit love’s horsing jawbones, chafing lips of fasting shades that long to sip past fleshed out masking asking holes, untimely ripped for doctored roles, disbanded Adams, Eves dispatched-gone!— save for face that gyps and laps in vacuumed webs. We must rematch. Remember would that friendship can. 8 Louis Petrich Like this--up late to keep bent true for great--none better knows than you. � Ode to the Stroll When I am weary of the world, I walk about my town, And try to notice hidden things, The splendor all around. Here are buried memories, Beneath the bricks and stones, The stories that have given rise To lullabies and bones. Marvel at the dignity The redwood tree commands, A beacon from the world before, Enduring Fortune’s plans. Note weeds that punch the sidewalk cracks And force their spindles through With will to live and taste the air, Charisma fair and true. A man bemasked with downcast eyes Trails back behind his hound; I wonder who is walking whom, And where the pair is bound. Presently my thoughts contortThe future gapes its maw; Malevolence below our feet From sleep has come to thaw. Lysithia Page 9 �Alone together shall we trudge, All wandering fallow land; Though cataclysm comes to call, I cannot hold your hand. Ruin has a bitter taste, How shall we wash it down? What does it take to build an arc, Or will we simply drown? I take these thoughts and smother them, I scrape my mind of fear; In several months, the ball will drop, And end this lonesome year. To break the spell of loneliness, I stroll, behold, and muse; While breathing in the sweet salt air, I pay the Bay my dues. Old-sea swells tell a secret, With words that hush and lull, That all returns unto its depths In love unshakeable. All buildings were but dreams before, So was this well-worn street. Then someone blessed them into life, As when old friends first meet. 10 �A child picks a dandelion, Blows its tufts away. I wonder what the child wished, And hope her dreams will stay. Indeed I dream of dancing On nights that fizz with joy; Though isolation stings my soul, This song no fears destroy. When I can’t remember who I am, And living seems a chore, I gather all my spirits up And step outside the door. 11 11 �Can you see me?/ Deep in the Red Sea 12 Daryl Locke �Self Portrait 2020 The Unnameable’s Objection toward color is just one’s own insecurity. Insecurity because of color is just one’s own folly. Folly due to another’s exquisiteness is an unnameable objection. 13 �Bedford 14 Sera Johnson �An End Indigo sunset. Salt smell, dull wave hum in a night that hides the jungle and reveals stars. I am awake. I think about the sweetness of the fruit that used to fall from trees– dripping, bursting, overripe. Then. Now: brown mush underfoot. Worm food. I stand up. I look down the empty beach. Just past a breeze stands a stone wall that stretches into the jungle and dismantles itself in ivy and moss. Something cries far off beneath the shadow of the wet trees. I follow. The air is clinging close under the palms; the water wants to enter my nose and mouth and clog them. Clouds cover the sky. Mud covers the ground. I peel something off in hushed darkness, becoming more naked– sweet, fresh, fat. Once. Now: bony. Rancid with spit and sweat and ugly dreams. Somewhere shrouded, the moon sets. I breathe. I sit down. Rot loves me. Blind patches of ooze stretch out moldy fingers toward my lips and eyes. I close. Brown mush underfoot. Worm food. Samuel Berrettini 15 �Seal Attacked by Polar Bears 16 Samuel Berrettini �restless Sofe Cote 17 �Red Light Sunset 18 Raphael Rose � The Dry Cleaner My mother and I walk home. It is dark out. Wind is cool and soft. Lampposts dirty and yellow. The street is empty and clear, Except for outside The Korean dry cleaners. Mr. Yi is clutching his wrist. He does not wince. Red stain down tan trousers. Pool of blood At his feet. My mother asks If he is okay. He replies he was just Trying to bring down the gate. My mother asks if there is an ambulance coming. He nods. He says yes. He smiles. We walk on. I look back. He stands there alone. I am nervous. We shut the door to the building. Muffled sirens. Late evening Blood drip Clenched wrist Gentle breeze On the corner Bleeding calmly We greet the cleaner He nods Pants soaked red As blood pools Distant sirens A steady heart Eric Baker 19 �Han XVII: Back Home in Isolation Oma paces, Then turns on the stove to light her Dunhill. She’s been up all night smoking, too. 20 Zeinep Kyzy �Undersell Lazy sun UnderSelling new religion Of self love Sets upon me, my nose Fragility Is telling the truth Of the unheard, aspired Overseen: In fragile places lies floating and captivating Sterilized molecules of beauty and being In the haze of darkening I see my light from below In the haze gettin’ lost I see my heart beautified. Jay Tram Clare Collins 21 � i feel trapped. dispel the liquid on my tongue and let it leave the slight tingle on my lips, like frostbite on the lungs. a revolving door heart, never stopping, always letting in new and letting out old, wanting to know even a glimpse of their souls. i tear at the bags underneath my eyes, set upon my fragile frame from sleepless dreaming and nightmarish evenings; they’re all spent inside my mind. maybe if i stretch the bags down far enough i can wrap them around myself and cocoon for a thousand winter solcistices. i feel trapped. dispel my tongue on the liquid like frostbite on the lips, and let my lungs feel the slight tingle it leaves. 22 Avery Laur trapped �The End Is Nigh John Verdi 23 ��Co-Editors Assistant Editors Cover Illustrations Sophia Cote Adam Schulman Grace Calk Elias Christian Lysithia Page Zeinep Kyzy Special thanks to Enkh-Od Batzorig Energeia Energeia is the Literary and Art Publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis... ... St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 �Fall 2020 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Fall 2020 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Fall 2020. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2020Fall Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/679f4f72e39a4a21f9c3705e859c4d46.pdf a3478ab5083243c8c383652efcb44b1d PDF Text Text Energeia Spring 2018 �Letter from the editors �Sasha Grand 1 Name Stephanie Liu Mary Quinn Sofe Cote Jaeyon Jo Anonymous Ree Jones Annie Brong Rachel Goad Chance Hogan Anna Seban Sera Johnson update Logan Zimmerman 2 Untitled Ben Haas Cora Clark Isabella Williams 3 Confused-yet-Open Book 4 The Dunes 6 Stuart 7 Untitled 8 Untitled 9 Haunted 10 Plucked Petals 12 Untitled 13 lessons in hospitality 14 Blowjob Pantoum 15 No Name 16 Untitled 17 Franklin Seeks Understanding Re ader 18 To Be Determined 19 Untitled Anonymous 21 the moon is blinking Mary Turner 22 Tsornin Proposition Sophia Kiang 24 Untitled Sam Berrettini Amalie Christensen 25 13 failed drafts of an apology 26 Universal Margaret O’Hare 27 Flower Weiouqing Chen 28 Untitled Arthur Kohn 29 Elemental Genesis Kidus Kebede 30 01.01.18 2.45 Gabriela Sanchez 31 Between the Blue Yaxuan Tang Jonah Piscetelli 32 Untitled 33 For Fall �Name my name guides my body. my shins quiver at the cascade of syllables lovingly spoken. They tear up become slick, and attempt to hide from the welts of falsehoods cuffed around their trotting ankles. my name was spoken (as a lullaby) when my eyes first twitched. They whispered it and left an empty nest. The twigs were crooked, the leaves burdened with mud - river willow tried to fix the mess, but fell out of fashion. Silk was used instead, but nothing geometric could be achieved. Nests are messy in nature. I see a name whose skin has blushed waiting in the river too long it could not pan out an identity of gold nor silt. I see ankles chained to bloodhounds, dragging my name away from what I intended. They sniff out the thoughts of strangers instead of my own. Sasha Grand |1 �Untitled Confused-yet-Open Book Seeks Understanding Reader “I am not what the kids call Inscrutable If easily read people wear their hearts on their sleeves, mine is hovering ten feet from me, flashing neon red It’s not like I’m trying to hide it I just Can’t say it out loud What if it’s weird? What if it’s wrong? I’ve always had a hard time telling between romance and friendship Even intimacy doesn’t seem to shift I’ve slept with people I didn’t love and love people I haven’t slept with Not that romance has to be sexual, but that’s not really the point right now The point is that I like you but (nearly) every inch of me is (pretty) sure that everyone else but me can tell the difference Long story short, I value you as a person and as a friend But also you’re very cute Help” 2| Stephanie Liu Ben Haas |3 �The Dunes On any day like this the old curtain opens And out of my memory I come walking, As I did once, down The dune-lined deserted highways of Barnstable That all lead to the beach Or nowhere through iridescent swamps. I’d never felt so alone For the birds there knew how to bury themselves And wait out the hot sun till the evening, chilly with sea murmurs To shadow the stars with their wings. I could hear the gas pumps crooning from a station That stuck out of the sand like a silver photograph. I’d never known so well my shoes. There were paths that straight from the concrete Disappeared into the sand and purple shrubs. They made me tired with their ancientness, their slow life in grass roots and salt consumption, Ensnared with blueberries, coins of sunlight tumbling in And cool droplets of everlasting dew Of rain from weeks ago, unevaporated. I recall no sign of anyone, no footprints nor car. It was gray and worn and diminutive, banked Halfway into the slope by blown sand That reached the window box of shriveled roses. A single window with four panes and white cotton curtains. And its windowsill, reverent in its arm of sunlight, The way all windowsills are reverent. Holding a few solitary objects, silver bits, thimbles or coins, Leaves in half states of dryness. This ethereal vision Of what I felt was one person’s secretive importance, Here in huge expanse of lonely weariness, in the golden weather Became what I become when I’m in a room of vacancy. Void, emptiness, and I fill it with ruby ragged grass. I see my body like a mirage where the air wavered, Like the tracks dragonflies’ wings leave behind, too quick to see. On a shelf, something mysterious matters. Something elusive, Imaginative, becomes true. Collecting the gentle dust. This movelessness what my whole life is. I stood, a marble person when I saw the ocean, finally, like a wet tongue, and felt nothing. This was the kind of wildness Where I knew the lost things went, bottle caps and sunhats, kite string, swallow feathers. And somewhere there, where the road blurred in memory, Sat a cabin halfway up the incline to the sea, Throttled in sage and glossy leaves. 4| Cora Clark |5 �Stuart Untitled It is too early For your sleepy eyes to open. You are not mine Though I wanted you to be. Your little hands Are too small for the day ahead. You are not mine Yet, I cannot fathom being apart from you. We walk together To the end of the gravel drive. You are not mine But in moments like these you belong to nobody. I am too scared To let go of your little hand. You are not mine Nevertheless, I love you all the same. The great horned owl calls Reminding me it’s far too early, Your hands are far too little, And you are not mine. In his holler I find solace For your grace, Like the omniscient raptor’s, Cannot be claimed by simple souls like mine. 6| Mary Quinn Sofe Cote |7 �Untitled Haunted Lying still, I watch the clock dwindling down, Marking that time for rest that never comes; Coalescing αρχή and terminus into one. The moon’s soft light supplanted by the sun, And six o’clock startles me– I had dreamt of faraway rooms and lamps, Holding their memory: Itself bereft of me. That self I thought – no – imagined knew, Now becomes one form: You. Disrobing pride, Love seeks the other: Striving, searching, converging to one. For through love, does not the other’s Kiss explode one’s heart into A moment stretched past eternity? I am at Time’s slow mercy. Do I dwell in Limbo Or Paradise or Hell? I do not know. Or–do the different not differ, And difference entangles with same Now that sweet torment yokes me to life, Allowing no reprieve in a heart so aflame? As a god from Olympus looks down on Sisyphus, His fashioned pawn, You orchestrated me in your clever games. Yet, with my soul you did abscond, And left with all the Rights: wronged. 8| Jaeyon Jo Anonymous |9 �Plucked Petals i. you love her. her soft body, the way her skin smells like cocoa and mango, the way her hair curls along with the corners of her mouth, the way her lips melt upwards when she graces you with a smile. she demands eye contact and forces you to put your phone down. she bathes in your attentionstripping herself naked, before hiding behind your eyelids. she peeks out from behind velvet eyelashes, marvelling at the masterpiece she knows that she could be beautiful (if only she had another set of eyes.) ii. you love her not. she is meltdown after meltdown after meltdown, and you are forced to make space in your bed not just for her, but for every mistake she has safety pinned to her pajamas you wish she’d clean up her mess. (she wishes you’d clean up yours.) v. you love her. she is beautiful, she is sexy, and sometimes she walks like she believes it. she wears an all-black outfit like a second skin, and puts your hands on her body while stealing a kissshe’ll steal kisses often if she’s tall enough. (she’ll wear heels often so she’s tall enough) she manages those stilts like a harlequin drunk on confidence. iii. you love her. she is yours. your camera roll exists for her like a shrineeach smile she captured, saved, and sent to you, each time she loved herself enough to say, “for god’s sake. look at me.” iv. you love her not. 10 | vi. you love her not. she cannot hold her liquor. she cries sometimes, and you know all too well that once she begins to cry, she cannot bring herself to stop. she just cries and cries and cries and creates monsoons that threaten to wash everything away. You stand like a sand castle, You close your hermit eyes, and wait for the silence. vii. you love her. no one else knows how to quiet the noise in your head, or sing lullabies into the ether. she wraps herself around you from behind youyou didn’t like being the small spoon until you met her. she is warm, like sunbeams of salvation. you thaw under her touch. viii. you love her not. she never learned how to keep her hands to herself. she has a hard time grasping how much you have to hold, how your hands have calloused and frozen around her, how protecting her is a full-time job. You count the spots on her butterfly wings multiple times a day, you check her for signs of self-destruction, you are a gentle lepidopterist. Always on guard, second guessing the way you touch her, you caress her with bubble wrapped hands. you are always on-call on the other side of her glasses. all of you. x. you love her not. she sees the stars in your eyes, but she does not see how she drains you. x. you love her not. she is a supernova of sadness, but you can’t even wrap your mind around gravity. x. you love her not. but she loves you too much. ix. you love her. she sees you- Ree Jones | 11 �Untitled lessons in hospitality love does not abide decorum: should you welcome her, she will not reside in the guest room she will not look for subtones, she is not American courtesy she will not muffle her laughter, will not meeken her chews she will sprawl over the tidy couch of your reason, all spent limbs and tousled hair sweet relief, you think, in the stammer of the screen door her lithe contour being swallowed by the sunset your home is yours again, but sweet inconsideration sighed too soon— when she leaves, it is only a trip to the hardware store 12 | Annie Brong Rachel Goad | 13 �Blowjob Pantoum No Name You took me into your bed The silence remained undiminished I took you into my head Only one of us left when you finished The silence remained undiminished I went first and you came forth Only one of us left when you finished a joke about it pointing magnetic north I went first and you came forth I took you in and less in A joke about it pointing magnetic north For once I kept the mess in I took you in and less in Not that I needed someone to teach me For once I kept the mess in I elected, you impeached me Not that I needed someone to teach me You took me into your bed I elected, you impeached me I took you into my head 14 | Chance Hogan Anna Seban | 15 �Untitled Franklin Franklin dipped the pad of his forefinger into his reflection; smooth circles wrinkled the surface, pushing his nose into his eyebrows. The seamless rippling seemed to Franklin like the motion of the Pasco wave machine in his lab. When will those circles reach the end of their string, and rejoin the centre, he wondered. Eight moments of chilled silence answered his query: there is no return. Franklin considered all of the motions he’d caused that day. The bread in the toaster popped down, and then back up. The faucet on, and off. The plate was lathered in perfect circular patterns. The compost went into the garden, where it would one day grow ripe, red tomatoes blooming in cycles of rain and sunshine. On his morning walk to the lake, Franklin knew he, too, would have to return to the place from whence he’d departed (an idyllic yellow house with white trim-- this thought, with the others, also rolled around Franklin’s head). Surely, the rings in the water must also find balance? Or perhaps, he thought, they continue moving forever-- until the water dries up completely with the return of the sun. When his nose rested under his eyes once more, Franklin recalled his cottage, and its garden, again. And his walk to the front door, where he would open the screen to find more of the same. A wife with thin lips and hazelnut eyes, who, like Franklin, revolves around the yellow house. She’d be knitting, he knew, behind the screen (today, a small set of green socks). But what of a world where eyebrows are noses? Precisely on that note, Franklin made a distinctly linear decision, and walked into the lake. Sera Johnson | 16 17 | update �To Be Determined Untitled Why compare the mirrored unknown To the spoken civility, half-known pity, Of knowing oneselfTo insipid gray? You are violet, blood-red, quicksilverLicorice lips, dripping with ink Of thoughts yet unsaid You are breath before a cup Of unpoured coffeeThe breadth of undiscovered land Plaintive and presumptuous with Unfulfilled action, ripening fruition Unsatisfied, unceasing, Undeterred, unfetteredYou are midnight on an altar As the clocks scream goodnight, Goodnight, goodnight.... 18 | Isabella Williams Logan Zimmerman | 19 �the moon is blinking pure perfect i’ve never had pure perfect before. i clutch you and you moan three short syllables {into my ear} and her name is pure perfect {in my mind} i wish i could be everything or anything that you need but you sit beside me and she sits beside you and i am not worth the trouble and you see that in me and the moon blinks and you wink and i sink into the hole left behind by your pure perfect picking fingers. 20 | Anonymous | 21 �Tsornin Proposition If a hyperbola is constructed in a cone by a cutting plane which is parallel to the axis of the cone, and an axial triangle is cut parallel to the cutting plane of the hyperbola, then the axial triangle is equiangular to the triangle formed by the asyptotes of they hyperbola and the line drawn tangent to the section at the vertex. For let there be a cone with vertex A and axis AK, with the circle on BC as the base. Let it be cut by a plane through the axis creating an axial triangle ABC. Let the cone be cut by another plane parallel to the axis so that its intersection with the base is perpendicular to the diameter BC and it will make section DFE so that when the diameter of the section, FG, is extended it will meet the side of the axial triangle AC above the vertex at point H. This section, DFE, is a hyperbola (I.12). Draw a line through the vertex A, falling on the diameter BC which is parallel to the diameter FG. I say it will be the axis AK, for the cutting plane of section DFE is parallel to AK, so AK is parallel to FG. It goes through the vertex, and it falls on the center of the circle, so it will lie on the diameter BC. Let straight line FL be taken so that sq. KA : rec. BK,KC :: FH : FL, which is the contrivance from I.12. Let the cone be cut by a plane parallel to the plane of the hyperbola DFE through the axis, creating the axial triangle MAN. Draw a line tangent to the section DFE at the vertex F in the plane DFE. Cut off the tangent line on either side of the section PF and SF so that sq. PF = sq. SF = 1/4 rec. HF,FL. Take the midpoint Q of the transverse side FH and join QP and QS. They are the asymptotes of the hyperbola DFE (II.1). 4 sq. PF = rec. HF,FL (by construction) Draw the straight line R such that R = 2PF sq. R=4sq. PF sq. R = rec. HF,FL HF:R:: R:FL(EuclidVI.17) HF : FL duplicate HF : R (Euclid V.def 9) sq. KA : rec. BK,KC :: HF : FL BK = KC = MK = NK sq. KA:sq. MK:: HF:FL sq. KA : sq. MK duplicate KA : MK (Euclid VIII.11) and HF : FL duplicate HF : R and sq. KA : sq. MK :: HF : FL KA : MK :: HF : R HF = 2QF and R = 2PF HF:R:: QF:PF KA:MK:: QF:PF AK HG and DE MN ™MKA=™DGH (Euclid XI.10) DE PS and they are cut by HG ™DGH=™PFQ ™MKA=™PFQ andKA:MK:: QF:PF Q PFQ is equiangular to Q MKA (Euclid VI.6) and ™PQF=™MAK and ™AMK=™QPF Similarly Q SFQ is equiangular to Q NKA and ™SQF=™NAK and ™QSF=™ANK ™PQF=™MAK and ™SQF=™NAK ™PQS=™MAN (Euclid C.N. 2) Q PQS is equiangular to Q MAN I say that Q MAN is equiangular to Q PQS. 22 | Mary Turner | 23 �Untitled 13 failed drafts of an apology I didn’t know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t know, but I would have fixed it if I had. I didn’t know, and don’t we all make mistakes? I didn’t know, but you could have told me. I didn’t know, and I’ll be better now, I promise. I didn’t know, but now I do. I didn’t know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t know, but that’s no excuse. I didn’t know, and it’s still my fault. I didn’t know, but in the end, that doesn’t matter. And you know why. Maybe I didn’t know why the distance was growing. Maybe I didn’t know things were falling apart. Maybe I didn’t know I was the problem. But I should have. 24 | Sophia Kiang Sam Berrettini | 25 �Universal Flower Enumerating lights long elapsed, named it something of the past. Extant no more, the glamor’s gone, our endeavor to explain is lifelong. irreligious iridescenceconsternated constellationsmacrocosmic malevolence- Observing the enormous expansion, our inclusion is the mission. Disregard your omnipresencedesolate in the inhuman distance. 26 | Amalie Christensen Margaret O’Hare | 27 �Untitled Elemental Genesis As a mathematician, as a Geometer, I am a God. My word is the Word. My thoughts become Reality, And I see them as they are, as Good. I wonder what God’s Axioms were, When He made Man, when he made me. What things did He beg? And to Whom? Did He ask them of Himself ? As I do? Making them clear and distinct in His mind? He conceived of Darkness and Light, Then begged that they were Good and Evil Then defined his terms. I’ve always thought Good was something Outside God, As the sphere is something Outside Me. More perfect, Divine (er?) Can such a thing be conceived? What Proofs do you need? What Axioms? I have none. And I have no God But when I set my pen to paper, And enunciate The Truth Weiouqing Chen | 28 29 | Arthur Kohn I Am He. Elements My Genesis And My Adam and Eve More Perfect They Will never Fall, Fail. �01.01.18 2.45 Between the Blue Sprinted into the world at the speed of silence. And still they followed, the hollow figures that resided very firmly in the depths of my bedroom mirror. We lay together often. 30 | Kidus Kebede Gabriela Sanchez | 31 �Untitled For Fall I want to say which fall I mean. It’s not the maple-blushing fall, The season that flings out a wash Of bronzy on the atmosphere, A row of geese-and-hearts-soar days. It is not that, although I praise The late tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, Smeared apple pie for sunset, and A candy-apple of a sun. When I say fall is the best good In me, let others understand By which fall I have understood Myself by standing under sky, Either too cloudy or too clear: Frost fall, thanksgiving fall, a dry Wind-kicked November at the door, The fall that tells me, singing, sore, To jig, to leap, at last to crawl Across a white and yellow green. Fall-on-your-knees––Yes, that’s the one. 32 | Yaxuan Tang Jonah Piscetelli | 33 �Editors-in-Chief Editors Front Cover Dorothea Bowerfind Dahye Kim Arthur Kohn Anna Seban Adam Schulman Enkh-Od Batzorig Devin Van Gorden Mary Hommel Table of Contents & Inside Cover Energeia is the literary and art publication of St. John’s College, Annapolis. St. John’s College 60 College Ave. Annapolis, Maryland 21401 energeiasjc.com Submit to energeia@sjc.edu � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 21 Pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2018 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2018. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Arts--Periodicals Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia_2018Spring Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4d718669fc609bae5a980d719fff8189.pdf 1d59e200d284d88b68015cccc37bef99 PDF Text Text Energeia I St. John's College Writing and Art Publication 131 1 1 169611 il ~~l1il 1~il1~~i1i1i1172i 1 1 ~ 01170 1111 11 11111 Spring 2016 1 - I ,~ ,/ I / I I I I . , 1 : I /V I 1 1 I \ \ ' .·• . I DATE DUE �1 -· Spring 2016 Co-Editors Jakub Piven Abigail Purnell Assistant Editors Dahye Kim Dorothea Bowerfind Website* Design Dahye Kim Cover Illustrations Layout Design Calida Howell Jakub Piven *www.energeiasjc.com \ \ :· �Visual Art Photography, Painting, and Others Writing Essays, Translations, and Poetry Montgomery Alcott 1 New yr. in New York Eva Brann 3 Why Read? RM.Goad 11 Blooming Life Camille Gagnier 12 Holocausto (Translation) Felipe Rego 14 [A.n Engineer's Guilt} Julia Shiller 16 To Tania Emily Grazier 17 InLimine Arthur Kohn 31 Antigone (Translation) Victoria Lockamy 38 Smokey the Bear suffered from a lack offoresight Montgomery Alcott 40 ForOfra Abigail Purnell 42 It's Raining Cats and Dogmatism Stan Lavery 44 A Decrepit Tutor Judy Seeger 47 Notes from the Other Side Louis Petrich, Tutor 53 At Home in the World: A Toast to the Graduates Stefan Vasic 2 Building On Indian Spring Road Sophie Colt 9 Gothics Stuart Lombard 10 Untitled Stefan Vasic 13 Barn On Backroad Sarah Benson 18 Middlemarch Paper Theater Scott Chevallier 37 Untitled Xiuyuan Zhang 39 Texture-03 Calida Howell 41 What's in my purse? Charlie Denton 45 Untitled Works R.M. Goad 52 Louis Petrich, Tutor 55 Window Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles �r ! 1 Newy1·.inNewYork by Montgomery Alcott After the numbers, Patrick hiccuped again. His pink tiara fell in the attack And I saw twenty-sixteen on the tavern floor. 1 �Building On Indian Spring Road I Stefan Vasic Why Read? Delivered by Erua Brann, March 2016, to the Great Books Honors Course ofthe Torrey Institute, Bio/a University, La Mirada, California. Y ou've all probably heard the expression "preaching to the choir," which means trying to persuade the faithful of what they already believe. The opposite of preaching to the faithful choir is propagandizing the disengaged crowd. This latter preaching needs to be a little lurid, just to raise attention, and somewhat gross, so as to trump the competition. I know that I'm addressing an audience of the already convinced who are not in need of a pep talk but could perhaps do with a visitor's more subdued reflection on their commitment. I understand that commitment to have two aspects: You are willing to read books from a large yet selective list and you submit to a way of teaching which Professor Wright described to me as "the Socratic method." Now it seems true to me that there is some method in Socrates' divine madness, but though he has his very own way, it is not a method strictly speaking, that is to say a codified procedure applicable universally, willy-nilly. You will recall that in his Apology, that is, the "Defense" of his way of life, Socrates famously says: "The unexamined life is not worth living." I get a wicked pleasure from pointing out on every suitable occasion that he says something much more rousing. He actually says: "The unexamined life is not livable." In other words, you haven't lived if you haven't reflected on your living. You've been carried along on the stream of your life until one day you went under - and that was that. To make your merely lived life come alive you have to recall and review it. To rephrase Socrates: The once-lived life has hardly happened. Live twice! Let me take account here of your age as undergraduates. Most of you will be in your late teens or early twenties. So if all goes well, less than a quarter of your life has gone by. Is Socrates asking you to wax prematurely autobiographical? No, the reflection in which he has faith is not age-related. According to students of child development, you discerned objects before you'd been in this world more than three weeks, so you've had zillions of things to think about. When you were two years old you began - the terrible two's - to be intensely aware of yourself as a willful 2 \ \ being, a self-assertive little imp. Recall that Socrates is a great believer in Apollo's saying, posted in his temple: "Know thyself." By "thyself" Socrates does not mean your unique, private, personal, idiosyncratic self, of which he wants us to take notice mostly so as to manage its waywardness. He means: Discover and know your human nature. One superlatively mystifying feature of that nature is our ability - we do not know whether any other animal possesses it - to talk to ourselves. This ability for self-communion is evident even earlier than is the feature of self-assertion. Those of you who have baby-sat pre-linguistic infants might have experienced what the experts call jargoning - an infinitely charming jabbering, a kind of sweet proto-language that goes on in the crib especially early in the morning when no one's up, self to sel£ To me it seems like the beginning of selfknowledge and an indication that not much life experience is required to engage in it. We are, specifically homo sapiens, "the discerning human" from birth, and we can, nearly from birth, reflect on objects in the world outside and on ourselves within. The word "reflect" means "bend back," return to, double down on what comes into, appears before, our human awareness, our consciousness. While I'm at it: The very word "consciousness" means "knowing jointly [with oneself]." I'll just stop to point out that some of what I've said so far I thought out on my own, but I got its shaping and phrasing from reading books. The "but" is important here. Thinking is not in a straight and easy relation to reading. Reading presents thoughts as gifts; thinking produces thoughts as accomplishments. That is a tension I shall keep in mind as I now go on to tell you why you should be doing what you are in fact doing: read books. One way to put the quandary is: How can I summon Socrates' invitation to reflect in support of reading books, when studying books is not necessarily thinking things out? Of course, he himself read a lot: Homer, whom he knew by heart, the tragedians, the writers of speeches, and most wonderfully, the philosophers who preceded him and who would one day be called "the pre-Socratics." 3 �Eva Brann Why Read? So now to reasons for reading. But one more thing: There's reading and then there's reading. There's the kind called texting, done on a minuscule tablet with a limit to the cyphers used, which has in effect given up the ghost of significance. Then there's the kind of easy feed, the bestseller, which we scarf up in a state of pleasant relaxation. Then there's the instruction booklet, infinitely annoying, because widget A never does fit into aperture B. I won't attempt to list all the types of reading we do, but instead I'll leap to the list of books to which your program of learning is in fact devoted. These books all share one characteristic: They are demanding. They're not taken up lightly, nor do they go down easily, nor are they irritatingly inscrutable. They are, instead, difficult. Some, like Hume's great Treatise, are lucid on the surface and more and more complex as you penetrate it; others, like Kant's Critiques, are obscure when you first open them but become quite intelligible as you go. All require your undivided attention and repay it with insights that are at once new to you and also welcome to your intellect. They deliver adventitious, that is, novel, matter which nevertheless immediately sits well in your intellect - or rouses energizing opposition. The fictions among these works also require alert being-there. You can't scan or abstract a great novel: The plot is an extrusion of the characters' being, not their prop, as in a routine romance. These works have depth, which means that they open up successively, are in effect inexhaustible, so that a reading program like yours is an assignment for life, for re-reading. By the way, "depth" in books is, of course, a metaphor, and one element in reading "deep" books ought to be to think out the literal meaning of the figure of speech: What exactly does it mean to get deep into a deep book? That's not for tonight. Such books have a collective name, one I've already introduced: They're great, "great books." (I hasten to say that while all great books are ipso facto demanding, because they're rich, the converse is false. There are plenty of very difficult works, usually perpetrated at universities, that are pretty meager. The usual reason is that while plain language expresses the author's thought, difficult jargon displaces it. 4 By and large, undergraduates should not be reading such derivative works.) I really believe that greatness designates a class of books, a class by itself, the so-called classics. The notion of incomparable excellence is now, in the face of a certain dogmatic egalitarianism, somewhat in disrepute. It's another interesting issue I'll set aside tonight.- We'll see who comes out ahead in the long run. Now I'll get down to my job and give you my answer to the question of my title: "Why read?" Of course, I mean: Why read books and, moreover, why read great books? As for the "book'' part, I don't care what so-called delivery system you use. If you like, bring your text on stone tablets, like those Moses inscribed on Mount Sinai, or on an electronic tablet, as long as you can readily flip to the page we're all on. As for the "great" part, come with some faith in the faculty's ·reading list. And that brings me to a first reason. One. Great books held in common and conversation about them is the cause of the warmest, most long-lasting, least problem-fraught friendships life has. The friends you room with, work with, play with come and go as the occasion arises and falls apart; reading friendships survive the decades. I'm speaking from experience here. There used to be a name for this club: the Republic of Letters, whose citizens are cosmopolitan in reach of interest and global in human sympathy. A faculty that has the preparation and the courage to choose and require a reading list like yours is a small sub-community of this commonwealth. Belonging requires preparation, because to compose such a list you have to read extensively and critically, and it requires courage because you have to be willing to judge decisively and articulately. The same demands go for you students in reverse order: You have to have the guts to commit yourself to real, substantial study, and then you have to prepare your assignments with concentration. It's way different from the flabbily social relations of casual friends focused on fun, or that pretended cosmopolitanism of, say, eating falafel or wearing a sari - all good fun, but not quite for real. To see and hear another human being expres- hard times shut down most alternative programs, some such courses existed. Let me tell you: It wasn't as joyful as it sounds. Why not? Because the sightseers' life isn't all that real, and self-concentrated talk misses the real self. What then is the substance and depth I am attributing to great books, and why are they a gift to us? Substance is persistent thereness; these books are not in the canine and apish Now that Browning's Grammarian scorns. Adolescent preferences fade away; these books gain glow as you age. I'm again speaking from experience here- my own and my friends! Substantial is what great books are in themselves - depth is what they offer us. This is a very personal way of talking, so I'll explain it. I think that we have laminated, that is to say layered, souls. If you like, our souls are stratified, as were the deposTwo. Here's my second reason for reading great books. its we found and numbered when I was an archaeologist Such books have substance and, as I said, depth. You might in Athens, some sixty years ago. So also is the world stratisay: That's underwhelming in its hazy generality. There's fied. It has a surface layer: the phenomena, the way things life itself, which is realer, more here and now, more inex- in general look on their outside, their surface appearance. Both our souls and our world challenge us to dig into them, haustible than a page with little squiggles on it. A favorite line of mine is from Robert Browning's ''A to penetrate the surface. The same things, for example, have very variable looks, depending on the light that shines on Grammarian's Funeral": them and the perspective we have on them. For instance, Other's mistrust and say, "But time escapes: Live on the surface we are our idiosyncratic sel·ves, below that now or never!" we carry each our shaping ethnic background, yet deeper He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and we have our common humanity. So with the world. On the apes! Man has Forever." The scholar's advisors have a point. Since the purpose surface each body varies from all others in infinite detail; of reading is to appropriate life, why not just live it, now? beneath that, all are tangibly shaped material, still deeper After all, Socrates said that to gain our life we must think all lose their shaped materiality and become the numerable about it. He didn't say "study books" (although, as I've said, mass-points called "m" in physics. Here is what books do: They delineate these levels for he had actually read everything available. And though he himself dictated no scroll to any slave as far as we know, us and take us into them. They help us penetrate into ourwhen he was in his sixties, Plato came into his life, and then selves and into the world. I think this penetration is what Socrates means by the examination, which, if we leave he must have known that his ways and thoughts would be undone, we aren't all there; we don't exist on all the levels written up.) beneath the surface. Of course, the writers of great books Well then, why read books rather than live reality? Or know that "depth" is a spatial metaphor, a visualizing figure if you feel you need formal preparation, why not find, more of speech. So as we work our way into the depths we must likely in California than, say, in Maryland, a School of Life? also ask: What is the literal, the concrete, meaning of shalIts curriculum might be "World 1.00: You travel all over" low or deep living - but not tonight. and "Myself 2.00: You talk about yourself" In fact before sive in the light of greatness is a pleasure of a higher order. So the first reward is simply invaluable: there is no price you can put on it. It's that communion of friends, that commonwealth of readers, I've just described. I should soberly qualify the extent of such friendships here. You've read Aristotle on friendship and might recall that he inquires into the number of friends it is possible to have: at the most as many as live nearby. He would have been simply disgusted at the inhuman greed for quantity that is now called "friending." It follows that the global friendship of readers is potential. You will gain a world of people who could well, who might be, your friends, real friends, soulmates. Some, a few of these, will be actual, face-to-face or voice-to-voice friends. 5 �Why Read? Eva Brann Three. Great books help us do what we can't do for ourselves; they are our supporters in a life-enhancing activity. But once again: Why turn to books rather than directly to life itself? In the end we have to do it all by ourselves, for ourselves. Why not face ourselves and our world in that direct way? Here's the answer, straight and harsh: We're not up to it. Most of us, you and I and your professors, faced with all that is within and without us, simply shut down or take to babbling. So we need the boot-strappers, the socalled original thinkers who, though they too have teachers, are able to go beyond them on their own. You will have seen, you must have felt, the danger. We need teachers. Then how do we avoid becoming mere disciples? How do readers of great books escape becoming their captives, escape from their constricting embrace? It's alright for a while, especially in youth, to indenture yourself to a master. A year of devotion, of surrender to Socrates, or Nietzsche or Hegel, is the mark of an ardent soul. It's the beginning of expertise, but it's also the end of the examined life. (Oddly enough it's the writers who seem least to want such followers who most attract them.) But here's the saving grace. Your own great books list contains little short of ten dozen authors. Just because they're great, these books differ from each other in nontrivial ways. Even if one author captivates you, there are about one hundred and nineteen others to liberate you. Non-judgmentalism is nice in social situations, but in matters of intellect, judgments are what we have to make. The reading of quite a few great books will return you to the edgy vitality that is part of being all there. I'll put it this way: such various reading will make you critical, not in the sense of carping denial but in the spirit of affirming interest. And when you finally actively and steadfastly embrace a belief - embrace it rather than being captured by it - you, the student, may, as I see it, lay claim to it as your own. For if Plato, for example, hatched an idea when he was, say thirty-eight, and you receivea, understood, and adopted it at eighteen, then you are i s legitimate claimant, having come to it first in your own biographical time. 6 \ \ Four. Great books are affirmative. There seem to me to be two camps with respect to liberal higher education. I'll call one, for short, the problem-solving party and the other the life-shaping camp. The first, the problematic party, wants education to be, as they say, "relevant,'' to concern itself with the understanding and cure of current ills. I'm not on that side, because I think that finding those solutions to present evils that don't mire us in unintended consequences requires much common sense and practical experience, such as even the most promising eighteenyear-olds shouldn't and can't have - that's not what it is to be promisingly young. The camp in which I live thinks that the central purpose of a liberal education is to give students a chance at working out a picture of happiness. Administrators, some of whom believe that schools should be held statistically accountable for outcomes, want alumni to fill out questionnaires asking them, for example, to rate their post-BA happiness. What, I ask myself, if a lot of the graduates of my college thought that they'd never again been as happy, as alive, as they were reading books with us? Would that count for or against us? I think it would prove that we'd given them a chance at a truly useful education. For to live well with yourself and act effectively in the world, one knowledge matters above all others, the knowledge of what constitutes, what makes for happiness, happiness as distinct from pleasure, fun, or excitement. If your learning life at the university was a dreary routine of socializing fun and reluctant hitting the books or scanning the screen, you'll not be much good to the world, since you won't know what "good" is - know it not as a formula but as an experience. What is the relation of great works to the experience of happiness? It is a very close one. Think of Augustine's Confessions, which is on your list. The author experiences and meticulously describes his sins and agonies - but the reading of it is grippingly exhilarating. Think of Shakespeare's Macbeth, whose hero descends into all the horrors and miseries of a tyrannical soul - but the watching of it is grandly awesome. Great books can depict a world that is hostile, souls that are stricken, fates that are terrible. But they are not just depressing, repulsive or frightening. They are, by their very greatness, affirmative. It's a characteristic I'm sure of but endlessly puzzled by. Let me give a particularly poignant example from a great work, a book of the audible sort: Bach's St. Matthew Passion. It sings and tells of a horrible death by torture, the Crucifixion - but it is altogether beautiful. How can that be? How is it done? Another enigma not for tonight. Five. So I'll just move on to my next to last reason for reading: the toning of the soul, which follows from the affirmative nature of greatness. If you get to be ninety, as many of you may, you will have lived through roughly fiftyfive million heart beats. Life is wearying and the flesh is weak; the spirit cannot possibly maintain a pulsing excitement for every moment of our lifetimes. We are often low and deflated - at least those of us lucky enough not to live in constant fear, want, or pain. The blues or blahs are the null mode of civilized humanity; whoever called it "quiet desperation" was being too dramatic. Books of depth and substance can help here, better than light reading, say a Harlequin Romance, that acts more like those ChineseAmerican meals, which fill you but don't satisfy you. In making demands on us and then really repaying our efforts, great books tone our souls. They impart to them a vitalizing tension. People who have the mandate and the leisure to think, to study, to foster the spirit, are especially prone to what medieval monks called acedia, a kind of spiritual moping, a revulsion from accepting the very blessings for which they really long. All students who don't study like automata know it. Its mild form is the inability to pull yourself together, to get down to it; its more serious form is being stalled, distracted, sleepy, mildly - not clinically - depressed. If you can only collect yourself enough to "pick up [the book] and read" (I'm quoting from a crucial event in Augustine's Confessions) a great book will pull you out of this languor. For such reading requires a dual mind, a kind of sound schizophrenia. You have to entertain within yourself both a critical and a reverent spirit. What I mean is that your critique is not rejection but engagement, that your doubts are honor done a text by close attention. And your reverence, far from being passive submission, is an active faith in the author's greatness. I'll give an example. While I'm writing this talk, my seniors and I are reading Karl Marx's Capital. In my personal opinion, this book has, more than any other, wreaked havoc in the world, largely because of an ingeniously false theory that demonizes working for a wage. Yet all - well most - of our intellects are on full alert, engaged by Marx's vivid and lucid prose and his acute, complex and original theorizing. So you may smile at my notion that reading Marx is therapy for feeling low, but I'm serious about this: If only you can bring yourself to sit down to it, reading great books arouses your vital spirits. Six. So now to my last point, which also concerns reading as a therapy, a therapy highly specific to an element of our current condition. That condition is most evident in cyberspace, where many of you probably live a large part of your life. There you find verbal texts, to be sure, but also a veritable flood of imagery, pictures made by others for their own purposes and poured out before or over you. This mud slide threatens to swamp and suffocate what seems to me our second most wonderful and very mysterious ability. (The most wonderful of all is, of course, our ability to think and to say what we think.) This mysterious ability - brain science has come nowhere near explaining it - is our power to form mental images, to see internally, to re-view within, what we remember having seen, or even to produce pictures of what we've never seen. It is this capacity, absolutely necessary to a livable inner life, that is threatened by the electronic image tsunami. Now think of books. Children's books have lots of pictures and few words. G reat novels have hundreds of pages of bare words - sometimes over seven hundred. But if some bold spirit has contributed a few figure plates, I, for one, 7 �Why Read? Gothics I Sophie Colt usually say to myself: "That's not how she" - say Natasha Rostov in war and Peace - "looks at all; I've seen her." Now imagine that some idiot undertook to illustrate what Hegel calls the "gallery of figures," in which the world-spirit appears in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. That would take the cake in ludicrousness. And yet I've walked down that gallery, too - illustrated, so to speak, my own apprehension of Hegel's intellect. Seen Natasha, viewed the incarnate world-spirit! Where? In my imagination, of course, in my mind's eye. Verbal texts incite, demand internal visualization. Logical and mathematical texts often require inscribing diagrams in your internal visual medium. Poetry (epic and lyric) or fictions (short stories and novels) can be thought of as potential pictures - instructions for forming mental images. Often you don't know what's going on until you actualize those directions. I can give examples in the question period. This is a good place to end, though of course there are more good reasons for reading. It's, in fact, the best place to stop, because if texts of words are indeed exercises in visu alization, in actively generating our own images from wellwrought words, if they are in fact exercises that prevent us from passively succumbing to other people's pictures and their self-serving agendas, then we might conclusively say of reading the best of books: They cooperate in saving our souls. 8 9 �Untitled I Stuart Lombard Blooming Life byR.M. Goad as your thumb primes my lips they make a fuss for truththe rest of you, reduced: fingertips and torso while too much of me tingles, you knead the sorest knot my heart, how you have wrought me: to tantrum only tempered going throughmy heart, this distance I can't weather: I must be among youas we together envy blooming life. 10 11 \ \ �Holocausto by Yolanda Bedregal (translation right) Holocaust translated by Camille Gagnier Oh Cristo, yo quisiera de tu augusta cabeza desclavar los espinos; endulzar tu martirio; darte mi adolescencia como incienso en delirio; alabandote en salmos, restafiar tu tristeza. Te volcaria en mi alma con la dulce certeza de corporal expolio a cabezal de lirio. Me inmolaria entera como ala sobre cirio votivo que, al quemarse, con su llama te besa. El humo, en holocausto, de mi cuerpo ofrendado empapara en perfume la esponja de la hiel y, hundida entre la llaga, mi vida en tu costado, -la culpa redimida y el mundo sin pecadoa la Ultima palabra de Dias crucificado, ungiria con rosa de amor tu humana piel. Oh Christ, I would like from your augustan head to disengage the thorns; to make sweet your martyrdom; to give you my youth like delirious incense; and praising you in psalms, to staunch your sadness. I would spill you out in my soul with the sweet assurance Of body pillaged at lily's bloom. I would sacrifice myself like a wing on a pascal candle that, as it burns, with its call kisses you. The fumes, in holocaust, from my offered body would soak the bitter sponge in perfume and, buried in the wound, my life on your side, -the guilt redeemed and the world without sinat the final word of Crucified God, would anoint with loving rose your human flesh. 12 Barn On Backroad I Stefan Vasic 13 \ \ �[An Engineer's Guilt] by Felipe Rego Felipe Rego (Something spoken, I think) When I was little I did a science project on supernovas I ask you to consider the notion of collision. A topic I requested. I wonder if that's our fault. Of collapse. I thought they were spectacular- but learning about them made me sad. Because I guess the universe thinks it's all simple, right? Of sacrifice. Of death. I will passionately support the pursuit of knowledge any time any day any place- as if my life depends on it And I suppose it does. But alchemy isn't all crazy The universe seems to ask for exchange Knowledge is rarely bestowed divinely upon us mere mortals. Education, like life, is suffering. Suffering into truth, I'm assured. Few things can be learned without sacrifice of some sort. Perhaps no things. Consider the lobotomyShock therapyThe point at which your femurs can no longer support weightWe only know of certain human limits because the Nazis were the most relentless philosophers. Nothing was more valuable than knowing, No sacrifice was too great Yet their greatest military failures could've been avoided by looking just over their shoulders. I don't believe in torture but I definitely believe we should've gone to the moon. 14 Doing science is like trying to make the perfect omeletteimagine what you're gonna have to do to those eggs. read between the lines. "I wish I could, but java isn't so simple" "It's all waves, homie. No other presentation in the class featured the word "death". In the past two years I've compared the theory of gravita- So much energy- so much life and time and history packed into these beautiful glowing balls of science- Boy, don't I feel stupid. tion to Lavoisier's caloric theory in three different papers. Ceasing to be. Just knock stuff together and listen real hard." Isn't it funnyIsn't it crazyIsn't it a little fucked how all these vibrations can just be made into music? Like an animation to a delete function. And math? And we have pictures. The death of a star is truly tragic. Isn't it messed up that everything is eventually just waves? And circles if you feel like it? Hawking says black holes "remember" what they absorb. Beautiful- absolutely, yes- but these things are not mutually exclusive. Isn't it wild that, for example, any wave can be made into music? Think of all the times we say things "aren't so simple" Consider: There is, conceptually, a song of the universe. I wonder how much of our sun would be remembered. I wonder if they remember what it feels like to collide. I say it every day to people asking about Wi-Fi- A collection of waves that make up our everything. I wonder what memory brought us this beautiful sound of the silent vacuum. Or data transfer- I wonder if it hurts. Or how to turn one file type into another. And you can put them together in order and listen to it, if you can make the time. I wonder if we deserve to hear it. I wonder if maybe trees just want to fall alone and unheard. We talk about things like they're completely different kinds of files and we're tryna figure out how they run on the same OS, I am made to wonder if modern medicine was worth it. But it looks like they're more like zip files. "I'm sorry for your loss, but if it means anything his heart was really weird so I'll get to publish a paper about it" We can move them around freely and put them side by side and into each other and unpack and repack and everything will stay exactly as it was, just differently. "It seems she died in pain, but now we have a video of a brain suffering to death. In color." I wonder how many doctors cry while they change the world. Science is beautiful. Science is sad. I guess it's easier to love learning if you pretend you can't I wonder what kind of song it would be. I'm sure it'd be fire. Maybe just in a different place. A different context. Things aren't so simple. Language isn't so simple. Temperature isn't so simple. 15 �To Tania by Julia Shiller InLimine by Eugenio Montale (translation right) She was pretty and young, She was fast on her tongue; He wasn't. She noticed him first, When she came unrehearsed; He was late to her concert. But his hands - in the air Conducting from his wheelchair. Music went to the end, He could not understand. Whose are those two hands? Exhausted, He won a few minutes of life He didn't just lose it. She could be his muse, But nothing amused him; Only cello and music. She touched a magic of strings, Cello's awaking spring , Preached to find his way To Titan Mnemosyne. Second chair from the right, He conducted with pride Recollecting his past While music was last. She dreamed to perform, But she had simply learned That he found her destiny. Teaching ... Her music is reaching to the mind that stole its own past, She is back to his lesson, Her music will last. lnLimine translated by Emily Grazier Godi se il vento ch' entra nel pomario vi rimena l'ondata della vita: qui dove affonda un morto viluppo di memorie, orto non era, ma reliquario. Delight, if the wind that enters into the orchard there stirs up the surge of life: here where sinks a dead tangle of memories, was not a garden, but a reliquary. Il frullo che tu senti non e un volo, ma il commuoversi dell'eterno grembo; vedi che si trasforma questo lembo di terra solitario in un crogiuolo. The flutter that you sense is not a flight but the exciting of the eternal womb; see how it is transformed - this strip of earth, isolated, in a crucible. Un rovello e di qua dall'erto muro. Se procedi t' imbatti tu forse nel fantasma che ti salva: si compongono qui le storie, gli atti scancellati pel giuoco del futuro. Cerca una maglia rotta nella rete che ci stringe, tu balza fuori, fuggi! Va, per te l'ho pregato, - ora la sete mi sara lieve, meno acre la ruggine... A vexation is here from the precipitous wall. If you proceed you bump into, perhaps, the spectre that saves you: composed here are the histories, the deeds blotted out for the game of the future. Search for a mesh broken in the net that clasps us, leap out, flee! Go, for you I have begged for it, - now my thirst will be light, less acrid the rust .... May be teaching Could help him with reaching His past; Her cello was preaching, Her music was reaching His heart. His eyes were bright, He was winning his fight. (She returned him to life) He remembered his wife, Who pronounced one word That cuts like a sword: Alzheimer. 16 He might not comprehend, He might not understand Her teaching, 17 \I �Sarah Benson youv cc.1t ovi t /...: s o vV!ti ./11A. o/. ~Wl c),__ PAFfR 1· -1fATEr< 1 s ;i tl-a ~7 ~ F 11 s (> ' reef - -- anj1e foJ a vitw ;"'/o y•uir ~r~ -+neV\ J~ rhtsf"e .,,.,,t /.o 1""-'t) "1 fro,,, f. . ! I r . J. (~ l ~ 18 19 �Sarah Benson Cut out other side. 20 21 \ \ . J I �Sarah Benson Cut out other side. 22 23 �' ' I Cut out other side. Sarah Benson I , , ... - REENAGT Dorothea's unhappy honeymoon, now with two missing scenes: f ~I :_ , 6 "" \ ~: l Our heroine the Thernsa-type never visited Bernini's ECSTASY OJ!' SAllW THERESA. Why not? Gi!~anelli I. I t- ..c.. I~ I~ ... 1 ..t I~ -l \ Daisy Miller ancl Mr. took a waJk in.the moonlit COLOSSEUM. So clid Grace Ansley ancl Delphin Slade. I What happened to Dorothea and Will there? ~ I ' I '. I ' I I \ ~ -0 I }-.. ~ ;- \ \I) I'\ ( t- "!-( I \j. (j\] '-U r, I .....,j ~ ~ I I 24 t< - ~ \ ~ 1k l.+ \ '-i ::> I -;_, \ 25 �Sarah Benson Cut out other side. ~ > () ;J\ MIDDLEMARCD t7 + \ () · I:._ + .!>a P APIERTHEATER ~~~ . ,~ ~ _..., 0) assemble a:nd be amazed ~ ,;.\~ .. ' \I\ ~ "'\ "' 26 27 \ " �Sarah Benson Cut out other side. I ~ ' I \J \ ~ f ..!. 1 ~ -S> I 1----.....,. - -·- - - I s-\ ~ - - - -- - - - -+ '------1 I I \ I ' l ' I I ' ' I ' I J I I 'I~ '' '~,~ ~ 'I I~~ I I I I l I t ... - '' I , ' '' . ____ ,__ - . - I ..,_ I ...,, - - - - ._ - - ... - - - - - - ., I t . \:r ' I ~ ~ :::. \~ a-, ~ .. d) I ' 28 29 \\ �Antigone by Sophocles - translated in verse by Arthur Kohn Cut out other side. ANTIGONE 0 head, Ismene, of our common womb, Know you some curse of our Oedipus Zeus Does not yet bring to end o'er us still living? For there is nothing not yet full of pain, Nor without ruin, nor dishonored, nor shamed. I have not seen an evil that does not Belong to us two, you and I. Now What do they say in the city public About the law the General has set down? Hark, do you know or care? Or does it 'scape you When hateful evils march 'gainst those you love? ISMENE To me no word nor rumor, cruel nor kind Regarding friends, Antigone, has come. Since Our dual and dueling brothers died In just one day by doubled hands in death. And since the Argive army fell away This night just past, I've seen nothing beyond, No more of my prosperity or ruin. ANTIGONE I've seen it well, and on account of this I've sent for you outside the outmost gate, So you alone might hear this 5 10 wKo1vov al.rrU8£A.cpov'foµ~vric; Kapa, ap, o1a0, 0 Tl Zeuc; TWV cm, Oioinou KaKWV 6rro1ov ouxl v(j>v en ~WO'ULV Tt:Aci; oMev yap OUT' aA.ymov OUT' UTT]c; a-rep Soih, alaxpov OUT, anµ6v foe,' 6rro1ov OU TWV O'WV Te Kaµwv OUK orrwrr' eyw KaKWV. Kal vuv Ti TOUT' au cpaO'l rravo~µ<.p rr6A.e1 K~puyµa Beivm TOV O'TPUTTJYOV apTiwc;; exw; Tl KELO'~Kouaac;; ~ ae A.av8avet rrpoc; wuc; cplA.ouc; O'Teixovrn TWV exepwv KaKa; 15 eµol µev oMelc; µu0oc;, A.vny6vri cpiA.wv oU0 ' ~Mc; ou-r' cl.Aymoc; LKeT' e~ OTOU ouoiv 6.0eA.cpoiv eaTep~0riµev ofo, µ1g 8aVOVTOlV ~µep\t 0L7tAft xepi: EITEL OE cppouOOc; EaTlV Apyelwv O'Tpa-roc; ev VUKTL Tft vuv, ouoev olO, urrepTepov, ouT ' eurnxouaa µO.Hov ouT' aTwµevri. 20 fl6ri KaA.wc;, Kai a' EKToc; auA.elwv TTUAWV TOUO , ouveK , e~erreµrrov, we; µ6v11 KAUOlc;. ISMENE Ti 0' fon; OT)AOic; yap Tl KUAXUiVOUO' ' erroc;. What is it? Clearly you ponder some dark, purple word. ANTIGONE Has not for death rights of our brothers both Creon dishonored one and praised the other? Eteocles they say with Justice and The righteous use of custom has been hidden Beneath the Earth with honor and the dead, While Polyneices' corpse which died in mis'ry They say has been proclaimed to citizens To stay uncovered, out of death rights, I· 30 25 30 ou yap Tacpou v(j>v Tw KaO'lyv~Tw Kpewv TOV µev rrpo-riaac;, TOV 6 , aT1µaaac; exeL; 'ETeoKAEa µev, we; HyouO'L, O'UV OiKT]c; XP~O'El OtKai\t Kal v6µou KaTa xeovoc; EKPU\l'E wic; £vep8ev evnµov veKpoic;: TOV 0' a8A.iwc; 0av6v-ra IIoA.uveiKouc; VEKUV aawiai <paO"LV EKKEKT)puxem TO µ~ -racp<.p KaA.inJ!m µ11oe KwKuaai nva, 31 �Antigone Arthur Kohn Nor wailed over, by anyone at all, But suffer unlamented, unburied, A sweet treat for the birds to find and feast on. Things such as this they say, the good Creon To you and me-e'en me-and has proclaimed, And hither comes so that these things, to those Who do not know, will be proclaimed, made clear, The deed, not weighed against nothing, but who So ever does these things will be set forth Before the city to be murdered by stone. Things are this way, and swiftly will you light Upon yourself as either well born or Corrupt though raised from good. 35 40 ISMENE 0 wretched one! If this is so, how might I add further Either by loosening or tightening? 45 ANTIGONE Consider, then if you will work with me By taking part in labour and in work. e<iv 0' UKAUU'toV, &:ta<pov, oiwvoTc; YAUKUV 811aa.upov ELOOpWOL npoc; xapLV ~oplic;. toLa.frrO. <petal TOY aya.Sov KpfovTa. aol Kaµol, Hyw yap Kaµ£, KTJpu~a.vT ' exeLv, Kal Oeupo veTa8m Taf>Ta total µ~ eiMa1v aa<p~ npOKTJPU~OVTa., KUL TO np<iyµ' ayelV oux we; nap' ouf>Ev, an, oc; av toUTWV Tl Op~, cpovov 7tp0Ke1a8m OTjµoA.euaTOV ev noAEl. oihwc; EXEL OOL rnurn, Ka.l oel~elc; Taxa eh ' euyev~c; 7tE<pUKa.c; eh' fo8AWV KUK~. Ti 0') wrnA.a.T<ppov, el TUO' ev toUtolc;, eyw Moua' av~ 'cpamouaa. npocr8eiµ11v 7TAEOV; el ~uµnov~cretc; Kal ~uvepyacret aK07tEl ISMENE What kind of hazard is that? Where's your mind now? 50 ANTIGONE Together will you lend your hand to raise The fallen corpse? noTov Tl KtvMveuµa.; nou yvwµ11c; noT' el; el TOV VEKpOV ~UV TfiOe KOU<pLetc; xepl. Has spoke against this. ANTIGONE But it's not with him To shut me out from that which is my own. ISMENE 0 woe is me! Remember, sister, how The hated, inglorious father of us Was decimated. And for his error Did double strike his eyes with his own hand. Thereafter, wife and mother, double named, With twisted cords did violate dear life. And third, the brothers, two in one short day In mutual murder, miserably their fate Did seal together with each others hand. And now we two left alone alive Consider how detestably destroyed We will be if we violate, with custom The laws made by the absolute sovereign Oe e'en to overstep any power. But it behooves us to remember this, That we as women by nature cannot 'Gainst men put up a fight, it's not in us And thus by this we're ruled by strength And must obey things more painful than this And I in truth do beg those 'neath the earth To hold pardon as I'm constrained in this For I'm suaded by those who stand fulfilled And acting 'gainst them is nonsense to none. an' ouoev atm9 TWV eµwv µ, e'lpyeLV µha. 60 65 70 75 80 o'lµo1. <ppov11aov, wKaa1yv~T'l, na.-r~p we; vq>v anex0~c; OuaKAE~c; T' anwAe-ro, npoc; auto<pwpwv aµnAaKT]µCtTWV 0L7tACic; O'l!ELc; 6.p6.~a.c; a.uToc; autoupyq> xepl. foma. µ~T'lP Ka.l yuv~, 0L7tAOUV enoc;, 7tAeK1'alatV apTCtVatat AWPUTUL piov: Tplrnv 8, aoeA.cpw Mo µlav Ka.0' ~µipav aurnKrnvouvw Tw TaA.a.mwpw µ6pov KOlVOV KaTElpyaaa.vT' enan~AOlV xepoTv. vuv {j, au µova {j~ vw AEAE1µµ£va OK07tEl Oa4J KUKlaT' 6A.ouµe0', et v6µou Pi9'. \jf~cpov Tupavvwv ~ Kp6.TTJ nape~tµev. an' evvoe1v XP~ TOUTO µE:v yuvaTx' OTL e<puµev, we; npoc; av6pac; OU µaxouµiva. bretrn {j' OUVEK , apx6µw0 ' eK Kpelaaovwv, Kal TaUT , UKOUElV KUTI TWV6' aA.yiova. 65eyw µE:v ouv airnt>aa wuc; uno x0ovoc; ~uyyvoLaV '(axe1v, we; ~la(oµm Ta6e, Tole; ev TEAEL pe~wat 7telaoµm: TO yap nepiaaa npaaae1v ouK exe1 vouv oMiva. ISMENE You think to honor him? Though surely forbidden in all the city? ANTIGONE Surely he's mine, and yours-though you deny Your brother. I will not be conquered here. ISM ENE 0 you, indefatigable, Creon 32 \ \ ~ 55 yap voeTc; 0cmmv a<p', anoppTJTOV no:\e1; TOY youv eµov Kal TOY crov ~v au µ~ 8£.X.nc; aOeA<pov: OU yap o~ npoOoua' aA.waoµm. ANTIGONE Then neither shall I urge you further on, Not even if you were willing to act With me, such things would not be sweet to do. But know what sort of person that you are For I myself will honor him in death And dying doing so will be gorgeous. Beloved and loving I will lie open, Playing a pious villain, since more time 85 90 oih ' 8.v KEAeucrmµ' OUT' av, et 0£A.01c; ETL 7tpUOOElV, eµou y' UV ~Oewc; 6p<!>T]c; µ£Ta. aAA' fo0 ' onola 001 6oKEL, KELVOV {)' eyw ea."'w: KaAOV µ01 TOUTO no1oucrn 8aveTv. cpiAT] µn ' auTou Keicroµm, cpiA.ou µ£Ta, oata navoupy~aacr' . end nA.elwv X povoc; ov 6eT µ, apfoKetv Tole; KUTW TWV ev8Me. EKET yap aid Kelaoµm: crol 6 ', et OoKeT, 33 �Arthur Kohn Antigone Must I spend standing with those down below Than must be spent with those above the ground. I'll lie open forever in that place But if to you it seems best, hold the honored Things of the Gods in dishonor and shame. ANTIGONE Then whenever I am run out of strength Entirely I will have ceased myself -ra -rwv St:wv ev-rLµ' cmµaaaa' ext:. ISMENE But firstly it is not suited to hunt For things without the means- Pl<;t 7t0ALTWV opav ecpuv aµ~xavoc;. ANTIGONE Don't fear for me, set straight your deadly dest'ny. If you will say These things you will be hated by me, more so You'll justly lie forever loathed by the dead. But ill-counseled allow me to suffer These terrible things, for no suffering Of mine will make me die unhonorably au µEv -rao' &.v 7tpouxoL': eyw OE o~ -racpov xwaoua' 0.0t:A<p4> <pLALa-rq> 11opt:liaoµm. µ~ 105 ANTIGONE Oh woe is me! You must speak out, for many Will find you far more hateful if you speak not To this. 'µou 11po-rappeL: -rov aov £~6p0ou 116-rµov. an, ouv 11poµ11vuanc; ye -rou-ro µrioevl -roupyov, Kpu<pft OE Kt:U0e, CJUV 0, au-rwc; eyw. o'lµm, Ka-rauoa: nonov exSlwv fot:L mywa', £avµ~ 7tclO'l Kflpu~nc; TCtOE. ISMENE Sepµ~v Your hot heart beats for frozen things. 34 115 ANTIGONE ISMENE Alas, oh wretched , how I fear for you! ISMENE And even if you could at any rate However without means now is your love. aetvw, 7terrafooµm. eyw µEv OUK chLµa 7toLoUµm, -ro OE ANTIGONE You may push these things forth but I'll proceed 100 With pushing forth the earth over our dear'st brother. ANTIGONE For I know I please those I'm fated to most µ~ 95 ISMENE I will not make myself dishonored for I can;t, by nature act 'gainst the city. ISMENE But do not speak before you do this deed In secret hide this thing, and so will I OUKOUV, o-rav o~ 110 e7tl \jluxpotO'l Kapolav exeLc;. an' oIO' apfoKoua' otc; µaALa0 ' aoetv µe el Kal OUV~O'El y': an' aµ11xavwv epq.c;. XP~· ISMENE But if to you it seems the best, you must go. Still know this that it's thoughtless to do so, But still your friends have every right to love you. el -rauTa AE~Elc;, exSapt:T µEv e~ eµou, 120 txepa OE Ttj) eav6vTL npoaKelaeL olKn. 950.n' ea µe Kal T~V £~ eµou OuapouAlav 11a8e1v To OeLvov -rou-ro: 11elaoµm yap ou TO<JOUTOV ouo£v W<JTE µ~OU KaAwc; Savt:Tv. an' Ei OoKEL O'Ol, aTetxe: TOUTO 0, '(a0, OTL avouc; µEv epxeL, -rote; <plAoLc; o' 6p0wc; <plATJ. 125 [Antigone exits, Ismene re-enters the Palace.] CHORUS 0 many are the terrible wonders But nothing is more great than those of man. And this does find its way and make its place Across the stoney grey and sultry sea With wildly storming swelling southern winds Surrounded by the depths of the dark waves He pushed further, under, and beyond. The highest of the Gods, un-waning Earth, Indefatigable, is worn away As plows move to and fro as year by year The horses bastards wear and churn the land. And a light minded race of birds is caught In nets, just as the savage swarms of beasts And creatures of the sea, he leads them all. With serpentine spun coils does brilliant man 1 5 10 7tOAAa Ta oe1va KOUOEV av8pw11ou Oe1v6-repov 7tEAEL. TOUlO Kal 7tOALOU nepav 7tOVTOU XELµeplq> VOTq> XWPEL, 7tt:plppuxlotO'LV 11epwv u11 ' o'(oµamv. Sewv Te Tav u11epTa-rav, !av acp81-rov, a.KaµaTav, cmoTpueTm iHoµevwv O.p6Tpwv hoc; elc; ewe; l1111elq> ytve1 110Aeuwv. KOu<pov6wv TE <pUAOV 6pvi0wv aµcp1paAwv ayt:L Kat 011pwv ayplwv e8v11 rr6v-rou T' eivaAlav <j>UO'LV arrelpmm OLKTUOKAwa-roLc;, rrept<ppao~c; av~p: 15 Kpa-ret OE µ11xavatc; aypauAou 011poc; 6pwa1pa-ra, Aaa1auxt:va 0' 35 �Antigone Untitled I Scott Chevallier Subdue with his machine the field dwelling, And mountain roaming beasts, and tightly grips The shaggy horse's mane, and yokes and breaks The back of an unwearied mountain bull. And speech with airy thought and city customs And impulses he has now taught himself and To flee the savage frozen clear cold air. And the wild stormy bolts, all contriving Held back in nothing, towards destiny He starts himself. He only stops for death. Against all other maladies he's found A way to slither through and keep moving. Possessing subtle and resourceful skill Beyond expectation he comes around And traces back from evil now to good. And when he honors the laws of the land, And justice of the gods, to which he's bounded By oath, his city dwells in great prosperity, But banned from this city is he, who's rash And coupled with disgrace. Never May I share land or home with man as he. And never may he think my thoughts, this man. 'lmtoV oxµa(eTCH etµ<pl AO<pOV (uywv oupelOV T' 20 CtKµ~-ra -raupov. KUL cp0£yµa KUL UVeµOeV <ppOVTjµa KUL QO'TUVOµouc; 6pyac; EOL<Sa~a-ro Kal ouaauA.wv naywv unal0pelU Kal ofooµ~pa <peuyeLV ~EAT] nav-ron6poc;: anopoc; en, ouoev epxe-rm 25 TO µ£AA.ov: 'A.Loa µ6vov <peU~Lv OUK £na~£Tal: VOO'WV 0, aµrixavwv cpuyac; ~uµn£cppaO'Tal. aocp6v Tl TO µrixav6ev Texvac; unep EA.nio, exwv TOTE µev KUKOV, aAAoT ' £71' fo0A.ov ep7tel, 30 voµouc; yepaipwv x0ovoc; 0eWV T' EVOpKOV OLKUV, U'JIL7tOAL<;: anoA.tc; OT<.p TO µ~ KUAOV ~UVEO'Tl ToA.µac; YEVOLTO xapLV. µ~T' eµol napfoTtoc; <ppovwv oc; TUO, epoel. µ~T , '(aov 35 [Enter Antigone] Is this a dark warning now sent by God? But how can I deny this having seen This daughter here to be Antigone 0 you disastrous and of disaster Brought of your father Oedipus. What's this? Do you not fail to follow royal rules And due to utter senselessness will fall. .,, I 40 ec; fotµoVLOV TEpac; aµ<pLVOW -r6oe: nwc; eiowc; avTLA.oy~aw T~vo' ouK e1vm nato ' AvTLyovriv. w OUO"tTjVO<; Kal oua-r~vou naTpoc; Olom68a, TL 7tOT,; OU o~ 7tOU O'E y, ama-rouaav -role; ~aO'LAELOLO'LV ayouO'l v6µ01c; Kal EV acppoauvn Ka0eAOVTec;; I I 36 37 \ \ �Smokey the Bear suffered from a lack of foresight by Victoria Lockamy Smokey the Bear suffered from a lack of foresight. Recently environmentalists have noticed an upward trend in the destruction caused by forest fires. They also noticed this upward trend correlated suspiciously well with a different upward trend, The use of the phrase: "Only You Can Protect Forest Fires" Humans, they say, are too effective at preventing forest fires, allowing litter and debris to build up And because humans are not yet perfect at preventing forest fires, All this does is provide more kindling. Turns out a little fire is good. But knowing that doesn't make the burning in my head hurt any less, So still I Try to put it out in an ashtray, Douse it with water. But I'm not any better at preventing forest fires than most people, So it's only a matter of time before it's all ablaze I blame the liberal media, That expansive, indistinct entity which is practically infallible Because even though we're supposed to hate it for its bias and corruption and sensationalism I can't help but like them because they make my political stances look good As it turns out, I'm a pack animal Just like the donkey (Though maybe here, ass is more appropriate) I Texture-03 I Xiuyuan Zhang And I suppose to an extent that may be true, But isn't it wrong that I feel no responsibility for the mental stress I'm under? Or for the pain I cause others out of selfishness because I need to "put myself first" Or for the poor traits I exhibit because "if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" They say we're the "me" generation Mindless, irreverent, narcissists But I think that's inaccurate, Because although I'm self-obsessed, the DSM-V classifies narcissists as holding the belief that they are better than others WebMD has been terrible for my hypochondria (Self-diagnosed I'll admit.) WebMD is successful for the same reason horoscopes are: Give anyone vague enough specifications, and they will identify with it But isn't everyone fatigued anyways? And isn't everyone suffering from headaches? And that constant crawling in my skin is just the physical sensation of my Manifest Destiny pulling me into everyday of the rest of my life The Prime Mover An ethereal whisper in my ear: "Don't look back. Don't look back" We all know Orpheus's struggle, running blindly ahead, everything we've ever wanted Dissipating before our eyes with every wavering doubt. After the liberal media told me Only [I] Could Prevent Forest Fires, They started to explain to me That everyone is a result of their environment. Nurture is key, they say. We are unfortunate victims of the circumstances of our birth. I 38 39 �1 What's in my purse.~I Calida Howell ForOfra by Montgomery Alcott al waters we m oved like ghosts, Over the coast f mud and dust, . h his house o Abandoning eac d d perfect frame h . h b the prou an Carried ig Y . , bane _ the plane. O f every modern nat10ns . nei hbor shared her breath with me: Just twice my g al hen the air At th' horizontal port 'wd fi d f gen an ear . blackened landing stnp. Was purifie o oxy nlight' and on the For su . Reagan or D ulles sends you, friend, Baltimore, lit cobblestones, O'er evening Annapo an mong the fixed, . . Ii ht who moves a d A wmking gone w ho lifts his eyes may fin In order that . . oumyour homelessness, . The offer to .JOm y . h eavy arms outspread. . h his To join you wit 41 40 \ �It's Raining Cats and Dogmatism by Abigail Purnell 1. There should be some different word, other than "grey," for those luminous blue-white skies that come with the rain here. It rains here. 2. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 3. In math we talked about infinity; About how we don't take it to mean eternity, not really-Eternity is a concept we couldn't use, not really (it's empty for us, meager finite things)-To say a thing is infinite is only to say That as far as I know And as far as I can see, As far as I can imagine Its extension is endless; And so I use the indeterminate Like the infinite For my own purposes. Abigail Purnell Will speak loudly and formally To themselves. Lately the expression "divine mystery" Has been on my mind and in my heart and Sheepishly off my lips; I have given up. This is to say, A divine mystery Is recognition Of my own defeat. A divine mystery Is my own willingness To admit That I do not know, And I cannot see Those things That I can barely imagine. 6. He who has ears, let him hear. 7. 4. You are bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh. These bones, This flesh, These moments. Those eyes. These skies. 5. Science has assured me There are colors I cannot see And sounds that I cannot hear And that electrons behave differently When they are watched, In the way children, conscious of an audience, 42 I look As far into this indeterminate space As I can get my head around, My eyes around, My arms around, And still I do not see. I do not touch I do not know. Those things we call divine mysteries Are those places Those ideas Those elusive, illusive noumena That stretch on and on Beyond Anything I could imagine. We call them mysteries Because we believe, Despite this, They can be known. And we call them divine Because the human mind Will live and decay Before we can understand. Or not once you leave it the first time. A friend who is always so literal Said to me once: If home is where the heart is, Are you not always at homeYour heart being, as it is, Necessary for your ongoing existence as a human organism? 8. I used to write stories. I used to read books. I never used to cry. And I said, a little astonished, A while later, Yes, exactly. 9. The white of the sky And the yellow leaves Still i~ trees Press against each other. We carry our homes in our selves. They stay in fragments inside of us, Necessary, absolutely fundamental, To our human existence. 10.Inertia: 13. After a while, everything ends. We are all doing Everything we can To exist endlessly Until we end. (14. As far as I know, As far as I can feel sure of.) 11. I can forgive anyone anything Anything done to me, Anything left out, And I do it with my whole self. Because I admire that they are still going on. Because I really truly don't understand anymore · What it might mean To keep going. 12. I am convinced now That home does not exist, 43 �A Decrepit Tutor Untitled Works / Charlie Denton by Stan Lavery Clene and kempt he wore his hoary hair His clere eyes two no wars the were. Yholde his heed in on hand often tenden, As to the sclate myshappy clarkes wenden. He knew by rote Greek wordes everychone, And many a songe of "Country" fashione Which told of povre men, and of prisoun; Of Trewe Love, and fornication; Ofbresten herts and breste biheste also, Of houndes dede, and muchel care and wo! Hevynesse of hert, swich tradgedye Songs suchel to the tavern al may gye! On early morwe colde, in reyn or sonne, Pass sokyngly* on foote, (ycleped "run") Far doun his nose ywered his perspectives, Misshappy clerks all dreden his directives. He grucche often of his surgeryes, And sorwe siketh of his somtel wyves. When siker clerks expounde far amiss, Hangynge his head, he sowrly mad, "Tis, tis." "I trowe", quod he, "this day I tak me lif, ''Alas ne t'overbyde myn eldest wif!" But him anon dispos'd him otherwyse; Clerks in an heep he deem'd nat worth two fl.yse! But face to face in conversatione, No longer was he that curmudgeone, But in swete chere and manere gav his say Avys and conceil, resoun each clerk's Essay Alas this Tutor's care and wo of age, Seemth al in playe - the studie was his stage! *adv. gradually, step by step 44 45 \ \ �Shipwreck I Sophie Colt . Notes from the Other Side by Judy Seeger (In the early 1970's my husband Tony and I spent about a year living with a group of Indians near the headwaters of the Xingu River in Central Brazil while he did research for his PhD dissertation in social anthropology. In subsequent years we made other visits, most recently in May of 2015. These pieces were written after that last visit.) The Cuban Doctor people, plaza, forest, river, sky, sun, moon, stars ... So why can't you say what you mean? dancing, singing, stamping, swirling, smiling, laughing, crying ... No! In the flickering firelight the touch of Puking my guts out in central Brazil I was delivered to the Cuban doctor. a feather ... He was young (unlike me) and brown (unlike me). He was on a mission to help those in need. Dark Sky in May 2015, 11° South·Latitude Or To the north the Big Dipper pours out all its contents, until toward dawn, drained dry, it dips below the trees. He was on a mission to demonstrate the superiority of his island's economic and social system. He gave me some soro, salty and sweet. Muchas gracias, Alejandro, por haberme bien tratado. Me estoy sintiendo me.Jar. The Bathroom in the Jungle How come when you build a bathroom in the jungle Suddenly there's a line ? No Words? (After Hegel?) I The Evening Star pierces the twilight's deep blue. To the south the Southern Cross proceeds across the heavens. Some must have seen it as a sign. From east to west the smaller stars are strewn across the sky, the glowing embers of a burning tree they say. Celestial animals tread that starry trail. You see them as patches of darkness silently making their way. From time to time, with blinking lights, a jet cuts through the dark. "Did you see?" I ask my friend, as we sit on a blanket outside the long house, "The sky canoe! That's the way I came and that's the way I'll leave." 1 How can you speak when you have no words? 46 But that can't be right! There are plenty of words: 47 �Judy Seeger Notes from the Other Side Watercolor: Going Up the Xingu River in the Rainy Season in an Aluminum Motorboat The Rainy Season Begins: 1 You can see the dark clouds trailing ribbons of rain. That one will miss us but that one will strike us for sure! G.!iick! Grab your dress from the line! Stinging clouds of dust raised from the plaza are whipped by the wind. The thatch on the roofs rises and rustles. In the old village the houses leaked badly. We would move our hammocks to avoid the worst drips. We would dig troughs in the dirt floor with tablespoons to drain the water. In this new village the houses are tighter. We're safe inside. The Rainy Season Begins: 2 Billowing curtains of rain smudge the forest. Pillars of mist rise like smoke from the river. Falling and rising the boundaries are blurred. The world is a study in gray. What could be more fragile than our little boat beating its way upriver against the fierce torrent draining the high plateau? When the motor falls silent we drift in a moment much farther downstream than we've come. A black tattered tarp keeps out some of the rain, while the cold silver hull makes a hard drizzly bed, as lulled by the deep throb of the laboring motor I dream the long hours away. At first the earth drinks in the rain. After all, it hasn't rained for months. The water simply disappears as if it had never been. And then we're back to dust again. There will be time enough for puddles; Time enough for shining sandy beaches to be submerged beneath the flood; Time enough for fish to flee and game to gather, trapped on islands nonexistent now; Time enough for the river to rise, and time enough for mud. Night and Day: Going up the Suia-Missu in the Dry Season in a Dugout Canoe By night: You find yourself afloat in a field of stars. Do you want one? Just reach down and pluck it from the river. But watch out for the curious caimans! They swim alongside and they bite. The stars drip through your fingers. How to hold them? By day: The Rainy Season I I It seems that nothing ever really dries. Things range from soaked to (on a good day) damp. We roll up our hammocks and set off by moonlight, while leaves still shine silver and jaguars still hoot in the forest, so when the sun is high and hot we've paddled a long way. The river at its source is crystal clear and nearly still. Sun-speckled bass glide gracefully through river grass beneath our boat. Under blazing sun cool water beckons. But watch out, for the depths are deceptive! Stepping out of the canoe you may find yourself in over your head. The Bad and the Good The bad: loneliness anger greed sickness sorrow death disorder The good: dancing singing eating laughing being strong being beautiful knowing your place in an orderly world The Umbrella Fish (0 candiru*) Piranhas? They're easy enough to avoid. They school in sharp bends where the river runs deep, beneath steep sandy banks where some food might fall in. You know not to swim in those pools. Stingrays? Also avoidable. You roil the river bottom with a stick before you step. They lurk in the mud but they flee. Electric eels? Sure, they'll give you a shock, but I got one only once. About a dozen of us were pushing a large net across a pond left by the receding river. The water before us teemed with flapping fish. An old man accidently struck an eel with a machete that had no handle: pure metal! He hollered and leapt from the water. The rest of us got a good shock and a good laugh. But the umbrella fish? That's a different story. It's a slender creature that swims into bodily orifices and, once there, opens itself up like an umbrella. Then you're in for it! The only way to remove it is surgically. Piranhas, stingrays, electric eels: I've seen - and eaten them all. An umbrella fish? Never! But I think every Brazilian in the Interior knows its story. *"Common designation for various species of bony fish ... There is a popular belief, not scientifically proven, that the candiru penetrates the urethra of people who are bathing in rivers." Translated from the Novo Dicionario Aurelio, Fourteenth Edition. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Mystery of the Tapir's Anus One day someone killed a tapir - enough meat for the whole village in those days! And they gave us the anal sphincter - well boiled, to be sure, but still - the anus! The body part we always laughed about! Why did they give us the tapir's anus? Was it a delicacy? Was it a joke? Was it acknowledgement that we were the only ones in the village whose teeth might be strong enough to chew it? (They weren't; we tried.) What do you do with a tapir's anus? Cut it up somehow and eat it? Wait until dark and heave it into the woods or the river? In the end, we gave it back: "This is not sweet to us." Why did they give us that tapir's anus? 49 48 \ \ �Notes from the Other Side Judy Seeger I didn't ask them then and I didn't ask them later. so was I. I guess I decided that some things don't need to be known. People poured out of the houses and onto the plaza in the reddening light. Snatches of Speech "You've come!" "Yes, I've come." "Where are you going?" "I'm going to the water." "Go ahead!" ''Are you awake?" "Yes, I'm awake." In the commotion a dog lunged and bit me. "Who's that?" "Me." "Where are you going?" "I'm going to the garden." "Go ahead!" ''Are you leaving?" "Yes, I'm leaving." "Let's go together!" "Let's!" I was hurt and mad as hell but looking back I guess he feared I meant to do his people harm. At last of course the moon came back to life. Even then they knew my people had walked on it. Sleeping in a Hammock "Until tomorrow." "Until tomorrow." Reminiscing with the Chief's Wife /Total Eclipse of the Moon We agree that as pets we prefer parrots to dogs or cats. We remember songs we've sung together:Javari and Yamuricuma learned from the Upriver Indians, Juruna songs danced while drinking spit-started manioc brew bubbling and working in its dugout trough, songs of the Txukarramae sung and danced by women and men in facing rows ... 50 Some sang to bring the moon back; some shot flaming arrows. Mothers covered the heads of their children with tree cotton: protection from wandering spirits who meant to do them harm. Sleeping in a hammock is the best! You make yourself a comfortable nest. Make sure your ropes are strong and tightly bound: There's nothing underneath you but the ground. A rolled-up blanket makes a handy sheath To warm you from above and from beneath. Once in, you're cradled in a pocket deep And perfectly disposed for restful sleep, As long as you don't dwell on the precar- Sleeping in a Hammock with a Malarial Fever while Everyone Else is Dancing If you can call it sleep ... Phantasmagoric shadows cast by fires dip and soar on the towering thatch. Passing beneath the rope of my hammock painted dancers set the hammock swinging ... Drifting in . . . Drifting out .. . I hear fragments of song ... Fever dreams take on the rhythm of the dance. They say that sickness means your spirit has been stolen. Perhaps it hides among the fish, among the bees, among the trees ... Haven't you heard? The whole world sings! But you must listen carefully ... And then perhaps when you return you'll bring a song back too. . My body is aching ... where is my spirit? My body is burning . . . where is my song? iousness of sleeping hanging in the air. We remember the night the moon died, or so the old people say. That was in the old village when she was young and 51 \ �Window I R.M. Goad At Home in the World: A Toast to the Graduates Delivered kY Louis Petrich, Tutor, May 4, 2015, at the Graduate Institute Commencement Reception D ear students, graduates, and guests of the Graduate Institute--on behalf of my colleagues on the faculty of St.John's College, I shall propose a toast with the help of several authors I happen to have been reading and pondering these last days. A classical origin for our words is, of course, a tribute to our inner resources, but also (as Nietzsche says) to our poverty of creation, our · spiritual ungainliness, if this is how we must quench our thirst, as humped camels do, from storage, surrounded all the while by much that has become desert in this noisy world. It is my hope, therefore, that you may discover, time and again, as thoughtful camels, something I recently experienced to my wonder, when I re-encountered a very famous English poem that I assigned to my senior language students, written by Matthew Arnold around 1851, called "Dover Beach." In it, a man stands by an open window, while looking out over the beach at Dover, England, and talking all the while to a silent woman present in the room with him. I remembered quite liking this poem when I first studied it as an English major in college over 30 years ago, at that time having seen next to nothing of the world, though the poem is in fact about the world and how to live in its turmoil. By the way, although I have been teaching for many years, here and around the world, I still ask myself how great literature should be taught to college kids who know so little yet of life in this world. Mathematics, science, metaphysics even, I can teach to novices, but literature?--which spans life and death, heaven and hell? I am satisfied if they store up its beauties for later uses; and therefore I proceed now with my toast in the confidence that you folks, being older, are perhaps readier to hear some hard things. As I was saying, I had not had occasion to return to this fondly remembered poem, "Dover Beach," until I reread it in the good company of my seniors, with whom I had pleasurably shared many old, lettered friends, but this time I found to my surprise that I disliked the experience at once. I felt somehow sickened by the poem, and immediately I sought relief in a parody written by Anthony Hecht in 1967 called (pardon me), "The Dover Bitch."This 52 parody is written from the point of view of the silent woman in Arnold's poem, who cannot stand being treated as a "cosmic last resort" by a nervous, classically educated man who would rather ruminate on the sonorous sufferings in Sophocles and over the terrors unleashed by the ignorant armies in Thucydides, than to make simple, proper love to a pretty girl on a romantic, moonlit beach. Who can blame her? I felt guilty to perhaps spoil my students' opportunity to like this poem, by impressing upon them my newfound dislike. But I asked them, as I do you, to lay this up for consideration: why is it that of the works we had loved as readers in youth, some retain or augment their power to transport and we love them the more, but others are found to disappoint or even to become repulsive in age? Is it that our more mature and refined tastes now detect better what is truly fine or disgusting in things? Or, is it that our chastened enthusiasms no longer catch at the surface beauties and miracles that formerly took hold of the eager heart, the depths and heights instead having become the lonely anchorages of our advanced journeys? In any case, my friends, as you grow older in the company of undying literature, I hope that you may experience these questions upon returning to a poem or book that you remember liking, or, I hasten to add, one that you did not like or did not take time to know, but may later find to be indispensable, like a new friend among enemies. Though the latter experiences are puzzling, because why would you return to a book that you did not like, or turn to one you know not? Well, maybe the book, if I may speak of books as friends, has a loyal liking for you. Besides, if the soul is immortal, as we may dare to suppose from our unquenchable thirst, or even if the soul is but a follower of the gay philosophy that promises jungles beyond deserts and playgrounds after jungles, then there will be time for those unread or disliked books, too; there will be time "for a hundred visions and revisions," as another poet of this modern desert landscape has put it, in another love song worthy of parody, of liking and disliking over time, because it is that good and deserving of a home in us. (T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of]. Alfred Prufrock''). 53 �At Home in the World: A Toast to the Graduates 54 Now there is something I had forgotten about Matthew Arnold that I rediscovered upon questioning my altered feelings towards his poem, for I was not resigned to lose an old friend, and I should like to share this singular fact with you. Matthew Arnold was, by profession, a lifelong school inspector. He believed that education was the only way to rescue the souls of the vast, rising middle classes from a sickness and evil that his contemporary, Baudelaire, named "ennui," and whose type Arnold himself was the first to label, "the philistine": a person of utilitarian dullness, comfort-seeking, security-mongering, media-minded, easy-going, always nice and inoffensive, therefore anemic, slavish, and trivial. I wonder what this Victorian school inspector would have to report of our cultural practices and their human types today. Perhaps, mindful of this fact, I should face "Dover Beach" again, with your help. Which behavior do you think is better: to look out a window at a moonlit beach, to hear the pebbles being thrown up and drawn back by the murmuring waves, and to invite your beloved to think of Sophocles, who made tragic poetry out of such sights and sounds?--Or, to register your satisfaction that this pleasant sea-side resort is rated, by the mass clicking of browsers under the moonlight--click, click, click-- one of the top twelve places to go for a convenient weekend get-away (discounted in the off-season), which earns points towards a free stay and partner points if you switch your life insurance? Indeed, I would like to ask the silent woman of Arnold's poem, or you ladies in the audience, what kind of man you would prefer as a lover. The man of the poem appeals to his lady-friend in these words: "Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another!" What does his appeal to "be true" mean, sandwiched as it is between references to Sophocles and Thucydides? In view of Arnold's professional concerns for the life of the middling soul in a "darkling plain," I think it means this: "let us keep in our possession the light, joy, love, and help that we find in the creative works of our predecessors, who poured their lives into making this world a place where we would want to be born. A place we strive to be able to call 'home'." This, I think, is essentially the appeal that Winston Churchill made in 1940, as he looked Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles I Louis Petrich, Tutor across the Channel from Dover Beach and saw what Arnold foresaw--the "alarums," the "struggle and flight" from barbarism-and he rallied the English classes, one and all, to be true to one another as keepers of the light. So, at the inspiration of this poem, which once I liked in innocence, recently disliked with experience, and upon present consideration begin to like again, I now make this same appeal to the graduates-"let us be true to one another." Rich in gratitude for the hours we have spent hearing together the murmuring sea of remembered voices sweet and bitter, the full tide of humanity right at our Chesapeake home shores, and with boldness to keep that tide from withdrawing over the edge of the world, let us, the faculty of St. John's College, raise our glasses to toast the graduates of this Institute, masters of the arts that make this world fit for poor human souls. 55 \ \ �Energeia I St. John's College VVriting and Art Publication 131 1 1 1696 ~01170if~ li1i i11721 1 1 1 ~11~~]1 1 l1l ~i 1 1 1 1 Spring 2016 •~ --~ 1- '- I ~ i / f I <T ' ATE DUE \ \ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 55 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Piven, Jakub (editor) Purnell, Abigail (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2016 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2016. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 2016 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e99f2c1b94d4c1095ad6da9152ede97c.pdf dd0ebf3a878557aba2fe0578b02f3c22 PDF Text Text ST. JOHNS COLLEGE LIBRARY 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 11mr11~r 1 i~1~1m1 1 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1696 01171 862 2 DATE DUE I �Winter 2016 Editors Dorothea Bowerfind Jakub Piven Abigail Purnell Editorial Staff Calida Howell Bonnie Scott Patrick Turley Web* Editor Dahye Kim Layout Design J akub Piven Cover Photograph *energeiasjc.rnm Stefan Vasic �Note from the editors The goal of Energeia, we tell people when they ask, is to collect art from the community. The point of this project, we insist, the point and the entire purpose-the assumption we make in so doing-is that there is very much good art in this place, very many good artists. Our labor is the collecting, the gathering into one place, and the collection is the entire end. It is hard for us to make connections, sometimes, hard to remember that in this world everything is analogue to everything else, and that we find symbols and metaphors profound and illuminating because they bring out this repetition and entanglement of all things. It is important, we believe, to remember this, and the creation of art is the manifestation of this awareness in us, and its outward manifestation an urgent cry to others to remember these connections likewise. For better or worse, men find themselves in communities. These are rarely the communities we envision for ourselves, that we hope for and plan-but then we do not ever have much say over the circumstances in which we land, about these inevitable, immediate boundaries of space and time. Our response to these circumstances, this is our good action, this is our overcoming, and it is art that is content for the overcoming, art our offering and duty to the community of thought in which we have found ourselves. Art is our speaking up, our speaking out, and in this utterance we are artists as well as philosophers. In the study of Great Ideas and the development of our minds, it is too often passed over that we are bodily, that these transcendental idealities are not the stuff of real knowledge, but rather that our experiences in flesh and sound are. Being able to acknowledge ourselves and our experiences constitutes some part of our humanity-this acknowledgement, this utterance of things taken into us and transfigured into images of our own creation-this process is most human of all. This process and this drawing-of-connections are art, and thus when we say that the purpose of Energeia is to collect and draw notice to these connections, what I am saying is that in this community we are all great thinkers and therefore also artists and lovers of art, and the task of collecting-and circulating, and celebrating-art is one that we find most noble, and one nicely eponymous: we are all at work being united here. Here is some art that we have created while in community. We hope you are glad to encounter it. Abby Purnell and Jakub Piven �W ritten Stories, Poems, and Others Image Photography, Painting, and Others 1 Bonnie Naradzay, Sunday Afternoon at Don Polio's 2 Jim Beall, Onyx Moon 4 7 8 Camille Gagnier, La Carta (Translation} Barnabas Holleran, Sonnet 6 Casey Collier, 1he Marshlands 9 Katelin Safford, Mourning in June 10 Felipe Rego, Untitled 12 Danielle Brown, Three Ways to Solve an Integral 16 Hal_y Ford, Recognition e 19 Patrick Turley, Pleasure Shrimp 20 21 23 24 27 30 34 Victoria Lockamy, Untitled #1 Victoria Lockamy, Untitled #2 R.M Goad, 1he Altercation R.M. Goad, Reach Arthur Kohn, 1he Story ofa Sane King Abigail Purnell, Eurydice Returning 3 Z.A., Untitled 6 James Connors, Build 3 (Atoll} 11 15 Sarah Irving,Johnnie Homes 17 Kit Rees, Hunt and No Trussel Louis Petrich (Tutor), Sabbatical Island, Bonaire 18 22 Rachael Langston, Untitled# 1 25 Rachael Langston, Untitled #2 Calida Howell, Untitled 26 Anton Kalmysh, Untitled 29 Annie Brong, Untitled 31 Will van Engen, Vulgur Monster in Polite Society Bonnie Scott, Untitled 32 36 Rose Pelham, Portrait ofIt 40 Sophie Colt, Watercolor of Charlie 42 Elaina Bowman, Rehearsal Timon Luo, Cosmic Egg 37 Olivia Frawley,A Promenade 38 Jonathan Llovet, Stufen (Translation} 41 Wesley Sonheim, Notices Untitled by Calida Howell �Sunday Afternoon at Don Polio's by Bonnie Naradzay Four women of a certain age, we gather at Don Polio's to critique our latest poems, with Pam suggesting that hers, in case we missed it, is on sexual awakening. Digging into spit-roasted chicken, we talk of ex-husbands. Norma says she'll like hers more after he dies, and this reminds me to outlive mine so he doesn't get my pension. A Moroccan soccer player on the wall-mounted tv whips off his shirt after scoring, and I stare, transfixed, at his rippling chest and abdomen. I fumble for words to explain how seeing his bared body affects me. Linda, having already mentioned her new decisiveness in the garden, now that she's sixty, her freedom to uproot plants if they don't fit in, says it's what women want, it's on all the talk shows, and I wonder about the antecedent and about that guy at Squaw Valley who talked of tantric bliss. When I was younger, I say, eating bread pudding from a paper plate, it was the high-minded renaissance man who caught my attention. What a disaster! I glance up at the soccer game. Did I behold Apollo's torso-the smiling hips and thighsor the nameless oarsmen who rowed Ulysses to Ithaca's shore? Sunday Afternoon at Don Polio's I1 �Onyx Moon by Jim Beall He died "East of here under an Onyx Moon'' in an older time. We have not seen his like since. This is a letter from the Dark Ages, of a place and time it is better not to know. What is the wind coming to? Or from? Which is the orb that rises North of a convergence of tracks, dark rails shining, seeming to have their own light. We know in our minds these thin strings, barely luminous, do not meet. But what does the mind know, really? It is the heart that teaches us dread. There is a mist in the sky in place of stars. What compass can tell us, we do not believe: the false convergence of tracks, the true convergence of meridians, the pale skin of a girl we knew once, becoming flame. NB.: An Onyx Moon (or Black Moon) is the second new Moon in a month. 2 I Jim Beall Eurydice Returning by Abigail Purnell I 3 �La Carta by Blanca Garnica (translation right) The Letter translated by Camille Gagnier Y me llegaste como llega la brisa a desplegar los brazos del naranjo. And you came to me like the breeze comes to spread wide the arms of the orange tree. Como se agacha el viento hasta la hierba. Like the wind stoops down to the grass. Como la tarde al campo fatigado. Like the evening to the weary field. Asi. Dulce y amargamente. That way. Sweet and bitterly. Asi me llegaste, peregrino, por la olvidada huella de los pajaros. You came that way, pilgrim, by the forgotten track of the birds. Dulce y amargamente. Sweet and bitterly. 4 I Camille Gagnier La Carta (Translation) I 5 �Sonnet 6 by Barnabas Holleran I saw a name engraved in dust like stone. The date beside it caught me by surprise; For even though it looked so newly drawn, For nine whole years it hid from dust's disguise. The lines were crisp which made this little note, And all the fingerprints could still be seen. No puff of wind had ever moved a mote; That breathless lunar flag looks less pristine. But as I passed, my passing brought a gust Which brushed the dust into a slight decay. The unswept pipe the name is on will rust, And every written word will fade away. And someday I will have to do the same. And yet, beside the first, I put my name. 6 I Untitled by Z.A. Sonnet 6 I 7 �The Marshlands Mourning in June by Katelin Safford by Casey Collier There was death here, tonight. And here, still. Screeching wheels and squelchy radios and fog, from before until now, and for me refined, but not Her. Her heart is broken and her body, is mumbling and trembling for confused forgiveness . When we were at the Falls, last winter, we saw a whirlpool that was a "killer." So, I posed, and she posed, and the photo is· somewhere in a stack of digital. But, we were smiling before the "killer." And now, I don't want to talk about it. But we must. To heal. From death. And I wish it had a throat I could squeeze, or get at. I 1 - J Ii These are the Marshlands. The reconciled march from there to here. I was a private chest, where her head would squirm, and for her eyes to swamp. There came that noiseless ship into the harbor. I did not recognize it. And it wasn't for me. But, my love is the wreck dashed before her. On such a clear night, with such low trim. it is june and I am running my grown-out fingernails through your blonde hair as the loud music and the screaming fans fail to drown out your sorrow. a moment ago you were making a joke but then I turned around and you were sobbing over a picture of your mother, the one where your sister is making a funny face. your grief is wet in my arms and I am thinking of how you wanted to plan this moment, to set aside a day, to make the right lighting, the right sound, the right time for the big cry. this moment is wholly opposite of that, and opposite of that in its wholeness-the invading sunlight broken on the floor by the shadow of the fan, children screaming outside. but i guess this is how these things always happen, i think to myself, my fingers firm on your trembling back. this grief, these tender moments, wait for no one. There is nothing here but for her and I. And we have to go to bed, in the gutless, in the blur. Because, we won't let light between us. / 8 I Casey Collier Mourning in June I9 �Untitled by Felipe Rego We tell kids playing house not to use the word love because like any four letter word we don't wanna hear it on tv But sometimes I think an unfettered mind might pronounce that word a little better Kinda like "happy," right? Like if you've ever been to the beach you know it's shit Sand in your hair, sunburn forming, eyes burning But I think those were my favorite things about the beach growing up I think I was happy In kindergarten no one could explain to me why fuck was a bad word I think words meant more back then, and I think I knew that one was made up But there was something about love I didn't love power rangers, but I liked it for sure I didn't really love much I think I loved my brother And probably the N 64 But not much. Someone told me you can't love someone. before you love yourself I think that's the same someone who told me you can run fast enough to dodge rain Maybe I couldn't fall if my life depended on it But I think ifl get caught in the rain I'll be in it regardless I don't usually forget my umbrella. I think we tell kids not to say love because it scares us to think that word could mean less than we think it does And we tell anyone who might listen that love at first sight is a fantasy Summer loving ends at the credits Maybe that's only because love can't be measured and we're afraid to build a unit Because I don't think any heart is too big or small to break Because I don't think my heartbeat can measure the movements of the heavens Because one winter night I felt a swelling in my chest that I'm certain would strike awe into the Leviathan Strike fear into seismologists everywhere Mama told me I make mountains out of mole hills But mama also told me not to get up on the furniture Thank god for you telling me to stand on tables And thank god for sitting on the sink. 10 I Felipe Rego [If T I KONTA 6x6 cm 1 nnc111 ·J1.1n1,mu' \ufn.1l11n ·n Build 3 (Atoll) by James Connors I 11 �- :;: 12 ~~ rx0sz J.'S Jnj-x+ z -f (__, ::: J )(~.z5-:tx ! I Danielle Brown Three Ways to Solve an Integral I 13 �14 I Danielle Brown Johnnie Homes by Sarah Irving I 15 �Recognition by Haley Ford I realized I would live and die here. Maybe not here, at the intersection of 25th and L, but somewhere near here-at least on this earth. Hospitals turn into apartment buildings and people don't stay in one place long enough to know it. The recognition of everything had gone stale. People only cared where they were walking long enough to get them where they were going. More business women passed us from behind on the tight sidewalks than we passed crossing the street. Maybe we never passed each other, I can't remember. I laughed loudly a few times and was greeted with faces of stern surprise. Well-dressed, effortless people morphed together in the masses, going home to children or bars. It started to pour and they huddled under the awnings of places they had never eaten in and will never enter, pretending to read the menu and glancing anxiously at the sky. The street steamed with summer heat, evaporating rain. I felt sticky all over. Were we like them? Briskly jaywalking to our meeting place, ignoring the signs and architecture above. We looked more at our feet than the sky, escaping the multitude of strangers looking into our faces. Locals never look to the tops of the skyscrapers. It's seen as unacceptable to stop and take a picture of some man-made icon of capitalism towering in the sky. Conformist after conformist brushing our shoulders and making peace with the race of time. I caught my reflection more than once in the shop fronts . Once I turned to look at my own reflection in an office window and saw a man at a desk staring back at me. We are not faceless. We are not unrecognizable in this place with no soil and obstructed sky. We are all the more lovely in the concrete playground we've made. But there is no one dancing in the streets, letting their silk ties be soiled by the rain. There were money and politics and unfinished projects to be discussed. Silence seem savored by those who walked alone. One could walk several blocks next to a person you've never seen and will never see again, never saying a word or looking up at them. Yet, there she was again-before, we had walked in opposing directions and now, two hours later, she was three seconds ahead, crossing the street before the light changed. I watched her, the emblem of recognition, with the intent to follow only as far as my destination would take me. And I remember her now, knowing her only in this place, when she is most certainly focused on another, more distant destination. 16 I Haley Ford Hunt and No Trussel by Kit Rees I 17 �Pleasure Shrimp by Patrick Turley In an effort to increase the pleasure in the world Monsanto designs a bioengineered shrimp variant, whose head is always itching but whose tail is able to constantly scratch the itch. This "pleasure shrimp" obviously generates an obscene amount of pleasure for itself, and it was theorized by Monsanto's in-house bioethics board that massive amounts of pleasure in an organism had the potential to "spill out" and affect those in its surroundings. Initial tests proved dangerous, especially the first instance of human submersion in a pleasure shrimp tank which led to the subject's body being wracked by wave after wave of climaxes for nearly an hour. With modified protocol for human exposure following that event, great finds were made with only the occasional freak accident endangering test subjects. Activities in the breeding room were found to simply be "more fun." This effect was observed not only in experiments, but also in anyone who happened to be in the room while the tanks were uncovered. Feelings of anxiety, boredom, irritability, self-hatred, and negative thinking were replaced by a relaxed sense of simply being in the moment and enjoying it. The initially open lab had to be restricted to essential personnel, as the breeding room became the unofficial break room for the entire company very shortly after its properties were discovered. The crowding agitated the shrimp causing the projected positive mindset to accelerate into racing thoughts, paranoid thinking, delusions of persecution and/or grandeur, and feelings of invincibility. This brief period was later called "the feeding frenzy," when nearly the entire company gathered at every opportunity they could find, leading to so many incredibly bizarre interactions that retellings of those events still make up the majority of in-house gossip at Monsanto today. Rumors of orgies in the shadows of breeding tanks, no holds barred fist fights without any animosity, and worst of all for a white collar workplace, the inability to express anything other than what one truly and sincerely feels, especially towards one's superiors. The event itself lasted a single workday, though with the natural warping of an individual's perception of time and markedly accelerated reaction times, the feeding frenzy stands in the minds of employees who were induced as a bacchanal that lasted days without sleep or eating (besides the occasional furtively consumed pleasure shrimp, the poaching of which by some present would produce its own cascade of events in the coming months). 18 I Sabbatical Island, Bonaire by Louis Petrich (Tutor) Pleasure Shrimp I 19 �Untitled #! Untitled#2 by Victoria Lockamy by Victoria Lockamy i've been trying to make art, but i need to ask god what kind of paint he used because i've worked for months on the sky in april the pools in your eyes the gravity of the moon it only took him six days when God abandoned Man He left them with Nothing which consumed 1 l their souls until they were but reflections in still water perfect mirrors of Glory unless shaken or stirred but even the stillest days afford themselves gentle breezes 20 J Victoria Lockamy Untitled #2 J 21 �The Altercation byR.M. Goad We speak in steel beams, cables and concreteour words fling like space debris. Chests puffed, we are huffing at brickless walls, we would have had left to bequeath if we'd never started building bridges. Or would we ever have been? And however would these muscles ache? And however would this skin? watching chalky rubble settle 'round. But we are humans! But we are engineers! Tired of mendless commotion, our mouths lose motion but the metals croak, pining for communion. And we are weary so we sate the pleaWhy don't we build a bridge? Why don't we build a bridge? Chest-deep in provisions, we begin with one word: consider The overpass ripens as our sweat pools beneath, and we wonder what 22 I Untitled #1 by Rachael Langston The Altercation I 23 �Reach byR.M Goad Pattering fingertips at the topmost shelf, posture bulkened with the strain: perpendicular feet. This is the closest I'll be to instability, but for the ones with bigger universes, their ballet. O!iivering kneecaps call me homethe question must be further backdusty hands retreat. 24 I R.M. Goad Untitled #2 by Rachael Langston I 25 �The Story of the Sane King .by Arthur Kohn Once upon a time, there was a kingdom ruled by a loving and beloved King. He ruled his subjects kindly and thought of each of them as a child. Likewise, his people fondly regarded their King as another father. Every subject within the King's domain knew that they could approach their leader with any concern and he would listen to them with open ears and judge them fairly. Everything was peaceful and perfect. However; one day, the King received word that the tyrannical empire across the mountains wished to conquer his kingdom and enslave his people. Terrified by this news and thinking only of his people the King decided to traverse the mountains and reason with the unreasonable emperor that threatened the lives of his subjects-his children. He left that afternoon. Yet soon after the King left, spies from the empire across the mountains infiltrated the peaceful kingdom and poisoned the water supply. Not with deadly toxins but with potent potions of madness. Not long after, the entire kingdom was frantic and corrupted with lunacy. People poured over each other and brawls ended as sporadically as they had begun. No one cared anymore for the sanctity of their realm, they only worried about themselves and their own private delusions. Once the King returned triumphant, having successfully bargained peace for his people, he was horrified to see the chaos and corruption that madness devolved his kingdom to. But when he reclaimed his throne, his subjects-his children no longer trusted him. No one felt like their once mighty king was fit to rule. He no longer seemed to understand their problems like he once had. They all thought him mad. For the sane, in the city of madness, is truly the insane. Until the King had found every medic, he searched across the globe for a cure for the plague of madness brought upon his land. He offered all the wealth of the kingdom to anyone who could cure his people. No one could. For madness, as you know, is incurable. Devastated, the King returned to his chamber and looked out his window at his once majestic dominion. He saw the people scurry about frantic and carefree. But in that moment he realized that although they were mad, his people were content. This thought comforted him and brought him peace for the night. In the morning when the King woke he noticed a bottle on his desk. The bottle contained a liquid as black and thick as death itself Beside the bottle lay a note scratched onto an old and worn out piece of parchment which read: Run, be free, and let your people die; drink and join your people in madness and in death; cross the mountains, be a slave, and your people will live. The King thought long and hard, weighing each option fully. He knew that if he ran 26 J Untitled by Calida Howell The Story of the Sane King J 27 �I . he w~uld live but his people would suffer the wrath of the tyrant across the mountains; he hoped that if he drank the liquid he would once again regain the love and trust of his people- even if they were all to die; and he prayed that if he sold himself to slavery that the tyrant would keep his word. The King realized he could not win, and so he chose. He chose to be a slave and live his life serving the man who condemned his subjectshis children. Every day he wondered if they were still alive. Every day he wondered if they were still happy. And every day he wondered if he made the right decision. Secretly, he knew he didn't. 28 I Arthur Kohn Untitled by Anton Kalmysh I 29 �Rehearsal by Elaina Bowman I lick the skin peeling from my fingers. I imagine licking correctly, I rehearse it. I'm very thoughtful. Then I pour a cup of warm milk on my navel. Anyway She's fortunate to get to know the people she's about to hurt. So[,] Sing a cheap ad to me, I could change my relationship with myself I have this odd gift of noticing the hot beauty and ugliness of everyone I glance at. I can see someone's overbearing nose, I can appreciate the veins in their hands, below their jawline. I can love the sickness, I can hate it. I see goblins and I see angels in white and plaid. I believe I'm not controlling this action, I believe I am not a literal being. I see her drawing lines and moving her glasses back into a more punctuate position. But We're just Kids ripping the wings off an outcasted dove. 30 I Elaina Bowman Untitled by Annie Brong I 31 �/ .. \ r, · - J \ ~· I~ J \ ) . . Vulgar Monster m Polite Society by Will van Engen I33 �Cosmic Egg by Timon Luo Standing on silenced, smoking battlefields, A remorseful God viewed the emptied Earth And vowed to raise up a worthier race. We all know the Cosmic Egg came first, Cracked in two crowns, heaven and earth The winged God from his broken shell began To shape the mountains and the rivers and Mold sacred life with His holy feathers So then God made us, winged and feathered folk Made in His image: wings, blue bars, and all For now the Pigeon rules Earth and heaven After the humans' folly sealed their fall! The Winged One made the first creatures from dirt Meek little beings with no legs nor wings Things which swam in water and crawled in earth Then He crafted the worthier creaturesGreat beasts, and foremost among them-Humans These monstrous tree-like, thick-legged bodies Towered over E arth and rivaled mountains Instead of wings or feathers He gave them Strength beyond measure, and claws they called hands To work, and build, at the Winged One's pleasure "I trust you with my creation," said H~ "Keep pure the waters, guard their sanctity This abode is yours to own forever, Stewards of the Earth, if you can keep her." But with monstrous power came monstrous pride Strong bodies gave way to greed and weak minds Men disobeyed the winged God's commandments, Calling themselves gods, master and sovereign As they held the power of destruction To rip trees like limbs from Earth's blessed flesh, Divert rivers, raise mountains in fl.at fields, And scar the visage of God's creation. Lust unbound, humans tore apart the Earth Then, insatiable, turned on each other The Human, the beast, forgot all kinship Ripped limbs like trees from their bloody soil Waged war to massacre and to destroy Killed in cruelty what they held dear before Till no human walked the Earth anymore. 34 I Timon Luo NB.: This poem is a creation myth told from the perspective of a fantastical pigeon civilization; there are intentional parallels to Genesis as well as to "world egg" -type myths. Ultimately the story is not about pigeons, who are now the dominant species in this version of Earth, at all, but rather the semimythical beast that precedes them, humans. Cosmic Egg I 35 �A Promenade by Olivia Frawley Meandering and whistling, down the lane And in the sun, among the trees, full bright, With jaunty tunes in handsome throats, alight With cheer and drunk with Spring in their domain, They come to dance and sing out of the night. The gentlemen parade their costumes fair And catch the ladies' eyes with well-coiffed hair; In turn, the ladies tease them with their flight. If one does chance to see this gay affair, The feminine apparel may surprise For though their songs be brilliant at sunrise, Somber and dusky are the clothes they wear. Thus do the Cardinals and Swallows all, Take to themselves dark wives before the Fall. - - - -· ·.··.·... 1 l/ 36 I Untitled by Bonnie Scott ... A Promenade I 37 �Stufen by Hermann Hesse (translation right) Stages . translated by Jonathan Llovet Wie jede Blute welkt und jede Jugend Dem Alter weicht, bliiht jede Lebensstufe, Bliiht jede Weisheit auch und jede Tugend Zu ihrer Zeit und darf nicht ewig dauern. Es mui?, das Herz bei jedem Lebensrufe Bereit zum Abschied sein und Neubeginne, Um sich in Tapferkeit und ohne Trauern In andre, neue Bindungen zu geben. Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne, Der uns beschiitzt und der uns hilft, zu leben. As each blossom wilts and every youth gives way To old age, so blossoms each of life's stages, So blooms each wisdom too and every virtue In its time, and forever it cannot stay. The heart, it must, at each of life's callings be Ready for parting and for new beginnings, So that with bravery and without mourning It can give itself to new, other bindings. And in each beginning there dwells a magic That protects us and that helps us in living. Wir sollen heiter Raum um Raum durchschreiten, An keinem wie an einer Heimat hangen, Der Weltgeist will nicht fesseln uns und engen, Er will uns Stuf' um Stufe heben, weiten. Kaum sind wir heimisch einem Lebenskreise Und traulich eingewohnt, so droht Erschlaffen, Nur wer bereit zu Aufbruch ist und Reise, Mag lahmender Gewohnung sich entraffen. We should take our strides with cheer from place to place, On none of them should we hang as on a home. The World Spirit wants not to bind us down fast; It wants to raise us from stage to stage - widen. Scarce are we by nature set one scope of life, Nor so snugly set - that would bring withering; Only who is ready to break and travel May bring feebler habits to their fulfilling. Es wird vielleicht auch noch die Todesstunde U ns neuen Raumen jung entgegen senden, Des Lebens Ruf an uns wird niemals enden ... Wohlan denn, Herz, nimm Abschied und gesunde! On top of all this, it may be that death's hours Send us young and unwilling to new places: Life's call to us will never come to an end ... Come then, my Heart, take your leave and recover! 38 I Jonathan Llovet Stufen (Translation) I 39 �NOTICES 1 From a Wearied Wary Traveller Concerning the Infamous and Obscure . Valley of Noise One must speak and step particularly softly in the Valley of Noise, for such disturbances are generally held to be forbidden there. Conversations held at a whisper are permitted, but talk above that level is carried out at peril. The Valley of Noise is not a somber place, but it is a quiet and solitudinal one. It behooves one to be earnest there. By earnest is meant seriously considerate and thoughtful adherence to onesel£ The skies are full of grey, and the land is dewy grassy cliffs. The Valley of Noise is not a terrifically social place. Interactions will and ought to be simple and short, not to exceed more than three or four moments. This is not to say that there is no LOVE in the Valley of Noise-on the contrary it is perhaps the most precious container of LOVE-but there is most definitely a lack of hatred and scorn. Arriving at the Valley of Noise is no great ordeal, once one actually sets out. It is a journey somewhat'less that thirty-five moments, depending on the course chosen. The Valley itself is some seventy or eighty moments long, and about fifty three moments wide at its widest point. These distances are misleading, however, as there are a great number of trails and alcoves which extend one's moments to, in some cases, hundreds more than would be expected. So far as has been seen, the only animal life in the whole of the Valley of Noise is domestic, excluding of course the INCOMPREHENSIBLE being who resides there. The LAIR of that being is hidden from all eyes, but the presence of its silent ROAR is felt at every place. Agriculture of all kinds is unheard of by the inhabitants, although they are by unknown means supplied with berries and some nuts. Bread is a curiosity in the Valley of Noise, but largely unadored. The LABYRINTH, or EFKALI, of histories and legends being connected to the Valley, is not known by the inhabitants, nor is there any evidence of its existence in any other form. It is most likely that it did never exist. Surmises that EFKALI is one and the same with the LAIR are absurd. This can be gathered merely from reading the various accounts of each. 1 First published anonymously c.1432 Falliad, in The Gazetteer ofThoughtfulness, Vol. 345, P.12. It is widely believed to be published by Lord Thiolli immediately following his third expedition. 40 I Portrait oflt by Rose Pelham Notices by "/iflesley Sonheim I 41 �42 I Watercolor of Charlie by Sophie Colt �Winter 2016 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 42 page Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bowerfind, Dorathea (editor) Piven, Jakub (editor) Purnell, Abigail (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Winter 2016 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Winter 2016. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Winter 2016 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6124a5b504f281bb6b994f18da31b899.pdf 1ef2afa409aec3a5422ffb3224a380da PDF Text Text 1 1 1 1 1 1 1i11mm~~iiil111 1 1 1 1 1 3 1696 01171 060 3 Energeia Spring 2015 �Energeia spring 2015 �Energeia editor Ekemezie U che managing editors Abigail Purnell Jakub Piven staff Sebastian Abella Patrick Turley cover by Shayna Jenkins : Light 3 �contents Terence Washington 7 6:15 Max Anthony 9 A Scunce of Frivolity Michael Van Wie Jr. 10 The Second Man artwork ZawMaw 6 Central Train Statum- Yangon, Burma Elizabeth Janthey 14 The Binding of l<1aac Jennifer Ongley 22 Back James Connors 26 47 55 Shroud Sy<1tem, Indian Creek Rock Salt, Gene<1eo Synthetic Arrangement, Buffaw Elizabeth Wooten 32 The Cro.Ming Jakub Piven 50 Untitled originally by AbyJiLM Bertrand Casey Morris 15 Before the Rain Thomas Magnette 16 Late Sunday Happy Hour Sebastian Abella 18 ToMySon originally by Miguel Hernandez Erik Neave To Know the Joy of Leaving Andrew Gudgel 25 33 Other<1 Will See Out<1UJe Waldo, Ohw Ely Fish 27 Miracle Machine Eva Brann 34 Teacher<! and Student<1: Intimate Di:Jtance Daniel Belshaw 48 &d Annapoli:J James Connors 4 23 51 Energeia 5 �6:15 Terence Wac1bington One day you open your eyes beneath a dark window. In fact, you often wake before the streets do, but this day, instead of lying in bed watching last night 1s highlights, waiting for it to be an okay hour to be awake, you choose to get up and go outside. You make some of the first prints in the snow and see a new and cute dog-walker, but soon your prints get filled in and you avoid the walker, not wanting to impinge on a routine which must always have been going on in the years you spent dawns sleeping. Centra Train Station - Yangon, Burma/ Zaw Maw People of a certain age or comportment wake up early so they can get the jump on obligation and diversion. There is no hurrying before sunup. Ambling has yet to be coming or going. Most people walking around now are already where they want to be. After grabbing coffee beans you walk home shivering, thinking of how well you can see certain things when the promise of light isn't yet fulfilled. At a certain hour people seem more authentic and the world is quieter in a way that is and is not related to sound. 6 7 �Starting the water, you pull down what you realize is your favorite mug and resolve to wake early, or maybe on time, more often. The sun rises, but you don't have to watch: it's the hour, not necessarily the sight, that bewitches. You reflect, with regret only at first, on all those quiet mornings you could have spent truly alone. For now, you sit and listen to yourself. It dawns on you how sad it is how long you'd wished to wake after the world had grown too loud for you to hear. A Science of Frivolity Max Anthony Anthropologists suggest cooking food permitted man's brain to grow and his stomach to shrink. But will they suspect the first flesh cooked was probably human? You say life begins at conception. But when does conception occur? At that height of man's endeavors or in the sighing that follows? "We": the apotheosis of the insincere. Would that the Doomsday Clock run like the Cuckoo. The Eighth Commandment is clearly meant for women. For the only false witness one could bear is a child. To those who say "real life": Learn not to employ degrading adjectives. SanktMax 8 9 �Le Deuxieme Homme A!oy.:JiUr:J Bertrand Enfer ! - Enfer et paradis ! -- eris de desespoir ! eris de joie ! - blasphemes des reprouves ! concerts des elus! - ames des marts, sembables aux chenes de la montagne deracines par les demons! ames des marts, sembables aux fleurs de la vallee cueillies par les anges. Soleil, firmament, terre et homme, tout avait commence, tout avait fini. Une voix secoua le neant. - « Soleil? appela cette voix, du seuil de la radieuse Jerusalem. - Soleil? repeterent les echos de l'inconsolable J osaphat. » - Et le soleil ouvrit ses cils d'or sur le chaos des mondes . Mais le firmament pendait comme un lam beau d' etendard. - «Firmament? appela cette voix, du seuil de la radieuse Jerusalem. - Firmament? repeterent les echos de l'inconsolable Josaphat.» Et le firmament deroula aux vents ses plis de pourpre et d' azur. 10 Mais la terre voguait a la derive, comme un navire foudroye qui ne porte dans ses Banes que des cendres et des ossements. - «Terre? appela cette voix, du seuil de la radieuse Jerusalem. - Terre? repeterent les echos de l'inconsolable J osaphat. » - Et la terre ayant jete l'ancre, la nature s'assit, couronnee de fleurs, sous le porche des montagnes aux cent mille colonnes. The Seco·nd Man tran.:J!ated by Michael Van Wu Jr. Hell! - Hell and Heaven! - Cries of despair! Cries of joy! - Blasphemies from the reprobate! Concerts from the elect! - Souls of the dead, seeming like oaks of the mountain uprooted by the demons! Souls of the dead, seeming like flowers of the valley plucked by the angels. Sun, sky, earth, man, all had begun, all had ended. A voice shook the void. "Sun?" the voice called, from the threshold of the Heavenly Jerusalem. "Sun?" repeated the echoes of the inconsolable J ehoshaphat. - And the sun opened its golden eyelashes upon the chaos of the cosmos. But the sky was hanging like a tatter of a battle standard. "Sky?" the voice called, from the threshold of the Heavenly Jerusalem. "Sky?" repeated the echoes of the inconsolable J ehoshaphat. And the sky unfurled with the winds its folds of burgundy and azure. But the earth was flotsam in the current, like a devastated ship which bears within its hull only char and bones. "Earth?" the voice called, from the threshold of the Heavenly Jerusalem. "Earth?" repeated the echoes of the inconsolable Jehoshaphat. And the earth having been tossed its anchor, nature sat down, crowned with flowers, beneath the porch of mountains with a hundred 11 �thousand columns. Mais l'homme manquait a la creation, et tristes etaient la terre et la nature, l'une de l'absence de son roi, l'autre de l' absence de son epoux. ~ «Homme? appela cette voix, du seuil de la radieuse Jerusalem . ~ Homme? repeterent les echos de !'inconsolable J osaphat.,, Et l'hymne de deliverance et de graces ne brisa point le sceau dont la mart avait plombe les levres de l'homme endormi pour l' eternite dans le lit du sepulcre. «Ainsi soit-ill dit cette voix, et le seuil de la radieuse Jerusalem se voila de deux sombres ailes . ~ Ainsi soit-ill Repeterent les echos, et !'inconsolable J osaphat se remit a pleurer. >> ~ Et la trompette de l'archange sonna d' abl:me en abl:me, tandis que tout croulait avec un fracas et une ruine immense: le firmament, la terre et le soleil, faute de l'homme, cette pierre angulaire de la creation l 12 But man was missing from creation, and sad were the earth and nature, the former lacking its king, the latter lacking its spouse. "Man?" the voice called, from the threshold of the Heavenly Jerusalem. "Man?" repeated the echoes of the inconsolable Jehoshaphat. And the hymn of salvation and grace did not break the seal with which death had bound the lips of man, asleep for eternity in the bed of the sepulcher. "So be it l" said the voice, and the threshold of the Heavenly Jerusalem covered itself with two dark wings. "So be itl" repeated the echoes, and the inconsolable Jehoshaphat was given to weeping again. And the archangel's trumpet sounded from abyss to abyss, while everything collapsed with a din and immense devastation: the sky, the earth, and the sun, from the sin of man, that cornerstone of creation l 13 �Before the Rain Ca.:1ey Morru At College Creek A little after seven, the water rests and swills the blue shadows of cattails and mudflat grass a rough embrace, it seems along the banks, of shadows summer water and their faint race through the parting lilies rowing through flies whose rising will only be remembered as rain. 14 15 �Late Sunday Happy Hour Thoma.1 Magnette Musical caffeine bounces off the brass and lights drown out the streetlights. In the early night music videos and the Patriots game are staring back in the picture window pane. My head scans clockwise the time telling of empty highball glasses, fresh faces, brawls. tv Sammy of Sammy, Don, Chip arid M att, at the popular table, holds brown bottled laughter of being the largest and the loudest but not the baldest. He's always telling the same story from the eighties where he 1s the punchline somewhere near Borderline. Tall Don turns aways and laughs. Left of the register, under the speakers in their spot, two vodka sodas, one with a sp lash, occasionally speak into each others'ear where it's too loud to hear. They 1re holding hands on top of the bar and Neiman Marcus intrudes, running his mouth off but splash guy is too polit e to brush him off. Vodka smiles but looks away and rolls his ey es . In the center, leaning on draft t aps, I w at ch this world across the bar top. In the window my red hat and concealed ey es r eflect back at me. Meanwhile, romantic scruffy brow n-haired hipsters, I hope unnot iced, sitting on barstools beside the window trade thick rimmed glances beside sweaty blushed vodka cocktails. Accidental brushings of boots catch the opposite hems on rolled chinos. 16 Tonight's fifty y ear old shy guy from Ohio stares at the New England v er sus Chicago in Levis and a college tee, hoping to see someone noticing him nur sing a Bud heavy, wondering whether a fumble or an inter ception's even possible by ten but someone's alw ay s ready early on a Sunday. 17 �AMi Hijo Miguel Hernandez To My Son tranJLated 6y Se6a.Jtian A6eLLa Te has negado a cerrar los ojos, muerto mfo, abiertos ante el cielo coma dos golondrinas: su color coronado de junios, ya es rodo alejandose a ciertas regiones matutinas. Hoy, que es un dia coma bajo la tierra, oscuro, coma bajo la tierra, lluvioso, despoblado, con la humedad sin sol de mi cuerpo futuro, coma bajo la tierra quiero haberte enterrado. Today, like a day under the earth, dark, like under the earth, drenched in rain, unpopulated, with humidity that lacks the sunlight of my future body, like under the earth, I want to have buried you. Desde que tu eres muerto no alientan las mananas, al fuego arrebatadas de tus ojos solares: precipitado octubre contra nuestras ventanas, diste paso al otofio y anochecio los mares. Since you have died, the mornings do not animate to the impetuous fire of your sun-like eyes: October headlong against our windows, you gave way to autumn and made the seas into dusk. Te ha devorado el sol, rival unico y hondo y la remota sombra que te lanzo encendido; te empuja luz abajo llevandote hasta el fondo, tragandote; y es coma si no hubieras nacido. You became devoured by the sun, your only rival and deep and the distant shadow that flung you, alight; The light pushes you from below, taking you to the depths, Swallowing you whole; it is as though you were never born. Diez meses en la luz, redondeando el cielo, sol muerto, anochecido, sepultado, eclipsado . Sin pasar por el dia se marchito tu pelo; atardecio tu carne con el alba en un lado. 18 You have refused to close your eyes, my dead one, they are open before the skies like two swallows: Their June-crowned hue is already dew, and distances themselves to certain regions of the mornmg. Ten months in the light, circling the sky, Dead sun, made to dusk, buried, eclipsed. Without passing through the day your hair has faded; your flesh has turned to evening with dawn by the side. El pajaro pregunta por ti, cuerpo al oriente, carne naciente al albay al jubilo precisa; nifio que solo supo reir, tan largamente, que solo ciertas flares mueren con tu sonrisa. The bird asks for you, body towards East, nascent flesh to dawn and to a particular joy; Boy that knew only how to laugh, for so long, that only certain flowers die with your smile. 19 �Ausente, ausente, ausente como la golondrina, ave estival que esquiva vivir al pie del hielo: golondrina que a poco de abrir la pluma fina, naufraga en las tijeras enemigas del vuelo. Flor que no foe capaz de endurecer los dientes, de llegar al mas leve signo de la fiereza. Vida como una hoja de labios incipientes, hoja que se desliza cuando a sonar empieza. Flower that was incapable of strengthening its teeth, of reaching the faintest indication of fierceness. Life like a leaf with nascent lips, Leaf which slips away when it begins to sound. Los consejos del mar de nada te han valido ... Vengo de dar a un tierno sol una pufialada, de enterrar un pedazo de pan en el olvido, de echar sobre unos ojos un puiiado de nada. The advice from the sea has been useless to you ... I return from stabbing the tender sun from burying a piece of bread into oblivion, to cast upon your eyes a handful of nothing. Verde, rojo, moreno: verde, azul y dorado; los latentes colores de la vida, los huertos, el centro de las flares a tus pies destinado, de oscuros negros tristes, de graves blancos yertos. Green, red, brown: Green, blue and gold. The veiled colors of life, the orchard the center of the flowers by your destined feet of sad dark-blacks, of solemn frozen-whites. Mujer arrinconada: mira que ya es de dia. (jAy, ojos sin poniente por siempre en la alborada!) Pero en tu vientre, pero en tus ojos, mujer mia, la noche continua cayendo desolada. 20 Absent, absent, absent like the swallow Summer bird that refrains from living at the foot of ice : Swallow that, soon after opening its fine plumage, is shipwrecked on the enemy scissors of its flight. Abandoned woman, look, it is now day. (Oh, eyes without setting into dawn!) But in your womb, but in your eyes, my woman, the night continues to fall into desolation . 21 �-------.....--- - - - -- - - To Know·the Joy of Leaving Erik Neave To know the joy of leaving - flesh and blood On flesh and blood - between the murmuring tongues, Before the song is buried in thunder, Takes the gentle burden of tired offspring Filling the cradle of cause and result; Eyelids heavy, set on sleep, mimicking Pizzicato cries and swells of close chords Sound, diminished, down the skeletal hall Emptied of life, a ghost of the future . (When clapped hands might carry grateful bodies Into the cavernous foyer for tea And tan coffee and pleasant, hushed talk And force the ghost to shuffle, wind-like And slip slow between civilised whispers And into the cold corpse of now . .. and now ... ) Back/ Jennifer Ongley 22 And now each quivering step on matte ice Sends memory to its mirror image . Like summer rain and white-washed nights converge, Toying with memory. Each season demands absolute regard, A quartet of individual voice Legato as the sliding, icy steps . Stones to home and warm, silent midnight - a Squirming torso bending towards the darkness, The haze, or the vague routine of childhood Guiding the dying present to dead past. One hears, at last, the palm-muted ballad Of flesh and blood on flesh and blood leaving 23 �Overflowing auditoriums then, For a vacant, translucent stillness now. A stillness that fills the whole unended song with )Oy. 24 Others Will See (For v.rw) Andrew Gudgel He was right even though he was wrong. He did not return; the body to dust And the soul into air disappearing. His like the nation ne'er will see again, For he was a creature of his times: The bloody war, the soldiers ' death rattles Breathed out as he patiently penned Letters home on their behalf. Then there came The swelling chorus of a reviv ed nation Stretching from sea to shining sea, Which like he and his body, found pow er And exaltation in its sinew and Spit and muscle and seed and lust for life. But as predicted, in latter days did Come other men who rode the ferry as He once had, gazing at Manhattan shores While the sun came up and the gulls wheeled Overhead, and all unaware of him Who rode before, who chanted his strong chants In homage to life and America. 25 �The Miracle Machine Ely Fuh The miracle machine grips you by the head. It whirs and comes alive. In your eyes, lights flash. In your ears, beeps play. You are on a beach. The sky is a dull, rainy grey, and it seems to you it should be chilly, though you feel neither cold nor hot. The waves crash and foam. Out at sea, a storm rages, and lightning strikes the horizon. A few droplets of rain fall on you, but you feel no wetness. In fact, you feel nothing at all. There is no one else on the beach, though it seems there might have been, once. You see the empty expanse of shoreline stretch off to infinity in both directions . Behind you are silent palm trees. The sand looks wet and clumped, but you don't feel it. The rain drips, and the miracle machine beeps and flashes. You lie down on the sand and stare up at the sky. Its grey is too perfect, too uniform. You lift your arms above you. They are arms, and they are yours, but they don't look like yours, or anyone 's. They tell you nothing about who you are. The machine beeps and flashes, and none of this surprises you. 26 27 �- - - - - -- - - - i I You feel bored, so you make a fist, holding within it the sky itself. You imagine a very different scene, and fling this sky off into the distance. Obediently, it slides away, revealing the darkness of night and the growling rage of a storm that is closing in on the shore. The rain stabs the sand around you. You rise, seeing and hearing lightning strike again and again out in the depths of the unending sea. The flashes illuminate a rogue wave, building in strength and intensity. And for a moment, you are pleased. This world you have created, or that has been created for you, is well rendered. You watch the wave grow and rush towards you. A flash of light and it is miles off. Another and it is half a mile. Another and it is twenty feet away and fifty feet high, the whitecap like great teeth beckoning you into the wave's gaping mouth. It is beautiful. But the idea of being swallowed annoys you. So you push the wave off and toss away the whole scene. Somewhere far away, the machine whirs loudly, as if pleased. You make a bright day. The sky is a solid chunk of blue, the sun not quite intense enough to burn the retinas of your mind's ey e . You throw in seagulls, a handful of clouds. You pull the ground up from beneath you a hundred feet, forming a cliff face, and leap off, snapping your fingers to freeze yourself in midair in the instant before you can touch the water's surface. Hanging above the frozen sea, you chuckle, and then you unfreeze, falling into 28 ' the liquid that-should feel like something but doesn't. Floating in the lonely sea, you suddenly feel bored again. You are struck by a certain fuzziness, and silly questions like "who are you" and "where are you" and "what's the point" make themselves known. But these questions are irrelevant, both to you and to the miracle machine - its beeps and clicks tell you that you need to end this boredom, and end it fast. So you pull a reverse-leap out of the water, sliding the cliff back down simultaneously, and land on even ground, doing a bow for no one in particular. You decide this place needs people. So you make some. First, a family : Mother, Father, Daughter, Son. You give them lives as best y ou are able. The females tan. The mother t ells her daughter about shopping in Paris; the daughter is enchanted, and dreams of the Sienne. The father and son toss a football around, the father telling the son about how to get gir ls, and the son imagining a stadium and a thousand screaming fans. You know you can't be a part of this, so you float above their heads, and decide one family isn't enough. So you throw down another, then a few more. They congregate and bask in the heat and talk about nothing and gossip about everyone. 29 �• Who are you? A thousand heads turn. No one moves. No one screams. You can't stop. You tear down the trees, build a hotel, and fill it with people - businessmen, shady characters, vapid fools, sad folk, and their families, with vast sums of money in tow. You give them things. Bulldozers tear up the palms, and suddenly there's a casino with dinging slots and the illusion of possibilities. Then there's a theme park with the highest and fastest roller coasters in this or any world, with an entrance price in the hundreds of dollars. ATVs are available to rent. Boats take people tubing or parasailing. Coral reefs beckon scuba divers, itching to explore ... The miracle machine beeps and flashes . And then a loud buzz sounds. The beach melts away. Your eyes open. It is over. You are alone in your room, on your bed, back in your body. Your walls are yours, but they seem foreign. Your heart beats, but y ou'd forgotten you had one. Your body aches, but it seems like someone else's pain. You feel as though you have woken from a dream, but you do not feel refreshed. You feel only longing. Who are you? The electrodes retract from your temples, and t he wires slither back into the body of the miracle machine. A superhighway is built. People race to get here at a hundred miles per hour, stay an instant, and leave at the same speed. An airport makes driving obsolete. More hotels spring up, bringing more people. And then, you realize that this place has moved beyond your control, and that you feel empiy and you don't know what this is or who you are but you know that you need to feel something. Anything. You sleep. Tomorrow, it will t ake you again. You become enraged. 30 So you call forth a tsunami, a hundred times the size and strength of the rogue wave you stared down. You float higher and higher in the sky until you are miles abov e the fray. And you watch. 31 �• Outside Waldo, Ohio Andrew Gudgel The trees their gnarled hands held up Hoping to seize handfuls of autumn sky, Whose afternoon blue shaded up beyond The vision of bees and men and into The realm of angels. The sun, only four fingers now above The horizon, its light pale and heatless, Cast corn-stalk shadows like a picket fence For miles down the road. In cardinal directions, lonely crows cawed over and over, seeking solace, Permission or maybe absolution, In a land made sere and biblical, All the way to the edge of the world. ;..... The Crossing/ E!b:a6eth Woott~n 32 33 �+ Teachers and Students: Intimate Distance Eva Brann There 1s something strange about our world, about its things, events, people. They reach us in two ways: real and unreal, genuine and fake, true and false, actual and virtual. lt1s surely the point of a real "higher" education to help us make out which is which, how they get entangled, switch sides, complement each other and, last but not least, how to live in this dual world and even get a - livable living out of it. A witty colleague of mine used to say that at St. John 1s we 1re always hunting down the primal amoeba. lt 1s quite true - a genuine education does a lot of tracking down and tracing back: delving deep into the hidden bases of things, following them back to their first beginnings. This passion for digging down and finding out holds us together. It shapes the relation between us teachers and our students. Succinctly put, we are all in it together - teachers, students, and a great third element: our Program. We form - all of us together a "community oflearning." Such a community has to be small, face -to-face, day-by-day. There are large, virtual connectivities in our world that do useful things (such as on-line courses with tenthousand takers), but as communities oflearning, they are illusionistic irrealities. 34 So the three elements of our college, a real community of learning, are the Program, the teachers, the students - mentioned last, but really first, because they are the reason for our existence. Why? Because there can be students without teachers, but a studentless teacher? That would be like a mute singer - a pathetic urgency. And yet I 1ll soon want to say that we really aren 1t teachers, and therefore call ourselves "tutors" (of which more below), and that our students don 1t just study. (l 1m not thinking of our many distinctive extracurricular activities, from major-league croquet to small-sloop sailing in Annapolis, and in Santa Fe, "search and rescue" operations and every kind of outdoor activity.) I mean that our students aren 1t supposed to study in the sense of now and then, at examination time "hitting the books" (as they used to say), which sounds like a deliberately caused traffic accident. We hope rather that they will read steadily, but put down the book often to look up and think by themselves, or find their friends to talk with about what they1ve absorbed - or, for that matter, take a tutor to lunch for conversation (which is free; no one ever went to a college dining hall for the gourmet experience, yet tutors are delighted to be asked). Even the first element that makes us one, the Program, is not a rigid prescription but a way to freedom: the relief from blind choices and sign-up anxieties, the security in having the grounding to do anything whatsoever in life, and the comfort of 35 �having classmates with whom to share discoveries and work out problems. We are great believers in thinking by oneself and studying together - both in turn. Footnotes are where writers park matter too close to their hearts to be left out, but perhaps for the moment skippable by the intended reader. I shall put in a footnote what I think of as the main characteristics (not the actual content) of the St. John 's Program.':' (Footnote on pg. 44) You can see that I 've said mostly what we are not; human ways that are seriously significant are often, to begin with, best described from the outside in, from what they avoid and resist, and so I'll go on like that for a little more. 36 We, the faculty, call ourselves "tutors" to avoid the appellation, standard for colleges, of "professors." Professors have certain properties we disown: They are trained in a profession, that of scholarship and research, and are expert in a sub-part of it, their specialty. Their duty is to train their students in the methods, and to impart to them the material, in which they are competent authorities. Oddly enough, they usually have no training in teaching, on the assumption (for which I actually have a lot of sympathy) that if you know "your subject" really well, are engaged in "original research" in it, and have some residual enthusiasm for it, you will infuse your expertise into your students. As a result a professor's relation to undergraduate students labors under a certain built-in aw k wardness and even liability. Professors are far more learned in their area than are their students and so, rightly, assume superior standing. But they are also teachers who, in order to be effective, need to be on a level, on a human equality, with their pupils. It is not easy to find the right tone between mature superiority and human togetherness. The danger of dominance is great; what's more, sometimes it is exactly what students want: to be told things, to be molded. But the more they want it, the more fraught with delicacy, even embarrassment, the relation must be. A tutor has a different - I think a very different relation to students. The word "tutor" is Latin and means a watcher-over, a guardian. At our college, the teachers are tutors who protect the students 1 learning - even from the t utors themselves. They try not to dominate the students' thinking but t o elicit it by asking many pertinent questions and then really participating in the resulting dialogue not M if the participants are equal but because they are equal - equal as thinking, feeling, bottomlessly mysterious and inexhaustibly interesting human beings. Here are the two dominations from which w e most strenuously abstain: political and personal. A teacher who perverts occasions for learning into opportunities for propaganda is either naively or cannily corrupt; a teacher who exploits a student's 37 �• devotion for personal use is just plain iniquitous. It's not that students may not ask our advice or, in a limited way, regard us as models; in fact no faculty could ask for more appreciative respect than we get from our students and alumni. (By "our" students I mean the students at our college. - I 've rarely heard a colleague speak of the personal property called "my student.") 38 this is as a paradox: We're non-teaching teachers. So now I'll try to delineate the relation of students and tutors from the inside out. But the more I think about it, the more it seems that this relat ion is really pervasively paradoxical (but then, so are all humanly significant matters). By "paradoxical" I don't mean evasively messy, or elusively murky. Not at all: paradoxes can state crisply the way things really are, which always includes a bit of their opposite. So here are five rubrics that seem to me to describe our tutor 's, our non-teaching teacher's relation to our students. Not being professors makes all sorts of additional difference here: We are not professionals of knowledge but amateurs of learning: Amateur means "lover" - that is, a lover of learning who is on the way, not at the end. All of us have acquired a small file of information and a sufficient fund of knowledge - enough to help our students in the most empathetic way through a demanding Program (one that has in it not the ghost of a gut course). But much of what we learned in pursuit of our advanced degrees is out of commission here: We all begin at the beginning to learn the same material as the students. We, as do they, advance in the Program, but there is no such thing as mastering it; its matter is too deep and too inexhaustible. Thus we are, in some significant sense, viewed from the heights of real knowledge, always on a level with our students - and so the awkwardness of inequality ceases. It takes our freshmen a little while to be really persuaded that their tutors are waiting for them to articulate their own thoughts, the fruit of their studies (and their lives), and that when their teachers speak, they're not talking at them but with them. One way to put 1. Unequal Equality 2. 3. 4. 5. Formal Closeness Intimate Distance Reticent Accessibility Respectful Love 1. Unequal Equality: I 've already said a good deal about that, but it is basic: Our whole school is basically egalitarian. Tutors have no ranks, students are not ranked. Competition has its place in the gym. Thinking well requires a lot of high spirits, and speaking well surely involves the desire to shine - but not at each others' expense. Students don 't do each other in so they can stand out; tutors don't out-do each other for academic bonuses (there aren't any). Students will hav e no success trying to impress the tutors; we hav e a good nose for pretense and don't like it. Tutors don't squash students with their magnificence; if '' 39 �ever they do, our upperclass students go to the dean and complain: He or she "dominates." Basically, students and tutors are serious with each other and that precludes personal pretensions. What makes us serious is our willingness to face the depths and abysses broached by the Program of study. (One proof of living seriousness is finding a lot to laugh about, such as all-too-consistent conformities and irresistibly comical incongruities.) We approach these problems unequal in maturity and with different levels of learning and experience, but equal in the desire to deal with the question at hand and on the same level in the face of its depth. At least, that 1s how it works when we 1re at our best; we aren 1t - here 1s full disclosure - all the time. 2. Formal Closeness: This college observes a lot of customs, most for articulable reasons. One is that we call each other Ms. or Mr. - no first names (except in circumstances where strict observance is ridiculous). The reason is that we often converse about matters that touch us deeply, so that formal civility is an important shield against becoming personal in the wrong way. Those formal observances make possible what you might call a higher-level closeness: We can pierce surfaces without lacerating each other. Generally, tutors and students maintain these formalities, through which they can touch each other inoffensively, until Commencement. On that day it's first names and, for some of us, friendship for life. 40 3. Intimate Distance: For while at the college, tutors and students are not friends in a genuine sense. The essence of true friendship - there are wonderful books about this on the Program 1s reading list - is real reciprocity (equal give and take) and true mutuality (simultaneous esteem) . How can tutors expect real reciprocity in intellectual guidance or students true mutuality of esteem? Tutors do, in fact, tend to know a lot more than stu dents, and what 1s more, tutors are obligated to evaluate students. So their equality in inquiry and their esteem for each other as human b eings sometimes has to recede before a clear and candid assessment by tutors of students 1 efforts and performances, including some pretty strong, tutorial words of what, by a euphemism, would be called encouragement. In other words, tutors must, on scheduled occasions, tell students what 1s what, which is not a mode of friendship. Thus a distance opens up. And yet there remains an intimacy - that of watchful care, of having the students 1 interest at heart. But that is not the only or chief sort of intimacy that a discreet distance makes permissible. The word intimacy comes from a Latin adjective, intimus, meaning "innermost," "most deeply within." What our books speak to us about is what is most internally ourselves. Especially when we are young, when we are most selfconsciously involved with other people, we tend to think that we get really to know and be known by others from the inside through a revealing exchanges of personal confidences and by daring disclosures of secrets. But the intimacies of our 41 �T souls that are suitable to common learning leap past these privacies, that should be reserved for particular friends, to a common humanity. Yet everything concerning the human soul - including the perfectly legitimate question whether we have one - is delicate and requires a certain careful distance from each other in order to be approached together. 42 4. Reticent Accessibility: We tutors don't keep posted office hours: "Tuesday and Thursday from 3-4 p.m. and by appointment." We are available when needed, and not only in an office (many of us don't have one), but w herever on campus we can sit and talk. Put it this way: People in offices are official, and while the relation of students and tutors sometimes has a semi-official aspect, as in scheduled oral examinations or "don rags" (our evaluations), for the most part even these are not so much bureaucratic or administrative (which is a particularly powerful and, as it happens, unavoidable way of being unreal) as genuinely human ways of guarding learning. So tutors and students get together in spontaneous ways, not hedged around with protocols of hierarchy and officialdom. On the other hand, there are restraints on these relations. We, the tutors, cannot function as personal trainers of students, riding herd on their indiscipline, and even if we would, we couldn't because of the demands on us. And in fact, students are respectful of our time, and we of theirs. Nor are we mom-and-dad substitutes; much as we may in our h earts sympathize with our students 1 griefs (which are much better known to us, even without telling, than they may know). We - students and teachers - contain our personal affairs below overt expression. Our students have a wonderful capacity, which has won my particular admiration, since it shows that the learning we do together has really taken: They exercise a thoughtful literacy in framing their most intimate feelings - of certainty or confusion, pride or guilt, triumph or grief; they communicate in those expressive terms, available to the beneficiaries of a real education, which make it possible to talk about anything, poignantly and yet without unwanted psychic touching. So in brief: Tutors and students are mutually accessible - but under restraint. And here's a bonus: A little loss in laid-back self-expression leads to a great gain in psychic intensity. 5. Respectful Love: Everything I've said so far about the relation between tutors and student s r eally comes to this: There's a sort oflove between us, real enough but well hedged by the realities of the situation. The best name, I think, for that sort of love is respect. "Respect" is yet another significant Latin word. "To respect" means "to look round at;" respect is thus a kind of wide-ey ed regard - not a bold and intrusive stare but a guarding and guarded glance, a careful and caring attention. Our regard for each other is reciprocal, but it cannot help but be somewhat different in kind. First, as far as mere ocular looking, seeing appearances, goes - and such physical eyeing is an unavoidable aspect of all "respect" - the y oung are 43 �just nicer to behold than their elders, and so far this is a plain truth - we are in their debt (not to mention here the attendant dangers). But the young, our students, are works in progress while we, the tutors, are closer to works accomplished, and so they look up to us (and here too are dangers, already mentioned). Second, as far as genuine respect, the true regard we have for each other 1s being, is concerned, one difference is that each tutor knows quite a number of students while each student knows only a few tutors. So the tutors 1 loving regard is - perhaps - somewhat more distributed, the students 1 admiring respect somewhat more intense. On the other hand, we - perhaps - know better what to look for than they do and so our regard is more realistic. But when all is said and done, what is truly mutual is affectionate regard, respectful love, lasting a lifetime. i:> I think four characteristics describe our Program: Greatness, Books, Tradition, Truth-Seeking, all closely interwoven. 44 Experts tell us that they've all four gone out of style among the young; that is why I want to sketch them out here. The experts are the folks who suppose that you find out what human beings think by instructing them to fill out questionnaires . I think that our students are practically defined by being unresponsive to jigged pseudoquestions, the kind that have numbered or yes/no answers, because for-real questions, which take time and human back-and-forth to produce a consummation, are the main way of our college. So if you believe that such results about contemporary late adolescents are true, you 'll believe anything. GreatnedJ. We, the tutors, the faculty, think that human works, particularly the kind called "texts," tapestries (like in "textile") woven of words, notes, symbols, come in gradable degrees of fineness: low-grade junk, passable mediocrity, unsurpassable greatness - and lots of unplaceable stuff. All human works, like the beings that produce them, can be interesting - appealingly or repellently fascinating. Nonetheless, we think that it's our pedagogic responsibility 1. to make out, by reading and thinking together, which is which and 2. to put into our Program mostly the works we think are the finest, the greatest. We are convinced - and this is emphatically not what is practiced much in universities - that since the world is full of lowness, banality, mediocrity, badness, and even evil, our students will have ample time to study and grapple with these later on. We are persuaded that just as those children live most competently in the world who experienced goodness at home, so those students will do best later who are amply provided in college with ideas of what is genuinely, desirable, great. For h ow can you "h ange ,, t h e c world (the almost universal student desire except for the tragically misguided one of making a lot of money) if you don't know in what direction? Booko. Such matter is found in books, or as academics say, in texts of all sorts: verbal, musical, mathematical, even instructional (such as laboratory manuals). Great Books are not "delivery systems" for information (which is only informative when you already know what you're doing) but are brought about by a high art in which the how and the what are conjoined. They may come in any format from real letters printed on solid paper to virtual texting on a translucent tablet (though, for all I care, a student may come to class, like Moses down from Mount Sinai, with engraved stone tablets) - as long as they have been well studied, have opened the mind for conversation, and are present on the table for ready reference . 45 �""T' I Tradition . Who wants to live on the thin forefront of all that went into making the present, and so, ignorant of what's pushing from behind, be helplessly driven into a future not of their own making? We study "the tradition" - meaning the works that made modernity - not because they're old but because they're at work in our present. Not to experience the illumination to be gotten from this tradition is to live in the dullest and most dominating of all time-phases: the mere now. Truth-Seeking. In most class-rooms in our country (I'm pretty sure) there's "correct" and "incorrect" for the hard sciences but not "true" and "false" in the squishy humanities. In these, where are raised questions of moral right and wrong, of esthetic beauty and ugliness, of human power or impotence, of first and last things, people shy away from asking: "Is what this author says true or not really true, truly beautiful or just elaborate, really penetrating or ultimately evasive?" We pursue a middle course: We stay away equally from delivering dogmas and from wishy-washy disengagement. We ask our students (as ourselves) to try to answer, to form their own opinion, but also to explain themselves to each other. 46 47 �Red Annapolis Danie! Beuhaw There, below flushed clouds, That are like fowl, as they perilously sit In the sky's suspension, Waiting to honorably discharge their creations, The exorbitantly pink rays Slashing through the atmosphere like branches, And maybe, unmoving on the courtyard, Someone in one of the Georgian houses across the streetWould see my state, rush over out of pity, and pull me out of the ground. Like pulling a pin off a board, but that is unl~kel~. And even if they saw me, through one of their wmdows, They must leave for the brightness of their kitchen and, Me, I would sink back into the courtyard. But this collapse of movement probably will not take place. My body, foot after foot, Attempting to leave the courtyard behind And my besieged, bedraggled senses Floating away, like balloons, over the tops of the buildings, My physical self too singleminded To change course and recapture them. When you walk at this hour, The world is more gravitational than before. Stand where you are, for just an instant, And you will stand there as if forever, the pant legs And the leather of your shoes the bark, and the shoot, The rubber of your soles the stump, and the roots, Not caring to get along. Perhaps I am asking too much of this establishment that calls itself the night, with a slightly cold temperat ure And ten mileperhour winds working the late shift. They are eyeing me from many places, waiting for my check. I have not yet written it, for I am t he man who Orders drink after drink. I have paid, hour after hour, For additional stores of str engt h; The temperature has been receptive to my desires, The wind, less so; I think it wishes to get home, Desperately, even. But I am not finished with my self in this light, And even if they kick me, I will simply spill out o~to the street And live a doubleday, smashing the signposts of time for my ow n ends. 48 49 �Energeia · Jamu ConnorcJ The title of this journal got me thinking about what 1energeia 1 might have to do with photography. What is photography? I want to say it is a formalization of vision . All photographs delineate, order, and preserve a particular visual moment. If vision itself is a way in which we receive the world, then photography delineates, orders, and preserves our reception of the world. Untitled/ Jalcu6 Piven But what is the point? We see well enough on our own, right? We already formalize the world in our mind, so what does the extra processing of the photograph provide? Perhaps it is this : insight into the energeia of things around us. I am not sure what 1energeia 1 means, but Aristotle seems to urge us to say that the activity of our world is mixed. Think of boulders, bodies of water, flora and fauna. The work of these 1natural 1 beings consists simply in preserving themselves . This much is straightforward. Of course, these are not the only things we encounter. The world is also full of art objects that some natural beings 1create 1 by combining, relocating, or repurposing other natural beings . Think of a hermit crab shell, a bird's nest, a hammer. These objects do not work to preserve themselves, but work for the goal of their creator. 50 51 �There is a 'tension' lying dormant in what I am calling art objects. Their work for the creator is at odds with their former work as natural beings, which we could say they might 'rather be doing '. For instance, an ax is called into the service of chopping, but its wooden handle once worked for the sake of 'treeness ' and it is to treeness that it owes everything (and similarly with the metal part). As the dead remnant of the tree it once sought to be, the ax handle now finds its woodenness humiliating. The tools we use are like mercenary soldiers with deeper affiliations elsewhere. This might sound ridiculous, but perhaps less so if we try to 'see' beyond our own ends. Does the art object have a specific energeia? I 'm not sure. If not then it is meaningless bastard matter. If so, does this energeia consist of its service to the creator, or the remnants of its natural being that continue to 'stay themselves' out of loyalty to their original form? Is it even our place to say? In a very real way, art objects are 'working overtime' serving many masters at once, and becoming exhausted all around us. This explains a range of phenomena in the class of plane crashes and nuclear meltdowns, as well as when my pencil lead breaks. We might say that constructing a web is essential to the work of a spider. Is this the same thing as saying that constructing ocean liners and smart bombs are essential to the work of human beings? I have to say yes, for even the most bizarre and destructive modern technologies remain instruments in service of seemingly unchanging human ends. You might say: "humans lived for thousands of years without these instruments, therefore they are not part of our nature". They are inessential choices we have made. And I would say: "but our nature has always wanted them". When we call things choices we are not thinking hard enough, for there are always reasons why choices are made. The struggle between our energeia and that of the natural beings we enlist comes to presence in the art object, and, getting back on track, it is this latent tension that photography is particularly good at exposing. The photograph is a disjunction from life, a respite from the continual flux of unprocessed vision. A place where both the world and the viewer 'take a break' from their business to question each other. And to question the world means increasingly to question the art object. In my mind, the photograph is the prison cell of the art object's interrogation. Here it is finally at rest from work, hence we are at rest too. These are the necessary conditions to consider a world beyond human use. A building in a photograph can't hold people or collapse, but it does demand an explanation for its existence. The aesthetic strength of the photograph lies in how forcefully this demand is posed. 52 53 �To delineate the art object in the photographic frame precisely w ith respect to its non-work is always to discover unintended b eauty, regardless of the banality or inhumanity of its function. But the more we are moved here, the more we are astounded at the ruthless efficiency with which we have wrested our creations from their manifold former meanings. Consider the process by which the collection of natural beings called a 'cell phone' became your cell phone. Human energeia is exquisitely lethal, like an apex predator acting out in nature. Might we be approaching an era where the prior obligations of our inventions, the totality of which we call the natural world, are lost completely? Sy nthetic Arrangement, Buffalo/ J amN Conno1<J 55 54 '' �Energeia St. john's college 60 college ave Annapolis, md 21401 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 55 Pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Uche, Ekemezie (editor Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2015 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2015. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 2015 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/af9804651fb0ad1c34145dd4b17ea8ec.pdf adc2c4eb8e2ce5455876820f5bd55a8f PDF Text Text p I I I ! ' I - - - - - ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY 131 1 1 1 1 1 9-61 i~1 ~1 rn1 ~1 1 ir1i1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 11 / �• energe1a spring 2012 �contents • Explaining Joku Ciara Barrick 9 Smoke in the Snow 13 On the End of the Fir<1t Book of ApoLfoniud' Conics Cesar Vallejo editor 7 Brendon Lasell energe1a Wesley Schantz 22 Black Stone upon a White Stone Stephanie Connolly staff Genevieve Allen Nathan Goldman Danielle Nels on Ian Tuttle trar14fateo 6y Daniel Rooriguez 25 27 M. W. Fogleman Marcel Proust Affirmatwn<1 Mutiny On Variatwn 28 Sefectwn<1 from Du cote de chez Swann faculty advisor trar14fateo by Jacob Garrett Fawn Trigg Aalin Bellinger Sefectwn<1 from ''Heart Breaking Open: An Arc of Sonnet<! 11 Louis Petrich 41 Stooping for Excellence in Iraqi Higher E'ducatwn Robert Schuerman cover by Carlin Felt: Portrait 37 57 O'd'd Enough to he Even A WhoLLy Sonnet �7 Explaining Jokes Wuley Schantz artwork Carlin Felt 8 42 LandcJcape Treed Keeley Pratt 11 Le graffiti dancJ le Metro de Parid 29 DM Hegelhaw in Stuttgart, DeutcJchland Henley Moore 12 Untitled Brendon Lasell 15 19 Figure 1 Figure2 Michael Green 33 Eiffel from the Pont Alexandre Ill Megan Faulkner 47 64 Croquet 1 Croquet Louis Petrich 48 59 Bw!ogyLab A Faculty Picnic Shikshya Adhikari 63 Morning PrayercJ Adam Maraschky 67 Rebecca Hey there, handy clerk, young man, dear brother Nicholas, how is it living alone? Seriocomic heroic stereotype, With the astrology books by your bed For reading young wives' horoscopes, lying To them, for them, with them, bidding husbands Truss themselves in attic bathtubs, awake Below while they wait out the flood asleep~ How is it smarting with the coulter brand? Or was that your intention, bargaining On burning first for the sake of the joke, Buying an indulgence from him later? Would you mind explaining, just between us, Between trysts, how you lived so long ago And still were fooling like we're doing now, And still we're laughing at the resemblance? �9 8 Smoke in the Snow Ciara Barrick le:: ; ·'=""" •·{-: Landscape/ Carlin FeLt We smoked filtered cigarettes in the grey daylight as the snow silently fellfrom it s high precipice. You sniffled quietly, flipping t he collar of your pea coat up to cover your ears. He rubbed his calloused hands together rapidly and rocked from his left suede shoe to his right. The blue smoke drifted straight up above our heads. Watch the smoke drift through the town between the snowflakes, unique in each w ay you can see. Now it belongs to the cigars of three bigbellied, middle-aged Italian men. They lounge with their ankles resting on their knees and their cigars instruments of declaration. "No Giuseppe! He was with my daughter!" A car whizzes by and the smoke flutters further down the street. It's captured by the panting children underdressed on the wintry sidewalks as they exhale, their snot wiped with class along a lime green polyester sleeve. Dick chases Jane through the crowds before the bakery, little lungs expounding little tufts of cold smoke. Now it's flooding out of the bakery window and sirens are heard approaching from far off in the distance. A large woman, whose upper half is mostly chin, chest, and breast, bursts through the back door with a rolling pin r aised above her head and a singed apron. The smoke billows out of the doors, up the street along the apartment building's brick walls. Now it belongs to a twenty-something, mascar aed ex -girlfriend �10 11 who holds a lighter beneath his love letter outside her window in the bitter air. Pieces of his passion float to the cement underworld, leaving only a trail of smoke for her to regret missing. A mustached Mexican pushing a dolly cart of crated crap from the market to his truck kicks up the pieces. A cigarette hangs safe and loose from his lips as his feet scuffle over some forgotten words. The smoke falls over his shoulders and into the espresso cups of three married women seated outside on a day far too cold but wishing to reminisce on days when snow kept them from class, not the carpool. The steam warms their faces but leaves their noses red. We watched from the corner as you nudged me and offered me a light. Le graffiti dans le Metro de Paris/ Keeley Pratt �13 12 On the End of the First Book of Apollonius' Conicd Brenoon La<JeLL Near the beginning of his Conicd, Apollonius cuts cones with planes to generat e three Untitled/ Henley Moore different kinds of conic section: parabolas, hyperbolas, and ellipses. He shows that each of these sections can be understood by means of its relation to two straight lines, which he calls an upright Ji2e and a tranJverde diameter, 1 and an angle (the angle between the ordinated and the diameter) . After completing the initial construction of these conic sections in Proposition 13, he demonstrates the next 37 propositions without referring directly to the cones they come from. Instead, he uses only the upright and transverse sides and the given angle to prove a variety of complicat ed theorems about parabolas, ellipses and hyperbolas. Only then, in Propositions 52 through 58, does he return to the cone. In these propositions near the end of the book he show s that it is always possible to construct a section of a cone with any given upright side and transverse diameter and any given angle between its ordinates and diamet er. Why did Apollonius end Book I in this way? In proving Propositions 52 through 58 he uses many of the propositions between 15 and 51. This might suggest that he needs to work through 1 In a p arabola w e do not strictly speaking have a transverse diameter; we simply have a diameter. �14 15 most of the propositions in Book I to show that for any upright and transverse there is always a conic section. We might then understand the whole first book as intended to show this. But it turns out that he did not have to use any proposition in the Conu.1 beyond 11- 13 to prove 52- 58. He could therefore have shown immediately after Propositions 13 that it is possible to find conic sections with any given upright and transverse side, and never returned to the cone after that. We therefore have to ask again: why did he wait until the end of Book I to prove 52- 58? Perhaps he judged that the constructions he uses in these propositions are better than anything he could have done immediately after Proposition 13. To show that something is true is different from showing why, and the constructions Apollonius uses may be better at showing us why there are conic sections with any given upright and transverse side. In any case, to explore this question it helps to compare the constructions Apollonius gives in Propositions 52- 58 with the ones he might have given immediately after Proposition 13. Here are some constructions that use only Propositions 11- 13. The hyperbola Let there be two bounded straight lines AB and BC perpendicular to each other, let AB be produced to L, and let there be a given angle ABH ; it is required to find in the plane t h rough the lines AB, BC an hyperbola whose diameter will be the A F p Figure 1/ Brendon LtUeLL �16 17 straight line ABL and vertex B, and upright side the straight line BC , an d where the straight lines dropped from the section to BL at the given angle ABH will equal in square the rectangles applied to BC having as breadths the str aight lines cut off by them from Band projecting beyond by a figure similar and similarly situated to the rectangle AB, BC. Let AB be produced to D so that BD is equal to BC . Draw a line BE perpendicular to the line BH and not in the plane ABH. Let AE and DE be joined. Draw line BF from B in the plane through AB and BE such that angle ABF is equal to angle BED (which must be less than angle ABE, by Euclid's Elements I 32) . Extend line BF beyond B to a point G. Draw a parallel GK to BE through G meeting AE extended at K . Let AD, extended if necessary, meet GK at L, and draw FM from F par allel to AD and meeting GK at M. Draw a line PLQ through L parallel to BH. Draw a circle GQK with diameter GK in the plane through PLQ and GK, and let this circle meet PLQ at P and Q. Let a cone be conceived whose vertex is the point F and whose base is the circle GQK. Since the lines PLQ and GK are parallel to the lines BH and BE, respectively, and BH is perpendicular to BE, it follows that the line PLQ is perpendicular to the line GK. Since a cone, whose base is the circle GQK and whose vertex is the point F, has been cut by a plane FGK through its axis, and also by another p lane ABH cutting the base of the cone in a straight line PLQ perpendicular to the b ase GK of the axial triangle FGK, and the diameter BL of the section meets the side FK of the axial triangle at the point A beyond the vertex of the cone, it follows (by Apollonius' Proposition I 12) that the resulting section PBQ of the cone is an hyperbola whose vertex is the point B where a side of the axial triangle meets the cutting plane, whose transverse side is the line AB, and whose ordinates meet the diameter at angle BLP, which is equal to the given angle ABH. Now angle BED is equal to angle ABF, and angleABFis equal to angle GFM. Moreover, because FM is parallel to BD and BE is parallel to GM, angle GMF is equal to angle EBD. Therefore triangle GFM is similar to triangle DEB. Consequently, GM : FM: : BD : BE. Again, triangle ABE is similar to triangle FMK, and therefore MK : FM :: BE :AB. Therefore GM : FM comp . MK : FM :: BD : BE comp. BE: AB :: BD:AB ::BC :AB. But GM : FM comp. MK : FM :: rect.GM, MK : sq.FM. Therefore rect.GM, MK : sq.FM :: BC : AB. But also (by I 12) rect.GM, MK : sq.FM :: upright side : AB. Therefore the line BC is equal to the upright side of the hyperbola PBQ. Q . E. F. �18 19 The ellipse Let there be two bounded straight lines AB and BC perpendicular to each other, and let there be a given angle ABH; it is required to find in the plane through the lines AB, BC an ellipse whose diameter will be the straight line AB and vertex B, and upright side the straight line BC, and where the straight lines dropped from the section to AB at the given angle ABH will equal in square the rectangles applied to BC having as breadths the straight lines cut off by them from B and falling short by a figure similar and similarly situated to the rectangle AB, BC. We again set BD equal to BC, taking Don line AB or AB extended. We proceed as for the hyperbola, drawing some line BE perpendicular to BH, and connecting D and E . We draw BG below B such that angle GBA is equal to angle BED, and extend it above BE until it meets AE extended at F. But in the construction for the ellipse, unlike in the case of the hyperbola, we need to make sure make BE is not too long. For to guarantee that GB extended will meet AE extended above the line BE, we need angle GBA (which is equal to angle BED) to be greater than angle BAE. If BE wer e too long, then angle BED would become too small. To know how long to make BE, we need the following lemma. p Figure 2/Brendon L{l,jeLL �20 21 Lemma: the hyperbola case. Note that there is no need to If break it up into different cases depending on whether BC is greater than or less than AB, as Apollonius does. sq.BE< rect.BD, BA, then J3ED >IBAE. Proof: If angle BED were equal to angle BAE, then triangle BED would be similar to triangle BAE, and so BD : BE :: BE: BA, and therefore rect.BD, BA= sq.BE. If BE were any smaller, then angle BED would be larger and angle BAE would be smaller, so that angle BED would be larger than angle BAE. Q.E.D. So we make sure to construct BE so that the square on BE is less than the rectangle on BD and BA . Note that once we construct the ellipse that the rectangle on BD on BA is the rectangle on the upright and the transverse, and this rectangle is (by I 15) equal to the square on the conjugate diameter. Therefore the condition of the lemma amounts to requiring that the line BE be less than the conjugate diameter of the ellipse we are constructing. This means that there is a limit to the shape of the cone that can provide us with a given ellipse: the cone must in a certain sense be broad enough . The larger the transverse diameter of the ellipse, the broader a cone we have to use. The construction then proceeds just as in The parabola In the case of the parabola, the construction is the same as for the hyperbola, except that we draw FE parallel to the diameter BL. �23 22 Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca Ce.Jar Vallejo Me morire en Paris con aguacero, un dfa del cual tengo ya el recuerdo. Me morire en Paris -y no me corrotal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otofio. Jueves sera, porque hoy, jueves, que proso estos versos, los humeros me he puesto a la mala y, jamas como hoy, me he vuelto, con todo mi camino, a verme solo. C-esar Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban todos sin que el les haga nada; le daban duro con un palo y duro tambien con una soga; son testigos los dfas jueves y los huesos humeros, la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos ... Black Stone Upon A White Stone Tran.1/ated 6y Daniel &drigU£z I will die in Paris from t he heaviest rain, a day which I already have to remember. I will die in Paris -I do not run away most likely a Thursday , like today , in N ovember. On a Thursday, for today, Thursday, prosifies these verses, my humerus bones have been put on poorly and, never like t oday, have I become sur prised, with looking down my road, to see my self anon. Cesar Vallejo has died, he was stuck by everyone for doing nothing at all; they beat him hard w ith a stick and toughened Him up with a rope as well; witnesses are the days of Thursdays and all the humerus bones, The loneliness, the heavy rain, all of my roads ... �25 24 Affirmations r M W. Fogleman [fl cJ..;{JJio~JJ.,1 <11.1f' ~ .;.fe...« 1 i ... ~·,._ if> ~f we ~ ~"J furp~ ~ <.<e rt.._ :t ~u..- .Is f,v, fv hi~. WiV """':1 ht. ""~· 5k<:11f- 111 L..;s sit.in 7 H~ ~(\J. {?. tt;. 0( Qef il'I .rkek.'-.$..J .>:elvu. l;rtlr hey.I ff...it d.J,f\ife l.Svw11/;icia of- Jr~.t")J or >pt/<?.!'('~ .,J,,,.,'<:..l, X .S:'\i I«.! wiHA rsr ...t«,fw,f. f4. ....;~) -~ c..Jt.~~1 A.,... f..r~ M.ro>s ~ fitU"\t.. p lie# o~ i'htr h:; sfi// ecl);li~ 1"\.7 ><NI? .DiJ J ":;I- $i,..pfy f~ SiJhs~c(! fr-e ~61<.¢ 1'1r.>t tt..u~ ...,..-..i.h., :H-,.;r s,~,,1.~·""t bvl- f/.1.-y i..o..te ~o'° ,C.,o/~tl-v> ~s; O>Mief".i.?n,1 f"k7 fn f~y bvf fa i ~ <UJJ ;...JeNl{- ~ hJ.efe'O/ s f4 ~ 'olltvb ;.,;lv'cA offvr Q.Fhr""4f1c~ i"-fo ,.,.,~ts l.J1't :r_ f"< '7 ~ """ S4(~ "f•"' ~ "'?"""', , I. <'Ai-v:""; "\ Ne.w WodJ! Wi/{ "!- vt·.1-~ d;~ief ,1'J1~1..vke, J<~ f"$ i., ...,.1oA1.,Jt 1 f'\P.f> <->f p...,... r il\.f?:. K'f naj,..,~ ~1 ~ di> ~uv>i°"J ~ l";)r 1 wJ Hi. ~.:if\j fo CJ"i~ r o" t7 fi.. u.r '? l'Nl - In our childhoods, in interim moments of solitude and silence, we knelt not to pray but to offer affirmations which became and went into the tide pools of the future. We may have forgotten these moments, their sincerity and conviction, but they have not forgotten us; they are the substance of our selves. Have I been true to that little boy ? Is his voice still echoing in the chambers of my soul? Did he have definite dreams or just simply scant sketches which sparkled in his skin? Have I sailed with or against the winds of change? Arn I pacing back and forth across the same soil, again and again, over and over, or am I entering a New World? Will I contract diseases of disturbance, dismay and disillusion, or can I push onwards, into the mist, with only the maps of my making to guide me? Arn I ready? �27 26 Mutiny I All :r of h<l,,V{ f'\7 ~qv 111 ff'\,.vslJ,e, O<J.Crl"J. ~ '1.itNf fY\vrr•wrec'~ ~v\-1"1/; fo,. ~ h;, h.,/J it· ~e,,,,H f-,._,,J, ~"'i""' 1 I r l"ia,,u 1r V'V;J,e,if , !~ (,J•\.$ a/\ly d7e ro<-h wh.eh :t fo"VIJ ~ ~ •\}"~) vAv,,r 1$ ~ ~>q1 &,A.W Wil\(. < d'ro,/''J c;.5 e,.d<!.f'\U! ~ ~ ~ t h'f • I I I I I f""'[1ff7 .. ;(\f~.11r t,,):i"\J J· . .d1... "..;i--;vl e.vv'f W1 {uer <.;\,.._1/p•"\ • /Yl~~l t>'\ M w)J-i, <?:~ 7/,._d 1 ~-,f ,..,,.. '- & f'tl~ Y"'" lAM J th. .I- T (<'-•/Ji a 1 {:... ;f-) sril ih..(e < /)er (,_,01 -r;;,., for fh. i"-clv/r~i.l- (!; / ' +:rrwi.fio"' t} ~ r"'-·'fe.i/1 bvl· --· bv f ~-~ f~.,, U ('>l\L1 ;:::w-JI '1,,,v . U.A ~-.} k. I+'$ ~6 kt;wt1; .J ~o'fh/- ;,_c!-/ So fi"'-'j/ f1.4 J.o vl t-v Peel vf lt f<> • • • • J c..,,<V.,d ~ ...,.~A ;,.;;Ii, c.., ~II~ «.I'"\ of 1Zhellii,',>jf7 J So 0 l/v...n 5r· .&(., c.A\J. 9;:lf --ev·d .erif CuAJ « V:~v-1 ( VI'\ 1tl-vo~l, . 1~ ,~N'.J· Pi, , 51..-rv. h.vr f-;vJ '( /1 orl-vrl '1~~ ~ ( ooft..ni . t All of my muscles have murmur ed mutiny, for I have ordered them to hold taut endlessly, bearing the weight of my self. I have made it myself, it was only an infant edge of rock w hen I found it unborn and with a hammer and chisel I have carved away what is unnecessary as evidence by the wisdom of the wind which whispers by. I carry it with every motion, with every act, so proud, so glad it's me and not you up there, so vain am I that I reach up to feel if it's still there, like looking for the indulgent confirmation of a mirror, but - but - there is only sand, how can that be? It's so heavy, I thought it so st able and self-evident and yet my fingers run through the sand looking for stone but finding nothing. �28 29 On Variation VARIATION ON A THOUGHT Notes (excerpt) "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces FRIGHTENS ME." This phrase - the force with which it wants to imprint itself upon our souls, and the magnificence of its form has made it one of the most famous utterances ever articulated - it is a Poem and not at all a Thought. For Eternal and Infinite are symbols of the ineffable. Their value is entirely emotional. They act only on a certain sensibility. They provoke: the particular sensation of the impotence of our faculty to imagine . Pascal introduces literature to the use and abuse of these terms which are very good for poetry and nothing else . He composes this sentence with a symmetric arrangement, a sort of formidable image of equilibrium, apart from which he places in opposition (and, as a man is isolated, lost in the heavens, negligible and thinking) the phrase: ... FRIGHTENS ME. Observe how the inhuman which reigns in the heavens is established, represented by this form of grand verse, of which words of the same function are adjacent to each other and reinforce each other in their effects: noun and noun, silence with spaces; epithet with epithet: infinite manifests eternal. This vast verse constitutes the rhetorical form of a system complete in itself, a "UNIVERSE" ... As for what is human, what concerns life, consciousness, terror, this is all held in one rebuttal: ... FRIGHTENS ME. The poem is perfect. - Paul Valery Das Hegelhaus in Stuttgart, Deutschland/ Keeley Pratt �30 31 Valery 1s claim in his brief essay, Variation on a Thought, is that this pensee by Pascal is not a thought, but a poem. Valery must know that this is, in the initial and factual sense, a lie~andyet he presses on. What justifies this claim? How does Valery think, read, and write in relation to Pascal? How should we? In the very title of the essay, we intimate the boldness of his activity: Variation. Valery restates the thought, proceeds to call it a "phrase" and then recasts it as a poem, making use of its words while abandoning their context and their original significance. It is of no importance that Pascal 1s book is entitled Pensees, not Poemes; nor is it worth noting that the Eternal and Infinite have meanings and "values" beyond the "emotional," namely the mathematical and physical, the philosophical and theological. Liberated from factual fetters, Valery reads, hears, and restates in the original thought something new~ he finds a poem. We might call this a beautiful lie. When we read Pascal 1s Pensees, we are readers of thoughts, not hearers of poems. We are good readers when we contemplate the meaning of a thought; we are average readers when we pause to confirm our comprehension; we are mediocre readers when we move on to the next thought, without any pause whatsoever. None of these readers speak the thought out loud, and so they are deaf to euphony. But Valery dwells in Pascal 1s thought like a person infatuated with a poem. He copies the thought down and carries it in his back pocket for peeking at. He cannot help but cele- brate the sounds on his tongue, letting the syllables tickle his throat and thoughts. Here he begins to hear the poem, recognizing emotional symbols, audible equilibrium and opposing imbalance, all knit tight in a careful construction. Valery presses on, unsatisfied with mere appreciation and the passive acts of replication, recitation and memorization. He advances past absorption and reflection int o the unknown by means of regeneration, a rebirth active and entire. The Variation is the child of this re-birth, the means by which Valery 1s process of hearing is reproduced in his reader 1s ear. The thought heard becomes a poem just as its reader becomes a hearer, admitting beauty and emotion, symmetry and symphony, life and breath to what was only ink on the page, black and dead. Two specific attributes of Valery 1s Variation limit our conception of the activity of variation: hearing and attribution. By considering and broadening them, we will come to justify his claim, and appreciate his essay as a prime example of a genre, and perhaps art itself, rather than considering it merely a singularly interesting (or deluded) artifact. First, hearing. We have seen hearing as a means towards interpreting Pascal 1s pensee as a poem, but more generally, hearing is list ening, the basis of speaking and conversation. One does not need to literally hear a thought to list en and respond to it. Nor does the product of list ening, a response, need to be a poem. Second, attribution. This particular thought, this pensee, can only be transformed into �32 33 a poem by an essay like Valery's, which explicitly connects itself to its source before transcending it. But variation itself does not require this attribution, nor does the reader need to make the connection between the variation and it source, for it is often the case that the variation has become a source in itself. One might argue that all thought, all art, all poetry is variation. Milton is a variation on Dante, Virgil, and Homer before him, and each of these men harness voice itself; we cannot imagine Picasso without cave drawings; this pattern is not parasitism but progress, not deviation or defilement but the culmination of dialogue. Variation is creation. In sum, Valery's essay is indeed a variation on Pascal's pensee. Valery understands what Pascal was trying to achieve, but he is not confined by it-it is a provocation. True thought, true creation begins in variation; it is indebted to its predecessors; it accepts and admires them while seeking its own place in humanity's annals. As thinkers, artists, and humans, we look to our ancestors to understand them and to admit their thoughts as the beginnings of our own. It seems we have found answers to our questions about Valery's essay, but this is not our end - it is our beginning. We have been summoned to perform the activity of Variation. Eiffel from the Pont Alexandre UV M ichael Green �34 35 Selections from Du cote de chez Swann Marcel Prowl Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure. Parfois, a peine ma bougie eteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n'avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m'endors.» Et, une demiheure apres, la pensee qu'il etait temps de chercher le sommeil m' eveillait; je voulais poser le volume que je croyais avoir encore dans les mains et souffler ma lumiere; je n'avais pas cesse en dormant de faire des reflexions sur ce que je venais de lire, mais ces reflexions avaient pris un tour un peu particulier; il me semblait que j'etais moimeme ce dont parlait l' ouvrage: une eglise, un quatuor, la rivalite de Franc;ois Ier et de Charles Ouint. Cette croyance survivait pendant quelques secondes a mon reveil; elle ne choquait pas ma raison mais pesait comme des ecailles sur mes yeux et les empechait de se rendre compte que le bougeoir n' etait plus allume. Puis elle commenc;ait a me devenir inintelligible, comme apres la metempsycose les pensees d'une existence anterieure; le sujet du livre se detachait de moi, j'etais libre de m'y appliquer ou non; aussitot je recouvrais la vue et j'etais bien etonne de trouver autour de moi une obscurite, douce et reposante pour mes yeux, mais peutetre plus encore pour mon esprit, a qui elle apparaissait comme une chose sans cause, incomprehensible, comme une chose vraiment obscure. Selections from Swann d Way tran.:Jlated /Jy Jacob Garrett For a long time, I'd lie down to bed at a good hour. Sometimes, scarcely after my candle had been put out, my eyes would shut so quickly that I'd not have the time to say to myself: "I sleep". And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to search for sleep would awake me; I would want to put down the volume that I believed to have still in my hands, and to blow out my light; I had not ceased in slumber to make reflections upon that which I was reading, but these reflections had taken a turn a a little peculiar ; it seemed to me that I was myself of that which the work spoke: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. That notion would survive during some seconds of my waking; it did not shock my reason, but weighed like scales upon my eyes and impeded them from realizing that the candle was no longer lit. Then it would begin to become unintelligible to me, like after metempsychosis the thoughts of a previous existence; the subject of the book would detach itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; at once I would recover sight and I would be well surprised to find surrounding me a darkness, sweet and restful for my eyes, but perhaps still more for my mind, to which it appeared like a thing without cause, incomprehensible, like a thing truly darkened. I'd ask myself what hour it could �37 36 Je me demandais quelle heure il pouvait etre; j'entendais le sifflement des trains qui, plus ou mains eloigne, comme le chant d'un oiseau dans une foret, relevant les distances, me decrivait l' etendue de la campagne deserte ou le voyageur se hate vers la station prochaine; et le petit chemin qu'il suit va etre grave dans son souvenir par l'excitation qu'il doit a des lieux nouveaux, a des actes inaccoutumes, a la causerie recente et aux adieux sous la lampe etrangere qui le suivent encore dans le silence de la nuit, a la douceur prochaine du retour. be; I'd"hear the whistling of trains which, further or closer away, like the song of a bird in the forest, noting the distances, would describe to me the expanse of the deserted country where the voyager hastens toward the next station; and the small path that he follows being engraved in his memory by the excitement that goes necessarily with places novel, with acts unaccustomed, with the recent chat and with the farewells bid under a strange lamp that follow still in the silence of the night, with the sweetness of the next return. J'appuyais tendrement mes joues contre les belles joues de l'oreiller qui, pleines et fraiches, sont comme les joues de notre enfance. J e frottais une allumette pour regarder ma montre. Bientot minuit. C'est l'instant OU le malade, qui a ete oblige de partir en voyage et a du coucher dans un hotel inconnu, reveille par une crise, se rejouit en apercevant sous la porte une raie de jour. Quel bonheur c' est deja le matin ! Dans un moment les domestiques seront leves, il pourra sonner, on viendra lui porter secours. L'esperance d'etre soulage lui donne du courage pour souffrir. Justement il a cru entendre des pas; les pas se rapprochent, puis s' eloignent. Et la raie de jour qui etait sous sa porte a disparu. C' est minuit; on vient d' eteindre le gaz; le dernier domestique est parti et il faudra rester toute la nuit a souffrir sans remede. I would rest tenderly my cheeks against the lovely cheeks of the pillow which, plump and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood. I would strike a match so to look at my w atch. Nearly midnight. That's the moment when an invalid, who has been obliged to leav e on a voyage and must sleep in an unknown hotel, awoken by a fit, rejoices in making out under the door the rays of the day. What happiness that it's already the morning! In a moment the domestics will rise, he'll be able to ring, one will come to bring him succor. The hope of being relived gives him the courage to suffer. Just then he believ es he hears some steps; the steps approach him, and then move away from him. And the ray of the day which was under his door has disappeared. It is midnight; someone came to put out the gas; the last domestic has left and he must remain all night in suffering without remedy. Je me rendormais, et parfois je n'avais plus que de courts reveils d'un instant, le temps d'entendre les craquements organiques des boiseries, I w ould go back to sleep, and sometimes �38 d' ouvrir les yeux pour fixer le kaleidoscope de l'obscurite, de gouter grace a une lueur momentanee de conscience le sommeil ou etaient plonges les meubles, la chambre, le tout dont je n' etais qu'une petite partie et a l'insensibilite duquel je retournais vite m'unir. Ou bien en dormant j'avais rejoint sans effort un age a jamais revolu de ma vie primitive, retrouve telle de mes t erreurs enfantines comme celle que mon grand-oncle me tirat par mes boucles et qu' avait dissipee le jour, - date pour moi d'une ere nouvelle, - ou on les avait coupees. J'avais oublie cet evenement pendant mon sommeil, j'en retrouvais le souvenir aussitot que j'avais reussi a m'eveiller pour echapper aux mains de mon grand-oncle, mais par mesure de precaution j 'entourais completement ma tete de mon oreiller avant de retourner dans le monde des reves. Quelquefois, comme Eve naquit d 'une cote d'Adam, une femme naissait pendant mon sommeil d'une fausse position de ma cuisse. Formee du plaisir que j'etais sur le point de gouter, je m 'imaginais que c'etait elle qui me l'offrait. Mon corps qui sentait dans le sien ma propr e chaleur voulait s'y rejoindre, je m' eveillais. Le reste des humains m' apparaissait comme bien lointain aupres de cette femme que j 'avais quittee ily avait quelques moments a peine; ma joue etait chaude encore de son baiser, mon corps courbature par le poids de sa taille. Si, comme il arriv ait quelquefois, elle avait les traits d'une femme que j 'avais connue dans la vie, j 'allais me donner tout entier ace b u t : la I'd have wakings no longer than an inst ant, time enough to hear the n atu r al cr eaking of the paneling, to open my ey es so t o stare at the kaleidoscope of the dar kness, t o taste, by the g r ace of a momentary gleam of conscience, the sleep w her ein was plunged the furniture, the room, the w hole of which I was but a small part and to t he insensibility of which I would soon reunite. O r perhaps in sleeping I had rejoined, without effort, a nev er returned t o age of my earlier life, recov er ed such childhood terrors like the one of my great-uncle pulling on my curls that had been d ispelled the d ay, - date of a new era for me, - w her e someone had them cropped. I had forgotten t hat ev ent during my sleep; I recalled the memory as soon as I had succeeded in waking myself so t o escape my great -uncle's hands, but for a measure of precaution, I'd completely wrap my head in my pillow befor e returning to the world of drea m s. Sometimes, just as E v e was born from Adam's rib, a woman w ould be born w h ile I slept from a twisted position of my thigh. F or med from the pleasure that I w a s upon the point of tasting, I imagined to my self that it was she w ho offered it t o me. My body which sensed in her breast my ow n h eat w ould want t o rejoin itself t o h er, I'd wake. The rest of humanity appear ed t o me distant after this woman w hom I had left , w ho w as there barely a few moments; my cheek w as still w ar m from her kiss, my body ached from the w eight of her w aist. If, as it hap p ened sometimes, sh e had the traits of a w oman th at I had know n in \ �40 41 retrouver, comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cite desiree et s'imaginent qu'on peut gouter dans une realite le charme du songe. Peu a peu son souvenir s'evanouissait, j'avais oublie la fille demon reve. life, I would give myself wholly to this aim: to find her, like those who leave on a voyage to see in person a long dreamt of city, and imagine to themselves that one can taste in reality the charm of the dream. Little by little her memory would fade away; I had forgotten the girl of my dream. \ 1 �---43 42 Selections from "Heart Breaking Open: An Arc of Sonnets" Aalin Bellinger 2. So, Lord, it is to be by fire and night Your pillar points through pain my faltering feet; My proud eyes blanch blind at the fierce light While flesh shudders at shock of crucible's heat. With heart's high hope dispelled to dwindling dark And fantasy flushed in truth's light cast clear, Burned feet first find this desert rock too stark To taste the hidden medicine trickling here. 0 Lord, have I forgotten how You held me, Through the soul-slapping waves of childhood's day, Strengthening my limbs in the cold sea, While all the time my heart against You lay? Just so, Lord, in this burning desert heat Work out in me a strength of heart more sweet. Trees/ Carlin FeLt �44 45 9. 8. 0 Panegia, teach me to detach My clinging heart from this new desperate love; Send me courage and method to unlatch My miser chest locked in from Grace above. Make me strong and free to let my soul Flow in and out with a relation 's tide, To love my friend so deep and yet be whole When circumstances call her from my side. I wish to be there for her, but my need Inflames my inner sense that gives and takes; So while I yearn to follow close her lead, I must carve my own way for both our sakes. 0 Mother intimate with Christ your son, Guide me how streams of love may rightly run. 0 Panegia, be with my close friend, Whose glance unfathomed cuts me to the heart; Take care of her to whom I'm blind to send Swift healing, comfort, strength to every part. Unguessable the grace that makes us two, So different utterly, create a space Where several harmonies of I and you Blend, resonate, and hold their place . And yet I, ignorant what storms or calm Blow out or breath in peace to her domain, Burn still to feel more keenly what the palm Of her soul only ever could explain. 0 Mother, from my depths receive this prayer, To hold my unseen friend in your wise care . �46 47 14. 0 Lord, my life lies open in Your hand. You know, I know, my needs for love on earth; Upon You and Your cross I cast my worth, 0 Word by Whom was made all life and land. I lie upon the sunny coats of sand That with each lifting wave find sweet rebirth And in this dance the dying breakers mirth Sparkles I praise I start to understand: The knowledge, Lord, that You are all in all, In each particular and the cycling whole, And the uniqueness of each beating heart Your gift, is safe; mysterious, small, Unfolding slowly in the growing soul, The harmony fulfilling whole and part. Croquet 1/ Megan Faulkner �--· 48 49 Stooping for Excellence in Iraqi Higher Education Louil Petruh Biology Lab!Louid Petrich Much of the talk about liberal education by those of us who wish to promote it at home and abroad tends in the direction of platitudes. Alistener who did not know better from experience might think that liberal education itself were as boring as the promoting of it tends to be. How much worse is the risk of sounding trivial or impertinent when one's audience of initiates has merely to look out the window to see revolution spreading like brush-fires in the desert wind, while determined dictators try to stamp out the fires. Even the most interesting activities of liberal education lose their hold on participants when the local dogs of war are observed to be straining again at their leashes. Here at St. John's College, we do not bother ourselves about the dust of the chalk that our demonstrations of Euclid leave behind in our classrooms. But if we were given to worry about whether the College itself will be reduced to dust before the freshmen graduate, who would be demonstrating Euclid at the board? And what would those demonstrations truly be demonstrating? Last year (2010-2011), at the American University of Iraq in the northeastern Ku rdish city of Sulaimani, I taught freshmen Iraqis (mostly Kurds, some Arabs) to read Euclid, Darwin, �50 51 Galileo and other authors of mathematical and scientific books as part of the two-year core curriculum of liberal arts required of all students. Such a curriculum is unprecedented in Iraq, unless you go back about 1000 years. All of us who taught in the core had to become the defenders and promoters of its ambitious content. Each day that I taught there another layer of that ancient land's dust had to be wiped away from the books so that eyes distracted by the glare from outside events might be persuaded to read them with interest and care. Who could blame one of the Iraqi members of the University Board of Trustees for storming out of a meeting one time, saying, "Not another word about Socr ates!" Even one of my American colleagues, a professor of business management, information technology (and mathematics), ended up using his copy of Euclid's Elements as a door stop to his office, thus to demonstrate that he concluded this g r eat book was good for just this function under those conditions. My office door continually swung open to admit one or more of my sixty or so students. They came to see me in groups of ten to fifteen if they wished to persuade me of something: W e think y our questions a r e too hard. If y ou w ant us to succeed you should ask easier questions. This was their way, as I learned, of negotiating potential conflicts: let one pow er p r esent itself to the other power so that the lesser m ight recognize itself as such and r espectfully defer to the great er. Sometimes I could find w ay s to defer in good conscience to reasonable demands: "I will give you take-hoine exams from now on and y ou m ay consult the books and w ork t ogether t o a n sw er the questions. If y ou still do not succeed, t her e w ill b e opportunities for extra cr edit. " (I do not know how we would hav e gotten by without extra credit. It functioned under my dispensation like grace t o sinners.) At other times I told t hem they should have brought mor e of themselv es into my little office -at w hich t hey exited to und ertake their prescribed dut ies in good humor. The students ast onished me to hav e preserved a sw eetness of temperament through the bitterness of their history. They were quite impossible to cure of the kind of collaboration that we call "cheating" or "plagiarism," and w hich t hey call "friendship" or "using the internet." They possessed a great capacity for honor, accompanied accordingly w ith an acut e sense for wrongs done them. Any w eaknesses of character that t hey could tu rn t o their advantage, they did , and some of my colleagues on the faculty paid a heavy p rice for weakness. It was best to stand while teaching them. You had to know w here to look not t o lose heart at t he ever present prospect and evidence of failure. As they looked out the window s in distraction t o t he affair s of the world, I mad e my horizon the mission of the u n iversity, w hose core w as the liberal arts, and there I looked to measure my success. The streets of S u laimani witnessed daily demonstrations for months against the entrenched party interests, and occasionally the street s become violent. The two major Ku r dish parties ordered their militias to occupy strategic positions �52 53 around the city to maintain order. A Peshmerga raid on an al-Qa'ida haven near our housing compound killed five terrorists, as if to remind the restive people not to overthrow their protectors. (The Peshmerga were once Kurdish mountain fighters who have evolved over the years into the professional military of the autonomous Kurdish region. The word conveys "those who stand before death with a knife clenched in their teeth.") We received daily security reports about what to expect and where not to go. Our contingent of body guards was doubled when Osama bin Laden was killed. They sat in the vans next to us, their AK-47's resting in their laps like the briefcases and ·book bags in ours. One of them was trying to learn some English, so I tried to make small talk. He was shy. We took different routes to the university for our security. My several students from Baghdad found all this boring by comparison to home. Sulaimani to them was like Peoria to someone from Manhattan. No bombs went off. One thing remained constant among students wherever they came from. Pressured by parents, relatives, and their own habits of mind to get the good grades and credentials necessary to become engineers, information technologists, or business managers, they demanded to know why they needed to read (for example) Charles Darwin. We are not going to become doctors or biologists, they knowingly declared. Will Darwin be on the exam? "Yes, you are being examined on this author," I replied. What kind of exam? "You may think of it as multiple choice, but you will supply the choices·." How many questions will we have to answer? "You may choose from among them to answer a few or just one - but do answer it well." There will not be enough time. "If there was enough time to make it possible for this conversation to have issued from species that have evolved from fish, there will be enough time for y ou to reflect on that process in the exam." I learned how to enjoy the students for asking me such questions. As Pascal says somewhere, the golden objects of learning are not always high and out of reach, but rolling around at our feet. It is only necessary to be willing to stoop for them. Yet stooping without picking up a satisfactory answer and having to stoop again and again did not please them as sport. Why are you always asking us about things you don't know? How do you expect us to know? We are the students; you are the professor. (Indeed, the sign on my office door said, "Louis Petrich: Associate Professor in the Core." I shall not sit that high again.) They had a point, so I tried to answer the question they kept asking me, in one form or another, all the time: Why are we reading these books? "We read Charles Darwin not to become biologist s," I professed one day, after giving much thought to the matter, "but to distinguish and appreciate the different paths that life has taken over the course of natural history. For example, there is the life of the social insects in the hive - materially secure, well-ordered, the struggle for existence decided in their favor. The path t hat we Homo sapiens hav e taken to regulate the awfulness oflife-not to be �-· 54 55 defeated by it-is a thing we call 'culture,' which unlike the bee hive is devoted to knowing the geometry of its spaces and to delighting in the beauty of colors and forms even in the face of dangers from all sides. Have you heard how Archimedes is reported to have died? He was so determined to finish the demonstration of one more geometrical theorem as the Roman sword hung over his head at the siege of Syracuse that he did not notice when it made its descent. (Ouod erat demonstrandum, 212 B.C.) His preoccupation with geometry (which provided him the know-how for an occupation as a great engineer) is not merely an eccentricity. Preoccupations ·make us human, different from chimpanzees and rats, who learn to solve puzzles and negotiate mazes to earn their bananas and sweets. The choice that you face as students at this university of liberal learning is not between thinking forever like a biologist or an engineer. Your choice is between learning to think freely and bravely for yourselves, or not to think much at all. In either case, the sword is hanging there, yet for some things it has no edge. Think on those things. Does not Holy Scripture say as much? We are all being examined on the multiple choices we make among the higher, lower, and middle paths of life. The paths that life can take are available for our inspection in literature, philosophy, history, and science. What a pity if your shelves do not hold these books. How will you know the path to take?" I apologize if my professed answer sounds platitudinous. As I said at the beginning, this is hard to avoid. I am, after all, a believer in the answer, and yet I must report that my students continued to believe in pressing the question. And so we contested the matter of their education for a year. You will not read about our contest in the news, but when I hear people speak about the outcome of the war in Iraq, I know that our contest at the American University of Iraq is a part of that whole outcome, a good part. Let me tell you about a young, veiled woman named Ziza, who always sat in the front row of our mathematics class. She never said a word, but paid strict attention to every demonstration and wrote down whatever I said or wrote on the board. At the end of the semester I collected the students' math notebooks, in which they were supposed to practice the art of demonst rating and to ponder its difficulties. Ziza used a ruler, compass, and different colored pencils to draw the diagrams and highlight the steps in the proofs, one after another throughout. Her notebook was a thing of manifest beauty. It was, in fact, a book, whose making had taken many more hours than I had intended, yet without any reckoning to me for credit of those hours, as others reckoned to me for much less reason. As I perused the pages of Ziza's craftsmanship I felt happy, yet without quite knowing why I should, for I could not say that she was learning to think mathematically on her own, rather than reproducing with great care and pa- · tience the thinking of others. When I turned to the first page to write something appr opr iate in �57 56 praise of her work and to encourage her to become more public in her learning, I saw in the center of the page a dedication, written in English and Kurdish in beautifully flowing scripts, and surrounded on the margins by the flourishing of geometrical figures that populate Book I of Euclid. The dedication said simply: To the Glory of God. We often hear it said that liberal education is the pursuit of knowledge and beauty for their own sakes, as goods in themselves. That saying was not good enough for Ziza. I did not write anything on that page. I did not write anything at all in her book. Many of my male students habitually carried prayer beads that they audibly fingered in class and everywhere else. I learned to ignore the sound, or to regard it as part of the exotic, like the call to prayer that loudly issued each day around noon from a mosque a block away from the university. I learned not to go to the washroom at that time~too many men crowding in to clean their hands before prayer. I wondered if the pursuit of knowledge and beauty is also a general calling to be followed by those who hear it and recognize the need to keep something in themselves clean for the purpose of pure learning. One of my male students, Bouwar, a Kurdish nationalist, always dressed in traditional attire (the shrwal), an elegant, trim robe with a scarflike belt around the waist, noble and assertive. He lacked only a scimitar to complete the image of the tribal leader and mountain warrior. (Weapons, by the way, were not allowed past the two entrances througli the concrete blast walls that surrounded the American University of Iraq. The signs proclaimed it, and the Peshmerga were stationed there to strictly enforce the ban. Otherwise, I should have other stories than this one t o tell you.) Bouwar liked to interrupt my professing of the things we now know about nature to ask sharp, impatient questions that felt to me hostile to modern science, particularly to Darwin. What's the evidence for that? How do they know that? Is that a fact or just a theory? Do you believe that, Professor? Are there Moslem scientists who believe that? He also fingered the prayer beads as he questioned me. To my imagination, Bouwar could have been a superbly groomed Spartan, and I an infidel Athenian. Bouwar wrote an essay for his history professor that he gave to me as well, since I had argued that Darwin turned biology into a k ind of history. The title of his essay was: "The Great Deceivers." I instantly imagined that the essay contained an attack on Darwin and other theorists of modern science. By the second sentence I realized that much I had imagined about this y oung man was wrong. His thesis was that the prophets were all deceivers, Mohammed being the greatest deceiver of the lot. I was stupefied and in awe, since these are the kind of thoughts, which uttered, can get you quickly killed in that part of the w orld (and other parts, too, less quickly). As I read the essay I recognized where his pointed questions in class were tending. He was covertly digging for solid evidence to use against the authority of the �58 59 prophets. Concerned for his future well-being, I gave him and the class Galileo's "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina" on how to read Holy Scripture in light of scientific discoveries, so that the oneness of truth manifested in nature and revelation might be maintained by a man of reason and faith. The courage of those who calmly accept the uncertainty of how they will earn their living as students of the liberal arts ought to be all the little courage one needs to follow that calling for a while at the university. Surely this is much less virtue to ask of ourselves than we dare to ask of our Moslem brothers and sisters in the bright ·causes of enlightenment and liberty. A letter that I shall keep among my remembrances of my year in Iraq was written to me by a young man named Bakir, an Arab from Baghdad, which a long time ago was the center of learning and wisdom in the West. But seven y ears ago, Bakir's father and uncle w ere mur dered in Baghdad by a squad of Shiah during their attacks on the Sunni, and from their home the remainder of his family had to flee for their lives to Damascus. (I wonder where they liv e t oday, now that Syria has taken its turn as a place from w hich t o flee.) I should mention that the students at the American University of Iraq all had stor ies to tell of death, torture, exile, imprisonment, or the fear of these things, stories that hav e been told befor e, so typically they did not tell them again , unless one wer e fresh or curious enough to ask. Bakir w anted to return to Baghdad some day to help make it great A Faculty Picnic/Lowd Petrich �60 61 again. That was why he intended to study politics at the American University in Sulaimani, where he could also write for the school newspaper, join the debate club, and without fear give expression to his conspicuous thymos. He could not understand why he - Bakir, the future Sunni politician should be forced to study modern life science, at the center of which he found a godless theory. This angered him. I asked the class to consider the motto above the oracle at Delphi: Know Thyself. Where does this self of ours come from? How shall we come to know it? What is its name? Is it bred into the genes of the only surviving species of the genus Homo, which some scientists speculate may have exterminated the Neanderthals and other related species long ago? Is that the story of who we are and why we are prone to anger and violence? Bakir began to listen to the arguments of life science when he saw the political connections, and so one day late in the semester he wrote me the following letter: As long as you are our professor and are lecturing us for the purpose of a superior education, I would like to have a public debate with you at the university: you are with Darwin's theory and I am against his theory. Then both professor and student will have the opportunity to convince the audience about what we both believe. I don't want-like many students-to have a contradiction within myself. So if you publicly refute me and convince me, I will believe in this theory. I think you can understand my situation when I believe in something and one day an American pro- f essor at school comes to me and tells me that what I believed is wrong. Darwin shocked the world by his theory, and I was shocked to hear you say to me that I am not who I thought I was! And I lived my life with a lie. So, imagine my situation currently. What we are going to decide is very essential, Professor. If this is really a university where students are allowed to have challenging personalities, then I am glad to be one of these students. And I challenge you. His words made me think of a Platonic dialogue and chivalric duel. I declined the format, and instead organized a class debate in teams of students on the question of Darwinism. The things that were said in that debate made an awful mess of Darwin. But one thing stood out from the mess. Bakir and his colleagues were not going to be persuaded of their origin from animals. They did not so much mind the idea of animals evolving from animals, but not human beings, not them. From this stance they would not budge. In some respects they were thinking like the pigeon fanciers in Darwin's opening chapter of The Origin who proudly believed that their fancy, prize-winning pigeons were each a special kind, instead of varieties of one species. I felt that this was closedminded of them and that I had failed as their teacher. But I have thought more about Bakir's challenge and stance in that debate since then. His beloved Baghdad, like Socrates' beloved Athens, had gone down the tubes, so to speak, from much war and tyranny. But his human soul, ,I �63 62 like that of Socrates, did not have to follow his city as it went down. In that messy debate about Darwin, the students did not allow themselves to be distracted from the soul's prizes by the recorded or purported events of natural history. To be free of stamping by the events of history-not to be stamped out by time -may that be a prize of the liberal learning that has begun in Iraq? We must hope so. Or else we must meet the challenge and teach them, as once, long ago, they taught us. That challenge is bigger than you think. An abridged version of this essay was delivered as · an address at a conference on liberal education in Tbilisi, Georgia in June of 2011 . Morning Pray ers !Shilcdhya A'dhilcari �64 65 Odd ·Enough to be Even Rohert Schuerman I hardly have an inkling how a bird song sings so sweet When not one jot of ink gets penned upon a noted sheet Nor have I come to fathom, how a millipede accords To navigate each step it takes to harmonize the hordes Nor do I fully see the sense, when my myriad leggd' friend Is by that song bird, made a meal, to meet his fate ful end Croquet 4/ Megan FauLlcner And yet, an intuition, like some solitary sea Attuned to be the many, in one single symphony Plays upon my reason .. which, I've come to understand Calls the tune, invisible, to turn the world at hand Leads across a bridge of time, in, this eternal land Where paradox, meets metaphor To find an irony In every answer.. questioned by The likes of me .. and you .. �66 67 A Wholly Sonnet I too awoke to see my world as wrong, Like life entire was up and passing by And soi wondered, had I lost the song? Until I sought out somewhere I could cry To tell how real the time is present, now Its story grows while welling up inside My need to pray.. but no, I don 't know how. Though still, my soul, itself, no longer hides Its sound gives sense to all I fail to see For everywhere I look, that's nowhere clear, But, . of a wholly what it means, to Be. While this idea's beyond me, I draw near To heed its call which sojourns with the wind Though too, lies still, in wisdom for to lend. Rebecca/ Adam Mar(Lfchlcy �energeia st. john's college p.o. box 2800 annapolis, md 21401 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 67 Pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Connolly, Stephanie (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2012 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2012. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 2012 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f87548cbcf1dd34b95fb79d5459fc63d.pdf 8b081e263f14a981e6253e4773ea7f7d PDF Text Text ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY l~~~~[f1\l\1 1 ~1 l lf11ij II III Ill Ill IIIll 1111 1 11111111111 1 31696 01141 5583 r Energeia Winter 2008 �Energeia Editor Junior Editor Willis McCumber Jen Stocklin Staff Kirstie Dodd Anne Duffee Kris Klotz My Nguyen Sandra Quintana Aurora Rivendale Max Socol Faculty Advisor Christian Holland Printer Chris Colby and the St. John's College Print Shop Cover art by Dan Rekshan Front: The Flowing Dress Back: Rocking �CONTENTS SOPHIA URUSOVA 5 BRYAN SMITH 6 Photographs and Drawings Untitled The Refugees As Far as She Can See Fall KATHERINE H ALE 11 39 Angel Angel W ings ANNA MIRZAYAN 12 It Is Not Women I Love The Cat D AN R EKSHAN 15 63 A unt Renee Susan &Anna HowARD ZEIDERMAN 17 Caged Explorers: The Hunger For Control JUSTIN L EE 16 64 123 Drive-by Untitled Apoptosis (Revelation 21:8) RAINER MARIA RILKE 54 Herbsttag A LLISON H AUSPURG 61 90 92 112 N ude No. 5 La Pedrera No. 2 Untitled Rockledge Farm N o. 1 SARAH FRY 104 Kneeling Pose Translated by Elsabe Dixon KAT Rros 56 Dwellings MAxSocOL 58 Minnesota A venue Incorrect Sonnet 62 3&h St. IAN LINDQUIST 65 Gender, Nature, and Politics in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales WILLIS M CCUMBER 88 The Gamekeeper's Son ALEXANDRA WALLING 91 City of Trees KIRSTIE DODD 93 Stuck in Sheremetyevo SANDRA QUINTANA 102 The Giantess SARAH HOGAN 105 The Heavenly Condition M. L. SHEAR • I I I �SOPHIA URUSOVA Untitled How could something slow as melancholy strike? Likeness of a snake, it huddles in the bones and when a motion strange or unexpected comes (nothing too grand or frightening but small enough to eat) it flies from coil to line. The venom quick and strong pulls down the darkening mist and never really death but an eternity of this: Urusova 5 �BRYAN SMITH The Refugees As Far as She Can See The refugees carry boxes full of systems and tape through a matrix of miniature bones; Wandering in a styrofoam desert, they huddle before an esoteric egg, monstrous, that speaks to them in a language of glass. Their temple of chalk is tipping, tipping, and laughter's diaspora blooms on ledges of bleary vigil. Their prayers are a fragile dome of algebra: perpetually shifting, rearranging itself. Their eyes are stalactites, and their sobs are hands that prick themselves on the icy braille of stars. Their tears, the black feet of gypsies, blood exiles from the city of symbols. Christmas cradled all her childhood happiness; now dying, her memory clings to a Christmas tree, whose knots of jumbled lights were beautiful chaos, cluttered like stars- no order she could see. A body of earth, rough brown and lashed in green, primped in ritual's trinkets, graced with light, the tree is her. She's borne its weight unseen for many years, but now she studies the night, peering through stars to find that eternal Maybe, like old men trudging endless snow for the sight of something pure and vulnerable as a baby, yet sacred, undying as heaven's glittering white. She sets the weight down. Nothing but the tree, shining, and snow as far as she can see. 6 Energeia _L Smith 7 �Fall I Stormtorn tree, disheveled by gale and gust, pale palms all wrung naked upward, softest green laid bare like a secret need. Right as she turns and walks inside a flake of sunlight breaks greengold on some leaf unnoticed being borne through the absence; a molten silkworm spinning itself into being and melting in midair. The dull deserted leaf meets (with a "Hush") the ignorant street, a torn stem evidence of tender spanning. Meanwhile she's tearing her room apart, clawing for the seams in lifesomething lost in haunted outtakes, something greengold in the corner of her eye. 8 Energeia II Getting older, like dark red leaves, the color of bricks, hard and rough, carved into shape and cemented in place to shut out the storm. Red as the clay underground where we came from, dark as the underground, swallowing sun and holding it all in, enduring and strong when snow buries everything, curling up but strong in the snow that sinks them sparkling wet a little nearer to the dirt, a little darker like the dirt. But still the sun fills us and makes us give up the secrets of innocence: blushing berries, delicious planets. Smith 9 �-- III Green and red leaves on the same tree, like rival armies mixed in melee, dripping berries the color of soilan intercourse of dirt and light, globes of perfect void. Leaves drawn from green's balance upward through yellow to orange, through orange to red through red to the color of milk and blood; drawn by the Fall into all of Creation's calico spices and finally falling, unveiling a tree with no illusions: a nuclear cloud the color of blank paper, branches like the arms of Shiva angled, gestures kaleidoscoped in dervish dance, Angel / Katherine Hale and a shadow like writhing smoke. 10 Energeia Hale 11 �ANNA MIRZAYAN It Is Not Women I Love It is not women I love, whose thighs are unexplored plains that step onto the Midwest I have never visited. Dancing legs and chariots that have existed foreverlike my mother who held me-peppered with Egyptian cotton that has grown coarse and uninhibited, an untouched secret, but upon which men and children lay despite its rough unkemptness. I love the summer light because it is made somewhere far and cool, and dark with promises. There is an ocean in me, diluted by blood. I have put it into bottles with thoughts, to fill the space of not loving. I do not love trees, whose bark makes me bleed when I attempt to pull convexity from the gnarled concavity of ancient thick bark whose darkness is also viscous and may also be full. The dark fluid I pull from the back of the bark, crescent-shaped bruises litter the forest but I am not satisfied. Hunched hard limbs reminiscent of the shoulders of men I have tried to love, tried to coax their convex to my gin-trash concavities, but it has only let out the gull in me, thrashing and squawking in salty air. Men and oaks are breakable and not like the water they have only small crevices into which my fingers may flee like ants, but no savannah to hide the heart of me. ) I cannot love a melody, a mingling of sound and breath. It has coupled and is taken by air. Music that uses my voice as a vehicle, my ribbed throat to buttress a thieving vibration. When it escapes my eyes are blue and my mouth is slack. 12 Energeia Mirzayan 13 �The Cat His existence is based on fine white string hanging about the face like fate, or snow. My crooked mouth sleeps closed by his sharp yawn. I have rolled the fat black glass of a far star into his skull, stuck my finger into the bulb that expands like a flower with fear and sunlight. He stamps and waits to leave a murky moon of an imprint upon my mewing soul. Aunt Renee I Dan Rekshan 14 Energeia Rekshan 15 �Caged Explorers: The Hunger For ControP Howard Zeiderman To achieve happiness and freedom you must desire nothing else but what is entirely in your control-and that is only your own thoughts and opinions. -Epictetus, The Manual Drive-by I Justin Lee 16 Energeia The letter's return address had a name, the letters MHC, and a number next to it. I had no idea what it meant but it was obvious from the carefully lettered envelope and handwritten letter that great effort was spent preparing it. The letter was a strange and bold request. It would lead me to the gates of the Maryland House of Corrections, a high medium/maximum security facility, the flagship of seven prisons surrounding a place in the Maryland landscape called Jessup, only a few miles from Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency. My contact with the Maryland House of Corrections began when I was asked for some Touchstones materials for an information fair at a prison. Twice a year the organizations that assist prisoners maintain some contact with their families, and the many self-help programs that are designed to encourage prisoners present their information in a large activity area. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, violence prevention programs, parenting advice, various Christian and Muslim ministries, and even the Junior Chamber of Commerce send representatives with brochures. Touchstones is a program originally designed for pre-college students of all backgrounds to overcome their passivity and enable them to collaborate 1This piece is dedicated to the memory of Brother Robert Smith, who wanted me to share these thoughts and experiences with our St. John's Community. Zeiderman 17 �and explore. It uses short seminal texts to initiate discussions in which students transform their thinking and their behavior toward others and themselves. Since at that time my work with Touchstones was primarily in schools, I sent the first high school volume of texts along with the accompanying guide explaining how leaders should utilize these materials. I thought nothing of this until two months later when I received the letter. The letter was from Marvin, a prisoner serving, he said, "life plus 30." The language was simple and direct. "Dear Professor," the letter began, "I've been looking at your books. They've been in the Legal Clinic office for a while. Two days ago I started reading them. First I was confused. But now I see how the leader's guide can help you run the meetings. But we need someone to help us get started. Would you come meet with us? I talked to a few of the guys. We all think this would be good here. Nothing they give us here makes any sense. But last night six of us were sitting around. I read out loud the story about the old man asking for his dead son back. And we talked about it. We were thinking about it. How brave the old man was to face his son's killer and what pain he felt." I was startled as I read his account of a text in our Volume I- a text from Homer's Iliad, in which the old king Priam begs the young warrior Achilles for the return of the dead body of his son Hector. He went on to say he hoped we could talk about how such a program might work in a prison. Though I was stretched in my commitments with Touchstones' efforts in public schools, with my normal teaching at St. John's, and in my work with an executive group of investment bankers, CEOs, lawyers, and journalists up in New York, I couldn't think of a sufficient reason to say no. In addition, I knew of a pilot program that had 18 Energeia been tried at the New Mexico State Penitentiary where the ghastly riot had· occurred in 1981. I was intrigued by the idea of working with prisoners and I had hoped we could find a location closer to home. Each type of group we work with is unique. Each group brings specific talents to the program as well as specific needs. Each new effort is therefore a collaboration. The program that Marvin reviewed was designed for high school students, both for the gifted and for those who couldn't read. It was therefore a good first step. It seemed wrong not to answer the request. However, in spite of my desire, I was hesitant. I was influenced by what the media reported about prisoners. I had the images of countless movies and the hostages at Attica in my imagination. I remembered the atrocities, the disembowelments, at the New Mexico prison outside of Santa Fe. I'm afraid I must admit that often in the early days I went into the prison because I couldn't think of a way to avoid going in without embarrassing myself. So in September of 1995, I took the thirty minute drive to Jessup and entered a vast structure that from a distance looked like an ancient nineteeth century Liverpool textile mill, but on closer inspection was revealed to be a fortress designed to keep two worlds entirely separated from one another. It was a Tuesday evening when I crossed the barriers of double steel-and-glass doors and razor wire to meet the nine men who would embark with me on the exploration of a world that none of us knew existed. I was reminded of Plutarch's description of England before the Romans crossed the water from Gaul: a land that existed only in myth and legend. Over the next two years we w ould take the first steps together into unknown territory. I would later realize that my entry on that day was remarkably efficient. My name was listed on a count out Zeiderman 19 �document at the first control booth and I was moved quickly through sets of double doors where I saw chains, handcuffs, and shotguns in a glass-enclosed watch area. I walked nervously past interrogation and holding rooms to what was called the Main Control Area: a large cubical steel-barred enclosure filled with guards. Unlike other such enclosures in the prison, this one had the only exit route to the outside world. A corrections officer announced through a loudspeaker that we were exiting the cage- which, ironically, was the Main Control Area-and entering the actual prison. We were on the inside and surrounded by tiers of cells and the sound of the movement of a thousand men. I was escorted by a guard up a flight of stairs past a hundred men descending from their cells. At moments I was lost in the crowd but with great effort moved through the confusing mass of people upstream. After a brief and nervous wait at a landing, a metal door opened into a large space, perhaps thirty by seventy feet, in which another guard sat at a small desk. The meeting took place in a small room at the edge of this large activity area where we would eventually hold our sessions amidst the 100-decibel noise of the prison and the rival claims for space of the Nation of Islam and the Jessup Jaycees. Around the open area were a number of these rooms, allocated to the use of various prisoner organizations. There was the writer's club, the prisoner newspaper, the colts- a sports club whose allegiance now focused on birds- oriels and ravens- instead of horses. There were the rooms for AA and NA, and the fifteen- by ten-foot area where men who had expressed themselves by crime now used brushes and paints. W e met in the room of the most important prisoner organization- the Legal Clinic. This was where the men came for advice from 20 Energeia other more experienced prisoners on how to represent themselves, since whether guilty or innocent th eir previous defense rarely warranted the name. It was significant that we met here since this was where prisoners most felt the distance between themselves and the world outside the walls. This was where they experienced most acutely their helplessness in the subtle labyrinth of our society's legal system. Five of the men I met were the high priests of this order. They w ere the officers-present and past- of the Legal Clinic. They held the keys to help others at least attempt to control their futures. The four others were equally important. They were presidents of other prisoner organizations. These were all older men, men who had somehow survived the years of indignity and abuse and isolation. The youngest w as in his late thirties and all but one were serving at least one life sentence, whereas most were serving multiple such sentences either concurrently or in succession. These were men for whom prison was to be their world and not merely an interlude before reinserting themselves into ours. I was clearly nervous as I entered and they had me sit in a part of the small room where I was no longer seen by the guard in the main area. The meeting began awkwardly. I thought they knew what they wanted from my visit, but in fact some were only vaguely aware of why they were meeting. Marvin began by having us go around the room and state who we were. I said I was a teacher, and others spoke briefly about themselves. They never said it explicitly, but each said enough for me to infer that I w as sitting with nine men convicted of murder, concealed from a guard in a small room. When we finished Marvin , took the lead again. "Why don't you tell us about the program," he 0 Zeiderman 21 �said in a voice filled with suspicion. I had thought that he would be my ally in this alien world but his tone was distant, as if he now wished to appear that he had played no part in my coming into the prison. From the introductions, it became clear that half were invited to this meeting to hear about the program for the first time. I could see a couple of the men whispering to one another and even heard one ask to no one or to all why I was there. Rather quickly the roles had become reversed. Instead of being asked to come to respond to their request, it seemed that I had to convince them that they should become involved. I could feel control slipping away from me. Perhaps it was implicitly a test to see if one more white volunteer could offer something they really wanted, or perhaps it was an exploration they were undertaking to find out what they needed. When they asked me to describe the program, I did a very poor job. I kept speaking in ways that were either too abstract or too rudimentary. I hoped to interest them in probing the conceptual presuppositions and biases of our culture though I didn't describe it in quite those words. However, such an exercise hardly moved them since, for many, their incarceration incorporated the presuppositions and biases of our culture. Of all the men I met in prison, very few asserted their innocence. However, most felt that they w ere political prisoners, prisoners because of the politics of our country stretching back into the very origins of the European conquest of the New World. They didn't offer this as an excuse but merely reported it as a fact. They saw their crimes much along the lines of an infraction against their master on the plantation. Nor were they particularly engaged by the prospect of increased skills. The skills they needed were quite specific, and it wasn't clear how Touch- 22 Energeia stones could he~p them overturn a conviction. As I was speaking and becoming more uneasy as I felt their eyes glued to me, a short heavily tattooed prisoner interrupted. "These guys," he said, referring to the collection of texts he had, "are all white." I was taken aback by his claim. In regard to the specific volume I had sent in, he was correct. I again started trying to explain that this program was very different from classes they had in school and that the Eurocentrism of this particular collection of texts wouldn't affect what we discussed. But they looked skeptical. The meeting seemed to be going nowhere until Marvin looked up from fingering the book of readings. "It could help us think for ourselves," he said calmly. "That's something they can't control." Immediately, I could see their faces change as if they finally heard something that might be useful or even important. "You think that? Say more," said Lee, the president of the Legal Clinic whose great knowledge earned him the respect of everyone in spite of a terrible stutter. "Yeah, it's like when we talked about that dead guy. That Trojan. And you asked us how we would mourn a friend. There was no one to tell us who was right and what to say. We were all thinking." A few of the most senior nodded agreement and the others, even the tattooed critic, seemed to concur. That remark finally penetrated to the core of their concerns. Perhaps Marvin had sensed this in the description of the discussion format . Perhaps these experts in the omnipresence of arbitrary control sensed an opportunity for the first time to undertake the pure act of thinking. Perhaps my own inability to supply an answer allowed them the leisure to determine what they needed. In their eyes, I was no longer a professor or a teacher of the kind they had previously experienced. I was merely a technician Zeiderman 23 �who could help them create the structure through which their own thought would take shape. "Thinking for oneself' was no simple expression for them. Within that phrase was lodged the full dimension of their suffering. In prison, all control and initiative was stripped from them. After one session in which we discussed Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham City Jail and why we need the stability of laws, Eddie, a lifer who had served 25 years, took me aside out of the hearing of the others. "Here you've got to be careful. Yeah, even you. They change the rules every day. And they never tell you. That way they control all of you." To supply the desperate need they felt to establish a realm in which they were not entirely passive, they had two options. He took me further aside as if to confide a great truth about his life. "We try to fight it. We work out with weights in the yard or in the gym. That way we at least control how we look. Or we control the fags and the slaves." An entire hierarchy of keeper and kept appears in the prison. The keepers tell the kept what to do, how to act, and what to think. Their thoughts are as imprisoned as their bodies, since the constant pressure of others establishes a tyranny which overrides the distinctions of guard and prisoner. Control in its rawest form flows through the prison, and it was this horror that these men felt our programs might transform. The task was now clear: to go about establishing the conditions for prisoners to reassert their freedom, their ability to become human again, by bestowing significance on their lives through the mere act of thought. By the end of the meeting certain things were clear. I had committed to corning in every Friday evening for two hours, though we never had that much time. Security 24 Energeia always dictated. how long it took to enter. Sometimes I would be held in a control area for an hour only to be told the paperwork couldn't be found. This was always exasperating; however, when I once complained to the group about it, they just laughed. Roderick, one of the older prisoners, explained, "We were hopin' it would happen. It's good for you. It'll help you understand something about here." From then on I sometimes even savored the delays as it revealed in a trivial and temporary way what the prisoners experienced continually. I began to grasp what it meant no longer to be a person but a mere thing. These men had no control over their lives. I too felt that every time I entered the facility. It was as if I had entered another world where I had no standing and no say in what might happen to me. It was a separate world, barely lit and chaotic. Anything could happen in those dim passageways as I walked past the correctional officers and groups of prisoners. My only security was the hope that it wasn't worth their effort to interfere with me. Control as it is implemented and experienced in our prisons is a uniquely modern construct. In contrast to ancient prisons, our prisons reduce men to beasts through controlling and dehumanizing measures. Although ancient prisons were dark and oppressive places where vermin, neglect, and disease dominated, prisoners were not dehumanized. Those vast ancient structures held people of various sorts, often in accommodations that suited their relative rank. Prisoners still retained respect, and in some cases the accoutrements of their position in society. The ranks the prisoners held were part of them and could not be stripped from them whatever their crime or infraction. However, this began to change as religion and science struggled for our souls. Prisons in a temporary compromise Zeiderrnan 25 �became penitentiaries, places where fallen human beings would do penance and assert their humanity again. These people were still not fundamentally different from those who would confess their sins in prayers during church services. The distinction was only that they required a more intense regimen of prayer in places where there were fewer distractions from the work of their salvation. However, as religion lost its primacy to scientific technology, the penitentiary became the house of correction. Some of the group, a few who had served over forty years in prisons in many different states, could actually remember this change. Once we were considering a drawing as a text and suddenly we heard the story first hand. The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz, Prisoners Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are skeletal, with hollow eyes- and all seemingly gripped by something. The session was not going very well and I regretted trying to use a text that connected too vividly with their situation. A number of the younger members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When I asked why a few who spoke often were silent, Larry answered. "It's scary looking at them. I don't want that to be me." As he finished, another prisoner, Craig, a man almost seventy years old who first served time more than fifty years before, laughed. "You don? undert stand nothing. They're not dying. They're gettin' past their hungers. It's the music that makes them pure- like angels. Listen- when I was young down south we had a chaplain. Every day he would play music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn't listen to it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes a song would last a long time, no words. But then we started to love it. We would listen like in the picture, and we'd remember things. And we'd cry. Sometimes you could hear ten men cry. And sometimes 26 Energeia the priest would cry too. We were all together in it. But then he retired and a new chaplain came. He was different. He wanted us to see the doctors and counselors- the case workers. They would ask us questions about ourselves and make us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music ended. It was different. It was them against us." Correction, as Craig sensed, is entirely different from penance. This is one reason why the allegory of the cave from Plato's Republic, one of the most powerful Touchstones readings for any group, is especially fertile in a prison. The status of the modern prison as its own self-enclosed world became explicit in a session in which the prisoners discussed this text. It is a story of people who are themselves prisoners in a barely illuminated cave and who believe the shadows they see cast by objects that move behind them are reality. Eight weeks into the program I decided use this text to encourage the prisoners for the first time to speak explicitly in the group about their own situations as prisoners. For a while they argued about details of the allegory but finally Thomas, a serious and highly intelligent prisoner, moved the discussion to their own reality. He started to consider how a freed prisoner from Plato's cave who saw the reality outside would communicate with those who were still underground if he returned. To make his point about the difficulty of communication, he began to describe his own return to prison. "When I came back in," he said, "I thought I'd find my old friends, and I'd talk to them. But I couldn't. Nothing I said made any sense. I had to learn a new language ." Ken, who had been silent, agreed. "Nothing here makes sense out there. Nothing you would do out there works in here. It's like going from earth to Pluto. They make us into aliens, animals, and then they Zeiderman 27 �wonder why we end up coming back to the barn." · It was into this highly controlled and dehumanizing space that I had entered in response to an appeal from nine lifers attempting to reestablish themselves as men who had committed crimes rather than as members of a separate species, a criminal class. Like the priest who played the music and cried with his prisoners, perhaps like Dostoevsky's Father Zossima crying for himself as much as for them, I was joining them on a journey we would have to undertake together. Soon, the nine men decided to involve another ten so we would have a group of about twenty. They had to explain our goal to the others as best they could. The goal was a rare one in the prison. I would undertake to turn over control of the program to them so they could spread the program throughout the facility. In short, I wasn'tlike other teachers or volunteers- coming to do something for them. Rather, I would try to make it possible for them no longer to need me. That is what all teachers want, but here it was essential that they not feel indebted to me. The program would only work if they felt it was also theirsthat they had collaborated in its creation. However, I knew that it would be as difficult for me to surrender control to them as it would be for them to accept it. I created the program they would learn. I felt I knew better than they what would work and what structure was best. Yet to succeed I would have to enable them actively to collaborate with me in shaping the program for prisons. I was worried that I might not be able to achieve this act of surrender. And would they be able to forget who I was and allow me to be involved without feeling I was judging them, that I was the expert and therefore in control of the situation? Here we were touching on some of the deepest issues of our cul- 28 Energeia ture, ones that :pervaded both the prison and also our own lives- issues of the need for control, the fear of surrender, and the very ownership of one's words. Every discussion group confronts the same set of barriers to a genuine collaborative activity. There are always initially the issues of control, power, and expertise. This initial stage is followed by competition among groups- in other words, factions- who struggle with each other to assert dominance. This happens by groups and individuals. The next barrier is the problem of listening without imposing our own thoughts on another. After overcoming these impediments, there is the effort one must make to evolve a type of leadership and responsibility that is shared among all the participants. These issues raise the most complex human problems and questions irrespective of culture. The culture determines how the group approaches these problems but not what the barriers are. In addition to these problems, there are others that characterize a group or the individuals in it as a unique collection of people immersed in a specific institutional or social environment. These problems concern all of us in some measure, but specific groups face certain problems continually as a fact of their lives and their circumstances. They have an expertise in that area, as a problem they must continually face, which the rest of us share to a lesser and more occasional extent. They can therefore become a resource for us all as they struggle in the discussion environment to overcome that barrier that uniquely affects them and shapes their lives. The prisoners had their own specific complex needs, needs that centered on the issue of control and their attempt to overcome the passivity imposed by their violent and arbitrary environment. They had a hunger for control. However, in order to create a genuine Zeiderman 29 �group, they would have to transmute this desire into a form that enabled them to surrender control in its customary forms . It was with regard to such issues that they could most clearly be a resource for others. Prisoners also certainly need the intellectual skills and the skills of cooperation to better equip them to enter society as employable people. However, the needs expressed by these prisoners had a different urgency. These nine men were to spend their lives in prison, and their needs dealt not with the future but with the environment in which they all lived. Their needs were three-fold. The first involved the fact that MHC, like all prisons, was overcrowded. There was a certain freedom of contact and movement simply because there was not enough space to keep prisoners separated. This mobility of course increased the possibility of collisions among prisoners or gangs of prisoners. Through spreading Touchstones in the prison, the men aimed gradually to change the environment where they all lived. A modest success was recounted one evening after one of the discussions. We had just discussed the opening scene of Ellison's Invisible Man where the "invisible" narrator collides with a white man and comes close to killing him. During the session they had mostly considered their prejudices, their assumptions about one another. However, near the end of our time, Alan, a white man, spoke up more personally. "This happened yesterday. I was on line at lunch, carrying my tray. James [a black man who sometimes attended sessions] was in front of me. Don't know how, but I bumped into him. His lunch fell. Three months ago he would have hit me hard, maybe killed me. But he didn't, and we cleaned up the mess. And other people gave him some of their food. That's never happened here before." Lee, one of the lead- 30 Energeia ers, seemed to speak for all of them, when he commented on this incident: "They try to make us savages. And before we started talking to one another, we used to believe them." In short, their startling goal was to humanize their world- a world in which they were viewed and viewed themselves as barely human. Their second goal involved a peculiar paternal attitude toward the younger men. These men were old timers, men who had survived years of abuse and indignity from guards, and other prisoners. They knew how to remain alive. They were the wisest of the wise. Each of them was unique, and the only image that captured their stature for me was a comparison with the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad: Ajax, Sarpedon, Patrocles, Achilleus, and Hector. These men hoped to influence the young ones, seventeen to twenty-five years old, who came for two or three years and then graduated, as if they had attended a college course in how to commit crimes. These young felons never grasped that they too might spend their lives behind these walls. The group of lifers felt that speaking directly wouldn't work. They hoped that their words would carry more weight after having worked together in these more neutral, though important, discussions. The third dimension was the one that affected each of them most intimately. It wasn't just a matter of their environment or a concern for those who would follow the paths these men regretted having themselves pursued. Rather, it was the sense that they too, even in these hostile and precarious and dehumanizing conditions, were capable of thinking on the deepest issues that confront all of us. This became vivid to me and to them one Friday evening. The text was a short passage by Kant on morality. He claims that we are moral only when we act from duty Zeiderman 31 �and not because we want to. Most of the group considered him crazy. They gave example after example of helping others, family, friends, even enemies, because of pity or affection. Finally Sam interrupted. "You guys really don't get it. He's saying that what you're talking about is only like eatin' when you're hungry. That's no big deal. It's only when it's hard, when it hurts, and you do it anyway that you can respect yourself. Then you know you're a man." As he spoke I and others nodded in agreement. The intensity of Sam's thought, exploring an idea that no one had been able to consider, enabled me and others to take Kant's claims more seriously. In these sessions they felt they could finally exercise control over their own thoughts- they could, as Sam did and helped us do, think for themselves. This they sensed would once again make them fully human in their own minds and capable of respecting themselves as well as others. The task we set ourselves was to create a group of about ten discussion leaders who then would each be able to conduct groups for other prisoners. The ultimate aim for the men was to involve as many prisoners as possible in the programs and to make these discussions part of the ongoing life of the institution. In addition, a collection of texts was to be selected and tried out for use in this prison as well as possibly in others. In this program and the other programs I have designed, the texts are understood as tools, as touchstones. Though they are sometimes specific to particular groups- like the Kolwitz drawing- most texts selected, like Ellison's or Kant's, touch so deeply on our habits and expectations and our past cultural and historical inheritance that they are useful for a wide variety of groups. In the case of the prison population we needed to determine what texts would enable the participants to con- 32 Energeia sider the issues of real concern to them. At the same time, the process should not force them into areas they would only approach in their own time. So it became necessary both to explore the problems these leaders would face as well as why certain kinds of texts were used. In other words, for the men to learn to lead a group meant for them to grasp to a certain extent the underlying structure of the program. The men in the group were therefore a core of nine men who had committed to this project as well as a varying group of others who would join up merely to participate. These were sometimes men known to the other participants. However, prisoners sometimes joined up for one or two meetings and were not known to the men. In certain cases we knew that prisoners were asked to attend to inform prison officials and monitor what was happening. I never knew who these other occasional participants were. I never knew whether they were sent to disrupt the session either by another prisoner organization that objected to what was happening, or by the prison administration, or simply by a prisoner who might be angry at one of the other prisoners or at the idea of changing the status quo of the institution. However, uncertainty is built into the nature of the discussion process and these visitors exacerbated that aspect. It also made clear to me that in a discussion, one is never in control. In order to participate or lead one must realize that one is dependent on the other participants. This also made it obvious that a genuine discussion is not an event that is isolated from the environment or culture or organization in which it occurs. The first stage of our work was to give the men the experience of a discussion. I used texts from the Touchstones series of volumes. These are contained in n ine vol- Zeiderman 33 �umes ranging from works for third and fourth ·graders through high schoolers and adults. These volumes, especially those for the middle and high school series, are also perfectly suitable for adults. The volume a group uses is rarely a function of reading level, since the program can be done orally, but rather a matter of experience with discussion. Our goal in high school in the first year of participation is for the participants to understand each stage of the process itself and, after twenty- to twenty-five sessions, to begin conducting the classes themselves. This became the model for what we wished to achieve in prison. In addition, each session was filmed. The video was copied and one of the copies was returned to the men. A typical session would involve my passing out a text which was read aloud, and having individual and small group work precede the discussion. The group would then reunite and I would lead the discussion. This would last about fifty to sixty minutes. Then I would break the discussion and for the last thirty minutes we would analyze what had occurred. This was the procedure we pursued week by week. Often the analysis of the discussion process would drift back into the topic of discussion itself or the text. Once after a discussion using the short essay by Francis Bacon, About Revenge, James, one of the prisoners, interrupted an argument between two very assertive men about whether there had been dominance in the session. "Hey," asked James, addressing one of the men arguing in an innocent tone, "did anyone take revenge during the meeting?" For a few moments no one responded though a number of eyes turned to Michael, the man James seemed to address. Then Lee actually acknowledged that he had been tempted to respond to what he took as a slight but 34 Energeia didn't. Finally, Michael spoke up. "I did. What Vaughn said rubbed me wrong and I thought he knew that- so I went at him. It was stupid." The group then returned to the text on revenge and Michael and Lee described how they had reacted in different ways, why one tried to get even and the other didn't and how they felt about their actions. This moment was common in the sessions as reflection on the discussion dynamics often led us back to the subject itself. The process of discussion and the text echoed one another. In order for this to happen texts must be selected which exemplify the structures and attitudes of our society and institutions. The discussion then becomes a unique kind of cultural exploration, in which the presuppositions of the culture can be made visible and new forms of thinking and behavior can be explored. The entire history of slavery was continually present in the prison. Jessup, like most American prisons, is filled primarily with black men- the descendants of slaves once again in something very like slave quarters. Not only are their cramped cells and chains reminiscent of slavery but as the state increasingly involves itself in various commercial enterprises in prisons we are once again witnessing the use of what is essentially slave labor. The entire drama and stage setting of incarceration duplicates the four hundred year history of slavery on this continent. Slavery, and the complete absence of control over one's decisions, one's future, and one's life were clearly the issues that should be probed by these men. They, more than others, had an expertise which we lack in surviving while facing the paralysis, the passivity, imposed on them. It is part of the aim of these discussions to ultimately enable the participants to discuss the most vital and volatile issues. However, no one is prepared to undertake this Zeiderman 35 �without the skills which the program develops. It is only quite late in the process that texts are dispensed with and topics themselves confronted. When that occurs prematurely the result is mere conflict or a series of monologues. It requires great discipline to undertake a genuine discussion of what one cares deeply about. Thus, though slavery was at least one of the main concerns of this group, its discussion as a topic would not occur until much later. We would approach it through the mediation of specific texts until the group became more skilled. Every group has certain issues like this and these will come up in the process itself, in the experiences the group has in their lives, and in the institutional structure within which they live. I therefore selected texts at various stages which would push aspects of the issue of slavery to the surface. The choice of a passage from Epictetus' Manual was a first attempt. The passage is a terse statement of stoicism, a very abstract claim about slavery and freedom which holds that we are all enslaved, and that only by desiring what is completely and entirely in one's control could anyone be free . Epictetus goes on to claim that only our thoughts and opinions are entirely in our control. This, he argues, is because all people for whom we might feel love or affection and all property we possess or desire could be lost through some unpredictable event. The discussion of this text occurred about two months into the program. It was a large group of about thirty that Friday night and the shape of the arrangement of chairs had departed far from a circle, which is preferred, and had become a very elongated ellipse. The configuration of the chairs often plays a key role in a discussion, since everything in a format like this has significance. I wanted to modify the shape of the ellipse and make it more uniform but I hesi- 36 Energeia tated. I always felt I should accept the circumstances that presented them'selves in the prison as much as possible. Whether one manipulates the seating arrangement depends on the setting, the group, and the leadership role. Leading a discussion is not a uniform task. There is not one model that all must adhere to in every situation. The goals remain the same across groups of the same kind but how one achieves them can vary considerably. I was at pains to make few demands on the situation and on the men in it. I didn't wish to be perceived as part of the organizational structure that moves them from place to place. When a prisoner would run the group, he would exercise much more control and direction than I did. It makes sense for that approach since he needs to demarcate himself as an expert in the initial phases whereas I wanted to minimize that status. This is the great issue confronting this effort to create a genuinely collaborative activity. People want an expert who will take control and yet wish to be free of that very desire. So the question is how one should share leadership and authority. That of course is a problem that will face all of us in every aspect oflife. These discussions therefore are a laboratory in which the new directions to be pursued in our society can be explored and worked out. I sat on the long side of the ellipse where I could best see all the men. Many men were new. There were three foci to the discussion. One group was led by a large man named Karem, who sat at one of the endpoints of the major axis-a dominant place in such a configuration. Karem agreed with Epictetus. He contended that the prison had enslaved his body but his mind was free. He argued that they couldn't enslave that. "No one can chain my mind," he boasted. "Though my body is locked in this sewer, my Zeiderman 37 �mind can roam everywhere." He spoke in such a. forceful way that many men, in spite of themselves, agreed. Kevin, on the other hand, violently disagreed. The officers didn't just control his body. By controlling that, they controlled him. They determined when he could move and where he could be. And these decisions controlled his life, his desire, his thoughts, and his dignity. While Karem held that he still felt free, Kevin vividly described what had happened to all of them- a need to urinate while waiting somewhere in the prison. "And," said Kevin, "they take their damn time. They know what's happening. They can read our faces, and we're forced to humiliate ourselves. They turn us into children or animals." Such an indignity can happen at any moment and to deny one's feeling about that is not to be free but rather to be less than human, Kevin went on to claim. Karem tensed at this point as if someone had said the very words he felt characterized both his and all their positions and which they were striving to change by their own efforts. Sometimes it is difficult to lead a discussion because what is said grips everyone with the reality of the lives of some of the participants. Even with experienced leaders, when a discussion becomes deeply real to the participants it is difficult for the leader to focus on the longrange goals of the project. Here I was listening to a discussion of Stoicism by people who didn't merely speculate and imagine what it would be like. These were people whose very survival and sanity often depended on their living that way. Some people in that room were in fact stoics and could speak to Epictetus as if they were colleagues on the same path. Others knew the temptation to stoicism and perhaps had tried it and abandoned it. It is this facet which gives such power to discussions 38 Energeia Angel Wings I Katherine Hale Hale 39 �- that are designed to use text and experience to echo one another. This fertile tension between the experience of the group and the text reveals how such discussions differ so radically from both education in the traditional sense, in which an idea or text is explored and elaborated, and also from therapy, in which what is at issue is the experience of the particular participant. Here the personal is mediated by a text which is often the seminal source of a concept or institutional structure and yet through its difference from the personal allows one to view oneself from a distance. In fact, this very issue itself came up in the discussion on Epictetus and soon became the main focus. One of the men- Eddie, a former Black Panther who was a lifer but always proclaimed his innocence- brought this home to all of us. "None of us are free. We're all enslaved," he said, breaking a brief moment of silence between Kevin and Karem. "And not just those like us in prison. Yeah, we're held in place by bars and wire, but that's not all. Our minds themselves are enslaved. And not just ours, Howard's too and everyone out there. Our thoughts aren't our own. They're just the ones we grew up with. How can we be free when how we think is our prison?" This took everyone aback. Everyone realized this was an important thought that we would have to continually consider and struggle with. Eddie's remark defused the tension between Karem and Kevin by revealing how this issue of our slavery was the struggle we all had to face. The men bounced all these ideas around as if they were in a three sided tennis match. No one changed an opinion but each gave the others the chance to speak. And this session was decisive for the group because they finally recognized, as Eddie implied, that I had nothing more to offer on this subject than they had, and in fact less. After an hour I 40 Energeia broke off the discussion so we might evaluate what had just happened. · In order to encourage people to emerge briefly from the prisons in which Eddie claimed we were all captive, I wanted the men to spend time with prisoners they didn't know. I asked the men to count to four and get into small groups according to number. That would effectively separate friends from one another, and I instructed them to consider what they felt were the strong and weak points of the discussion. When these groups reported their analyses, most of the groups agreed. They felt there had been a presentation of views but no discussion. As Vaughn said, "no one changed an opinion, and no one looked at what they themselves were saying. We were just stating our minds." But Thomas responded: "That isn't so terrible. At least we could finally say what we really thought. And the rest of us listened even if we didn't react. That was important. Others listening- we get some dignity that way," he claimed. A number of men agreed. But then Karem, who had been listening with a clear expression of discomfort, interrupted. "But that means you need others to be free . And how could this Epictetus be right about being free in your thoughts when we need one another for our own self-respect? And don't you need selfrespect for freedom?" It was there in the meta-discussion that the real discussion finally occurred. It was when they had made the claims of stoicism visible to themselves in their very activity that they could seriously consider the implications. The discussion did in fact act as an experiment for discerning new forms of activity. There was no official status in my position, and the men received nothing for their participation. There was nothing concrete they would gain. I therefore had no Zeiderman 41 �power to bestow anything obviously useful or valued in that environment. The men came because they were allowed to think. The excitement of thinking and knowing that they too were capable of this activity drew them into the group. They weren't here to learn from a book but to explore, together with me, both themselves and this new terrain we were bringing into being. Discussion is possible only when there is no agenda. I had no agenda in terms of the conclusions we would reach or the paths we would take though I clearly had a goal. I wanted to tailor the program to this institution. This meant I would try out texts, and explore the means by which I could turn over the responsibility for the program to these men. Often they would ask me about our other programs and I would tell them about the possibilities and the difficulties we faced in the program with Palestinians in Gaza in Arabic, or indentured children in Haiti, or CEO's at the Harvard Club, or middle school students, or senior citizens, or with plebes at the Naval Academy, or with my students at St. John's. I think it was very important to these men to realize that what they were doing was identical in some of its fundamental principles with attempts throughout the world by people who were willing to risk high levels of uncertainty to undertake the effort to change themselves. It was the start of a sort of community where wethere in the bleak activity area of a nineteenth century prison, in the third floor private meeting room at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, in senior citizen centers, and in Haitian churches- were taking steps to explore a world which, though continuous with strands of all of these disparate worlds, nonetheless revealed glimpses of other forms of life and new ways of being and thinking. It happened briefly but often enough to present the outlines of 42 Energeia possibility. The .men knew they were explorers into a region no one knew about. The trips to space were not the successors of the trips of Columbus and Magellan. Those early explorers needed to change their fundamental conception of their world in order to make room for what they saw. The astronauts merely solved the typical problem of how to get from one visible and relatively known place to another though on a more immense scale. The problem we faced was not one of going from here to there but from now to then. It was exploration into a future which would no longer be a corollary of our pasts. These men serving life sentences for serious crimes felt part of the small bands of people making these journeys and they sensed they were bringing a perspective that was uniquely theirs but necessary to all the others. This sense, I think, translated into their respect for me in spite of the fact that I was merely one more among them, a person who knew a bit about sketching a rough map of our explorations and who had an acute sense of apparent harbors that were merely the temptations of sirens. However, neither I nor they could give a detailed account of this new terrain. Sometimes I thought we were on solid ground and in a familiar region when suddenly the ground would open up and I found myself, as in the conventional dream, falling endlessly with no place to grab. And then just as suddenly the scene transformed and I could see that I was in a pacific valley and the fall was merely a misperception. I constantly had to seek my bearings along with the men, and that made vivid the reality of our mutual dependence. Up to this point I had led the discussions, selected the texts from the Touchstones series, and designed the meeting format. But since our goal was for the core group to develop the skills necessary to lead discussions with other Zeiderman 43 �prisoners, I knew at some stage I would have to turn over the responsibility to them. I must say I kept postponing the step. I kept worrying that I hadn't communicated enough to them, as if one could prepare for every eventuality in any complex activity, much less a discussion which, if properly engaged in, changes from moment to moment with a life of its own. However, I also recognized that these were merely excuses to avoid surrendering control. I was finally able to overcome my resistance because of what the prisoners were able to do. We were moving to a stage in the program in which the group must begin to observe and judge itself. In all the programs I have developed, the text, the experience of the participants, and the dynamical issues arising in the process all interpenetrate and echo one another. To prepare the way for self-judgment and self-criticism of the group we first discussed a worksheet which drew out the opinions of the men on how one judges others at first meeting. The men were asked if they considered peoples' clothes, how people sit or hold themselves, or their eyes when meeting someone for the first time. In a prison judging correctly at first meeting is a very important event as it can determine whether one is threatened or safe. Two men sharply disagreed on the best way to accomplish this. Idrus asserted it was by the person's posture, whereas Eddie focused on the eyes as the most revealing. This exchange went on for a few minutes, and we could see Eddie becoming increasingly impatient. Idrus was wearing dark glasses and Eddie, annoyed, finally said what he had been thinking: "What's behind those glasses?" In response Idrus tensed, started to rise, but then remained seated and replied. "You've known me here for twenty years and you've never seen that." The moment was ex- 44 Energeia plosive and I quickly moved it on to the text for that day to re-establish control. They reconsidered this issue of selfobservation and self-judgment by discussing two self-portraits of Rembrandt, one in which he concentrates on his eyes, and another in which he elaborates his clothing with the eyes almost invisible in darkness. The discussion got past that moment of tension to consider how Rembrandt had changed in how he depicted himself. The next week, Idrus- the prisoner who had worn the dark glasses for twenty years- came to the session without them. We were all stunned. All of us spoke haltingly as the session began, hardly able to absorb the momentousness of his action. This appeared such a monumental step that I felt I should follow suit. I felt in awe of what had just occurred and the others all appreciated the extraordinary gesture they were witnessing. I immediately changed what I had planned for the session. I resolved that I would surrender control to the group the following week, and to begin that process in this session I decided to explore with them what we would consider. I began encouraging the group to think through the issues involved in leading a group. A discussion leader always comes to a session with a goal. The goal can be a topic that it is deemed essential the group discuss, or a problem the group must overcome, such as dominance by a few, or an opportunity in the group's development, or a part of the text that seems important. The leader might have to surrender this goal immediately if it becomes clear that the group will not go along with this approach, or that they are ready for a different goal. In this case it was I, the group's leader, who was finally ready for something more significant. After almost a year of hesitation, I was finally ready Zeiderman 45 �to collaborate with them, to surrender control. !therefore asked them to consider what topic we as a group should discuss. For an hour they suggested various subjects but the main one was "What is God?" Some claimed that this was far too personal and sensitive too discuss, others claimed that the group was capable of attempting it. Some then claimed it wouldn't be a discussion where one might change one's mind. Instead they would simply state their opinions, indifferent to what the others might say. However, in spite of their reservations, they were willing to attempt it. At the end of the session we chose a text that we could use to focus our exploration. The text chosen was a selection in a Touchstones volume- the sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis. The session had been so penetrating in exa:rnining what constituted a discussion, what role texts can play in channeling the exploration, and how to avoid having it tum into an empty ping-pong match of quotes and scattered opinions, that I also decided that for the first time it would be lead by one of the prisoners. I could have chosen any of the group but Michael Evans-el volunteered. A thirty-five year old prisoner, he had been serving a life sentence since the age of fourteen when he was sentenced as an incorrigible offender. Michael began quietly. He asked: "What sort of God would make such a request?" There was silence for a few moments and then first Eddie and then Thomas and then Lee all plunged into the discussion to shed light on the mystery of God's purposes. For ninety minutes, Michael led a discussion on the difference between sacrifice and murder and the role of God in our lives with a group of men all of whom had either committed murder or were at least convicted of it. And they identified even more closely with Abraham. As Vaughn pointed out, "We here must con- 46 Energeia stantly ask ourselves just what Abraham must have asked himself during that three day trip to Mt. Moriah: why me, God, why me?" Though there was a text one could not determine whether this was a textual or non-textual discussion. They had finally achieved that intermediate point in which the distinction breaks down. The following week we spent a good part of the session discussing what had occurred and whether their expectations were satisfied. Had it been possible to discuss these subjects or were they simply presenting monologues? Everyone agreed that their worst fears had not materialized. In fact, the discussion was a great surprise even to those who expected that we were able to pursue it. As one of the men said, "It was like a wheel, it just moved round and round." These men were discussing the issue most personal to them-the murder of another human being. Yet they had the discipline to depersonalize their own experience and allow others to participate in a discussion. They could surrender control of what was most intimate, and yet at the same time they never made it an abstract discussion. They were able to fuse a textual exploration with one in which their own experience lent credibility to their comments. The session on the sacrifice of Isaac was a decisive moment for the group. It was a great success, far greater than I or they or anyone could have imagined. They felt that with some advance preparation one of them had been able to conduct a session. It was in fact a session on a topic-what is God?- that most felt they wouldn't be able to handle. However, it went much further. It was a discussion of the very crime for which they were serving life sentences. The discussion was thoughtful and probing with neither any self-pity nor any avoidance of self-examination. Once we began this process we decided to continue. Zeiderman 47 �The next week we decided we would have another leader and would go in rotation until each of the nine men had practiced with this group. This was a major step. I also thought it was better to allow the leader to know in advance and for him to be able to select the text and the approach. The next volunteer was Vaughn, a prisoner who had played a very strong role in the last discussion. Michael, who had led the discussion, had the best sense of how to keep himself out of the way. I knew others would have more difficulty. It is always a challenge to lead a group. Leading has little to do with whether you enjoy discussions yourself. In fact often the worst leaders are precisely those who want to be participants. However, there is no one model for conducting a discussion. One has to discern one's strengths and utilize those within this new environment. Vaughn's great strength as a participant in fact would, I expected, cause him problems as a leader. There was great seriousness and intensity in Vaughn. In a discussion he often took the group to new levels by his passionate thinking about a problem. In the Abraham discussion, when the discussion was becoming fragmented, Vaughn focused it on what we all knew we should talk about. He imagined Abraham, walking with Isaac those three days. He uttered what everyone in the group was asking about Abraham and themselves, "God, why me, why me?" It was Vaughn who could suddenly transform a meandering route into one of deep engagement. As one prisoner at a different prison said of a discussion on the Iliad, at some point it left the streets of Troy for those of Baltimore. Vaughn could effect that translation too. But this very power could also cause problems. It is wonderful when a participant further raises the 48 Energeia depth and importance of a discussion. But when a leader does it, the group can become dependent on his enthusiasm or defensive and even go into opposition. A leader must rather show that he respects others and feels that the issues they have raised are serious. Vaughn was also not generally attentive to the needs of others in the group. He was not vain at all but simply so engaged by the question or topic that he would lose a sense of where the others in the group were in their thinking. Each of the men had different kinds of issues they would have to face as leaders but Vaughn's was one of the most difficult. He would have to subordinate his own ideas and help others to bring out theirs. He would have to surrender control of the content and focus on his responsibility to others. If anyone had to learn service it was he. I also had to let him choose the text. What he chose startled and troubled me even more than the fact that he would lead it. It was a piece by an eighteenth century ex-slave about what owning slaves does to the slave owner. In one sense it was potentially useful because it at least took a perspective that the group of twenty black men had to infer. But as touching so directly on the topic of slavery it seemed beyond the ability of this group, much more so than the question about God. I was amazed that this was the text chosen though I had resolved there was nothing I would do to change it. They had to learn to select texts for a specific group at a specific time in their evolution and this was at least a start. And I had to learn to surrender my position and become a participant in the group. I hoped we could analyze it afterward in order at least to decide why it failed. The analysis would present an opportunity to explore the role of texts and how one selects them. I decided I would sit next to Vaughan, thinking that Zeiderman 49 �way at least I might control how much he spoke. Though the previous week had been so disciplined, this discussion collapsed within moments. The first question took us far from the text onto the issue of why whites enslaved blacks. All the issues with enslavement and abuse came up and the group could hardly sustain any exchange at all. Within minutes I sensed that we were near an abyss. The few whites in the room tried to speak but were not even listened to seriously. Some got up and left the circle, angry at what was happening. However, most eventually returned and sat down again since there was no place else for them to go. Even the blacks began to attack one another. And all the alliances that had developed broke down. I felt I had no idea where we were going, no idea whether the group could hold together for the hour or whether I would have to break it off if they allowed me. At that moment I was certain that the effort and the accomplishment of a year was really an illusion. The session seemed endless as person after person spoke. The area became electric when Arthur "Shaka" Wiggins said that in 1975 he was born a slave in Baltimore and his life would be devoted to becoming free . I remained silent, unable to speak after my one contribution was ignored. After an hour, Vaughn suddenly broke it off, saying we had to move on. I was relieved that we had all survived this experience, and was ready to pack up and depart feeling that I had failed in this entire effort. But before I could close out the session, in a very steady voice Vaughn asked each person to reflect on the activities of the previous hour- what were the strong and weak points, was it a discussion, was it a success or a disaster, and how could it have been improved? I was startled both at what Vaughn had attempted at this stage and also at how the men responded. 50 Energeia They were very circumspect and considerate in their comments. Both the whites and blacks spoke calmly about what had transpired- what they felt and why they thought they were not allowed to speak- even discussing why some men had left the circle. I didn't expect, at the end of that previous hour, that we could ever reconstruct the discipline they revealed the previous week. But after the discussion everything changed. They began to reflect on other aspects of the issue as if they were no longer expected to defend their people. After about fifteen minutes during which they considered how Vaughn had conducted the session, someone abruptly broadened the issue. Stuttering, Lee asked whether anyone had ever tried to enslave someone in the prison, or even whether that had happened during the discussion. There was a long silence and I could see many moving nervously in their chairs. Finally Thomas acknowledged both. And within moments, as if finally given the freedom to speak openly, all entered the discussion as if they were no longer just the victims but also the perpetrators. They began to describe the complexity of their emotions as slave owners. They recounted how when they first enslaved someone on the tiers they felt a power and sense of victory. They no longer felt imprisoned but human again. But then they began to feel the enslaved person to be a burden. Instead, only the free prisoners interested them. Their slaves were servile, willing to say or do anything they felt would ease their lot. These men here, all of whom were acknowledging themselves as slavers, wanted respect. They said they didn't want it from their slaves but from others- from one another. All felt that the moment they enslaved someone his respect was worthless and their own self-respect diminished. And others would Zeiderman 51 �not respect them for such pointless conquests. After their first moment of euphoria, they said they felt debased and less human. And they began acting that way. It was again in reflecting on themselves and their discussion that the text Vaughn had chosen was finally explored. As I drove back to Annapolis that evening, I finally had an occasion to reflect on what I had just lived through. In the prison I had heard the genuine reality of a critical section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit- the section on Lordship and Bondage. However, unlike Hegel's illusive and obscure abstractions these men felt in their flesh and in their lives the very failures chronicled in that pilgrimage. They too, as Hegel pointed out about all of us, felt the deep and fundamental urge to be recognized as human, as beings who were different from the rats and insects that populated their world. And they struggled to do that even in their most heinous acts. These men, enslaved by their past and their world, used others to attempt to break free , to display their humanity in an act of conquest, of being willing to die to assert themselves as lords over a cell block or over a part of the yard. And in the moment of success, of attaining complete control over a space and its inhabitants, they acknowledged feeling their sense of themselves slipping away into the emptiness. In addition, the very men whose submission and recognition was meant to guarantee their own mastery and control showed to them the futility of that recognition. By succumbing to these conquerors, those men showed they couldn't appreciate what the victor truly was and therefore couldn't offer him their acknowledgement and recognition. They- these victorsbegan to recognize themselves as slaves even in their moment of conquest. In Hegel's story of the progress of human awareness to its complete self-awareness, the master who conquers is a dead end. The story continues 52 Energeia through the trials and struggles of the slave. And it is selfdiscipline that shows the way to Hegel's all too joyous conclusion at the end of what he called the path of despair. And here too was despair, here in these yards and the echoing corridors, and yet these men showed a self-discipline I didn't expect. They had gone further than I had imagined or could go myself. They no longer needed a text to mediate to themselves. For that brief period they spoke of their own pain and anger and humiliation and then in a remarkable display of self-awareness commented on their own strengths and weaknesses. Though the road here was not directed toward Hegel's rosy culmination of h istory nonetheless the step through this discipline once again revealed the route to oneself. As one of the men said- the one who declared he was born a slave in Baltimore in 1975- it was in these discussions that for the first time he found his voice. The men had achieved more than anyone could give them, something which the act of bestowal would itself destroy. These men had to find their own voices- they had to surrender the idioms of their age and class and race and gender and for the first time risk hearing themselves. They had to break free together from the prison Eddie pointed out that they and I and all others inhabited. These prisoners thanked the discussions for making that possible. Perhaps that was correct, but they made the discussions. The discussions weren't there waiting for them. And in this moment I realized what it meant for me to surrender control. The utmost that I could do was merely to set the stage for acts of courage I could admire but which it might never be my privilege to display. I left the prison realizing that for a brief moment I had seen in men confined to cells for their lives an example of mutual respect and recognition, of freedom, that the rest of us rarely achieve. Zeiderman 53 �RAINER MARIA RILKE Herbsttag Autumn Day Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groK Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren, und auf den Fluren lag die Winde los. Lord: it is time. The great summer is done. Cast your shadow upon the sundial And across the earth's floor, let the wind loose. Befiehl den letzten Friichten voll zu sein; gieb ihnen noch zwei siidlichere Tage, drange sie zur Vollendung hin und jage die letzte su.ge in den schweren w ein. Command the last fruits to swell with ripeness Give them just two more days of warm southern wind, Urge them to their fulfillment and chase The last drops of sweetness into the heavy wine. W er jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. W er jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben, wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben und wird in den Alleen hin und her unruhig wandern, wenn die Blatter treiben. Now, he who has no house, will not build one. Now, he who is alone, will remain so, Will wake, read, and write long letters And will wander back and forth down the avenues Restlessly, as the leaves float to the ground. -Translated by Elsabe Dixon 54 Energeia Rilke 55 �KAT Rros Dwellings I The dunes rose high out of a sleeping giant that day. The arching breath of the dreaming monster lulled and sent Cold shivers rippling over silver specks at play With the brilliant glint of summer light that skipped and bent. Buried in myriad years of debris we would find Simple, beautiful containers; old abandoned homes That could rest in the palm of a soft, small hand; remind Us of skipping staunch waves amidst salty spray, sea foam. We'd gather and keep a collection ever growing To turn over from time to time in imitation; And intimate to our drum soft wind's azure lowing, Invisible, clearing skies for sun's salutation. II Most days wanted. Always brought out For turns, Or simply gazed at. Neatly minding One's own business. To tack Or not tack; that is One perfect question. Over ... over, Shale stone, Leafy and rolled smooth Over shores. Spit, As if waking From such A wonderful deep, As tides with strange fish Tug at hours Compiled Of swift sentiment. Tug, salt memories! Most grains time drags - Soft sandNever meet again. Always in the end Neatly arranged, Put back On the shelf again. 56 Energeia Rios 57 �- ---· MAxSocoL Minnesota A venue The worm that trundles hardly stops For you, young-and-pregnant. It hunts Warmer, wide and deep, oceanic; And the breath it breathes and the slop it slops On you, marble-eyed three-term panic, Is nothing to the howl spent Not getting out at Minnesota Avenue, As empty and weird as the moon. But the worm swallows deeper- and broader too, And keeps to the ground its electric ear. On the afternoon. Hear it barely, belly, Don't run your hands down to your hips. You shake on a seat, I sway and I standAnd the worm is a cast off relic That howls into the vat like a half-formed candle, In hardened hands that dip and dip. What or who will entice you out? And where will he do it? How studied and empty The turn your shoulders take. No pity For the barnacles of buildings that harden without, that Grow arthritic and painful to the beating city. Your shoulders say: I am ready. Wheezing like a virus the worm charges on. I cannot wait for the day I won't wait For the car parks and dried-up gas stations, the sordid Trash that builds and falls beyond The windows, the burned-out, acrid Flesh even a worm can escape. Ignore it for me and I'll ignore it for you, Sad-sacks that we are. But credit us, even we're 58 Energeia Socol 59 �Incorrect Sonnet The fullness of night beguiles me, rich As expensive chocolate, unsteady as leaves. I shutter in my bed. I toss and audit, I wrinkle up like a dried fruit- with effortNo one knows if I sleep or not Because I sleep like a tree. Displace me years hence, onward and wideward, Whirling in and down while the world winds out. I know that one day I will hide from day, I know that I will sleep away the sun and Scurry like a beetle under my furniture. My room will have three doors, and All will be for the nighttime. Darling, I almost forgot: be with me for the nighttime. Nude No. 5 I Allison Hauspurg 60 Energeia Hauspurg 61 �M. L. SHEAR 36th St. There is a home, A Cross from a Grave Yard. The Dead, they speak In silent tones. Sickly flowers return. Nursing in a home, A Cross from a Grave Yard. I see young tend these bold, Crusting worriers of Night. Their weight, the tripod gait. The Sun now setting, Fires flyfurring airs, The soft eve, My heart beat, A successive pulse, Rhymes till now. Susan and Anna I Dan Rekshan But the jagged arc of life, An old woman, Obese, caned, Expects the grassy Yard, So close and beautiful, Stone and green. 62 Energeia Rekshan 63 �Gender, Nature, and Politics in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Ian Lindquist Part I: Masculinity and Femininity Un titled /Justin Lee Chaucer's Canterbury Tales centers around the inevitable and eternal problem of the relation between men and women. Each character reveals his or her own belief about the role of men and women in the world and in relation to one another. While different conceptions of these roles are found throughout the Tales, the relation betw een the feminine and the masculine always reflects a distinction between the natural realm and th e human political realm. Indeed, the natural and human political realms underlie the roles offemininity and masculinity. Not only does the conflict between women and men reflect th at of nature and politics, but the former is simply a more particular manifestation of the latter. What kind of molding-together must be undergone by men and women for them to live in a harmonious society together? Do both sides h ave to give something up for this balance to work, or do they offer certain assets to each other that are beneficial for both? Likewise, what is natural for humanity? What kin d of balance of nature and politics does humanity need in order to live in the world and what are the roles of each in relation to each other? Finally, if this balance is possible, what allow s humanity to find it? In The Knight's Tale, we are told that Duke Theseus: Conquered al the regne of Femenye, That whilom was ycleped Scithia, 64 Energeia Lindquist 65 �And weddede the queen Ypolita, And broghte hire hoom with hym in his contree With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee. (866- 870) 1 By calling the country of the Amazons "Femenye" and only secondly calling it by its proper political name Scithia, the knight constructs a symbol that will be important throughout the Tales. Theseus conquers womanhood (Femenye) living on its own and therefore in its purest form. The knight places the story in a mythological time with mythological characters, something which is done to reveal the nature of humanity. Myth, and especially myth about the founder of ancient Athens, grapples with the . issue of humanity coming to terms with the natural realm. It is no surprise that the knight casts Theseus as his main character, as Theseus unified the Attic region of Greece into what became Athens by slaying and conquering the great thieves and monsters of his time. 2 Political stability only came about because Theseus could see order and was able to destroy all the chaos, represented by thieves and monsters, standing in its way. The conquest of the Amazons is included among these feats. Simply by using this character, the knight reveals to his audience that the tale takes place in a time when the human political realm was first coming into existence out of the chaos of the natural realm. By contrasting men and women in his account of Theseus' conquering, he shows that the two parties, the feminine and the masculine, have always been in conflict by nature. It is not until the human political realm is All citations from the Tales are according to Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, eds. A.C. Cawley and Malcolm Andrew (Great Britain: Clays Ltd, St Ives pk, 2004) . 2Plutarch, Lives: Theseus 1 66 Energeia formed that the yossibility exists for life without conflict between the two parties. The miller "pays back" (3127 "quite") the tale of the knight in his own tale by creating a major difference between his tale and the knight's: the role of the woman. While Emily is the reason that the action within The Knight's Tale occurs, she is never the central actor in the plot. She is akin to an unmoved mover, being both the first and final cause of the knight's story. She forces the story to occur in that she motivates the men to fight for her while also being the ultimate prize of the fighting. However, in between these two places, she is virtually unseen and unheard; in order to win her as a prize, the men steal the stage to battle each other for her. In The Miller's Tale, Alison, the eighteen-year-old housewife married to the carpenter, is the character who brings the action. Unlike Emily, she acts in order to get her way: she speaks with each man who desires her, fooling or welcoming them, depending on the man. While the battle for Emily is a very public one in that the men battle each other for her according to the custom of the city, the fight for Alison is private, each man battling Alison herself for the right to her. Rather than using laws to regulate the competition between the men, Alison, as the ultimate prize, determines the laws herself. There is no necessity for the men to interact together and therefore no common code between them either. Accordingly, while Theseus, the ruler of Athens, was the ultimate judge of which man received the right to the woman in The Knight's Tale, Alison is the ultimate judge of that same right in The Miller's Tale. Alison is very different from Emily: she has a "lecherous eye," (3244 "likerous ye") something we could never imagine the angelic Emily having. Alison also has an affair with the clerk, something obviously unexpected for a wife. Lindquist 67 �---Emily, on the other hand, never does anything so unexpected; after her country is conquered, she willingly lives in Athens, as far as the knight tells us. Despite Emily not being married, there is no indication given which would make us think that she would act like Alison if she were married. Alison's disregard for custom seems to arise out of her marriage to the carpenter. While Emily is not married and does not attempt to defy the men in Athens, Alison is married, defies her husband and makes other men chase her for her love. Alison's insistence on making men chase her is the opposite of Theseus' conquering of femininity in The Knight's Tale; rather than the masculine forcing the feminine into the city, thereby controlling the way women must live, it is now the feminine who is conquering the -masculine and controlling the way in which men live. However, The Knight's Tale also contains the same form of conquering as The Miller's Tale. This second form is in addition to the first form, in which the masculine conquers the feminine. While Theseus conquers Scithia, bringing the Amazon women into the political society of Athens, his actions are governed by the wants and cares of women. While this second form of conquering repeatedly appears in The Knight's Tale, the knight never acknowledges it as a form of mastery in the same way that Theseus' conquering (the first form) is a form of mastery. Nevertheless, the story is dictated in large part by the feminine controlling the masculine after the masculine has brought the feminine into the human political realm. This is a combination of the first form of conquering, that of the masculine over the feminine, as well as the second form of conquering, that of the feminine over the masculine. Riding home after his war with the Amazons, Theseus comes upon a group of women who tell him that Creon has ran- 68 Energeia sacked and destroyed Thebes, including all the men who lived in the city: The knight, before telling us that Theseus agreed to help the women, describes him: Hym thoughte that his herte wolde breke, Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat, That whilom weren of so greet estaat; And in his armes he hem alle up hente, And hem conforteth in ful good entente. (954-958) His compassion for the women is odd, considering that he was just described as "conquering" the entire gender. Yet Theseus' compassion for women may help us to understand more fully his desire to conquer them. By calling Scithia "Femenye," the knight has made Theseus' conquering a universal situation in which femininity is bound to be conquered by masculinity. From what we know of the war through The Knight's Tale, it appears to have been extremely brutal. The only survivors we hear of are Hippolita and Emily. The Amazons and, through the knight's symbolism, women, need protection from destruction such as this. Rather than locking Hippolita and Emily away in the tower as he does with Palamon and Arcite, Theseus takes Hippolita as his wife and lets Emily live in peace as long as she is in Athens. This is not a conquering for his political gain, but rather a conquering out of desire. Theseus' desire for women is thus manifested in his conquering them. His desire is for Hippolita, or for women generally. Theseus' decisions to go to war are motivated by different passions for women. In his war with the Amazons, Theseus is motivated by his erotic passion for women, while in his Theban campaign he acts Lindquist 69 �out of compassion for the women whose husbands have been brutally murdered. Even in The Knight's Tale, men are able to conquer women by forcibly bringing them into the political realm, yet must be conquered by women in that they desire them and therefore often act according to their wishes and concerns. The two forms of conquering are once again intimately related. Because Theseus would not have conquered women if he had not already been conquered by his own desire for them, neither form of conquering would be present without the other. Both men and women need to be conquered according to these two different forms for there to be any relations between the two genders. By not providing any reason for Theseus' conquering of "Femenye" and later showing how Theseus is conquered by his desire for women, the knight constructs a tale where the mere existence of women means that men will desire them. In The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale, the second form, that of the feminine over the masculine, is both temporally and logically prior to the first form, that of the masculine over the feminine. Since the second form of conquering- that of desire- leads directly to the first form- that of bringing the feminine into the human political realm- it is inevitable that both these forms of conquering will occur. But where is the problem the miller so vehemently wants to "pay back"? While Theseus is clearly conquered by women (or, Hippolita) in The Knight's Tale, his relationship with Hippolita ultimately works well. If it were not for Hippolita's break-down due to "verray wommanhede"(1748) during Theseus' encounter with Palamon and Arcite in the grove, both of the Theban knights would have been slain by Theseus on the spot and Emily would 70 Energeia never be wedded to either of them. Each time Hippolita says or does something, it is a correction of something that Theseus has done; Theseus is quick to jump at the opportunity to follow what she wants. The knight's portrayal of him is as a man who has willingly submitted to Hippolita's mastery. Theseus has only mastered Hippolita in order to become mastered by her because of his desire. Hippolita, in turn, accepts Theseus' submission to her without rebelling against him. Alison does not accept the submission of John the carpenter, her husband and an unfortunate cuckold of a man. Her marriage vows mean absolutely nothing to her. Despite being forced into this binding marriage in the same way that Hippolita was forced into the city, she still rebels and is unable to be truly conquered. The only difference in the two relationships- between Hippolita and Theseus on the one hand and Alison and John the carpenter on the other- is that Hippolita accepts Theseus' submissiveness to her while Alison rejects John's submissiveness. By refusing to take notice of it, Alison refuses to acknowledge her marriage, which is the product of John's desire for her. She is conquered insofar as she is legally and politically involved in a marriage with John- the first form- but is not conquered in a more personal and meaningful way; she is only bound by human law and the rules of the political realm. The miller is simply disagreeing with the knight in regard to whether women will be conquered in the paradigm of the second form. But what is the second form in this context? How does it differ both from the way we have been speaking about the second form already and from the first form? In the Knight's and Miller's tales, we see that the only way for a man to be in a successful relationship with Lindquist 71 �a woman is for him to be submissive to her. Submissiveness can only happen after the first form of conquering, whereas the masculine being conquered by desire- or, the second form- must take place, both temporally and logically, before the first form. However, being conquered by desire is submissiveness as well, since actions of men (Theseus and John the carpenter) are determined by their desire for women both before and after the feminine is brought into the human political realm (or, in Alison's case, into a legally binding marriage). The first form of conqueringbringing a woman into political society despite her wish to be outside of it- does not give the woman a choice. The second form- submissiveness to the woman by the mangives the woman a choice of whether or not to accept the man's submissiveness, as Alison does not accept that of Absalon or John. While the first form of conquering makes compatibility of men and women possible, only the second form, the submissiveness and acknowledgement of it, actualizes this compatibility. Why must there be a choice for women in the second form of conquering if there is none for them in the first? The wife of Bath, in explicating what women desire, deals with this question directly. After returning home, the knight of the tale tells the queen "Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee I As wel over hir housbond as hir love, I And for to been in maistrie hym above" (1038-1040). Having agreed to marry the woman who taught him this answer, the knight now puts up a huge fight; ultimately, the woman gives him a choice: "Chese now," quod she, "oon of thise thynges tweye: To han me foul and old til that I deye And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf, 72 Energeia And nevere yow displese in al my lyf; Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair, And take youre aventure of the repair That shal be to youre hous by cause of me, Or in som other place, may wel be." (1219- 1227) The knight, after pondering for some time, tells her: My lady and my love, and wyf so deere, I put me in youre wyse governance; Cheseth youreself which may be moost plesance And moost honour to yow and me also. I do no fors the wheither of the two; For as yow liketh, it suffiseth me. (1230- 1235) After confirming that she has gained mastery over him, the woman turns into a beautiful, young and faithful bride. While the knight and the woman would have been married even if the knight had picked one of the two options laid out for him, it would not have been a complete relationship. According to The Wife of Bath 's Tale, marriage guarantees that one out of two of the necessary qualities given by the woman is already present, though two out of two is not guaranteed. While the woman's beauty clearly refers to her body, she will only be faithful to the knight if he has been able to make her love him with her soul. However, without both of these present in their relationship, it will never be complete. If the woman only gives her body, the relationship will exist only insofar as two people are politically or contractually together (like Alison in The Miller's Tale); this is the first form of con- Lindquist 73 �quering. The knight, knowing that having mastery over the woman will never yield a complete relationship between the two, gives the decision back to her; this is the second form of conquering, where the masculine submits to the feminine . It is at this point that the woman becomes beautiful. But is it the woman who is making herself beautiful, or the knight who has made her beautiful by giving her back the decision? Rather than choosing either the woman or the knight as the person controlling the action, it must be acknowledged that the woman's transformation, which changes their relationship from a battle over mastery to love, is the direct result of the knight's submission. The love between them can only be unlocked through submission, which is the opposite of mastery. Love, as opposed to marriage or political and contractual bondage, is contingent upon a surrendering of mastery, not a fight over who possesses it. While the knight submits to the woman by giving her back the decision, the woman submits to the knight by making herself both beautiful and faithful to him. It is only at the point that both the man and the woman submit to each other that a relationship between two lovers can begin. This is the problem encountered in The Miller's Tale; Alison never submitted herself to John after his submission to her. W ithout this mutual submission, love does not exist. Marriage does not have any bearing on this submission. While in the first form of conquering the man conquered the woman before he submitted to her, in the second form the man submits to her, or is conquered by her, before she submits to him. Similarly, the first form of conquering is wholly about the body. The man can alw ays conquer the woman's body, but it is the woman's choice 74 Energeia T whether or not to give the man her soul. This secon d form of conquering is that choice. Without submitting to the feminine, the masculine guarantees humiliation for himself like that of John the carpenter in The Miller's Tale. The first form of conquering is something which makes this submission of the masculine and the feminine to each other possible insofar as it simply brings the two together in the political realm. However, the second form of conquering produces a good relationship between the two. The mutual submission produces an equilibrium in the second type of conquering that cannot be found in the first. Still, both types are necessary for any equilibrium between the sexes to be reached at all, for without the two living in political society together, no chance of equilibrium being reached would even exist. 0 Part II: Nature and Politics The conflict of masculine and feminine, found in the pilgrims' stories throughout the Tales, holds still greater significance. Chaucer illustrates this by placing the pilgrims' stories in the context of a greater story: the pilgrimage itself. Each tale told by the pilgrims reflects some truth about the person who tells it. While the pilgrims tell tales of the conflict between masculine and feminine , it seems that Chaucer is pointing to an underlying conflict of which the pilgrims as characters are not entirely aware. The pilgrims, unable to change the foremost identity of their characters as men and women (something naturally given each human), simply change the way the tw o sexes interact and clash, presumably based upon their ow n experiences. Keeping their identity as men and w omen, the characters hold certain characteristics which are constant Lindquist 75 �T for each sex throughout the entire body of the Tales. As · we read further into the work, we see that these characteristics show more than simply the forms of the masculine and the feminine. In The Knight's Tale, Emily prays to Diana before the great battle between Palamon and Arcite. The knight describes the statue of Diana that stands in her temple: This goddesse on an hert ful hye seet, With smale houndes al aboute hir feet; And undernethe hir feet she hadde a moone,W exynge it was, and sholde wanye soone. In gaude grene hir statue clothed was, With bowe in honde, and arwes in a cas. (2075- 2080) As a perpetual huntress, Diana is invariably tied to nature. She can never escape the natural cycle of things, as evidenced by the moon underneath her feet. Her chastity makes her forever separate from the masculine, just as the Amazons were before Theseus conquered them. As a representation of the pure feminine, she is not simply a part of nature because she is existing in the world, but rather her being is somehow rooted in nature, so that she could never totally separate herself, even if she is assimilated into political society. The natural thing for the feminine seems to be to exist as nature does. The most striking characteristic of Diana is how many personalities she has. On the one hand, she is a protector of chastity and virgins, a noble office for a goddess. On the other, she is a vengeful, dark deity, taking the form of Hecate in the underworld. In the knight's description, the moon under her feet shows that she is a goddess of both 76 Energeia dark and light. S~e accompanies the moon both in its waxing phase and its waning phase, its lightening and darkening. This characteristic can be said to apply to nature itself. While nature makes human life possible, it never actively attempts to determine human life. Though a human may see nature as active insofar as it affects a human in an active way such as a hurricane or tornado, nature itself is never active in seeking out that specific human. Natural disasters occur regardless of whether human beings are affected by them. Nature is unresponsive to human wishes and claims; it is unforgiving and impartial to humanity. Diana's temple has images on the wall that, though rooted in nature in the same way as the goddess, are unnatural for humans. The knight describes these images, painted on the wall of the temple: Ther saugh I Attheon an hert ymaked, For vengeaunce that he saugh Diane al naked; I saugh how that his houndes have hym caught And freeten him, for that they knewe hym naught. (2065- 2068) While Diana turns Actaeon into something that is closer to nature than a human, this is not necessarily natural for a human. After being turned into a deer, Actaeon is murdered by his own dogs because of their inability to recognize him. Unlike a human, a deer is a part of nature in the same way as Diana. It partakes of the unresponsiveness and impartiality which is nature. His hounds were subject to his control while he was a human, yet Actaeon loses this power of control now that he has become a part of the natural realm. Completely being a part of nature is not natural for humans, although, judging from Diana's repre- Lindquist 77 �sentation of womanhood, humanity must always be partially involved in this natural realm. What separates humanity from nature? The Knight's Tale reveals, along with the role of nature in defining womanhood, the role of politics in determining what humanity is. Theseus, after conquering Femenye, brings Hippolita back to his city, always a representation of the human political realm: And weddede the queen Ypolita, And broghte hire hoom with him in his contree With muchel glorie and greet solempnitee, And eek hire yonge suster Emelye. (868- 871) Theseus' capture of Hippolita alone is full of political allusion: marriage, the idea of a country as opposed to simply a land where one abides, and "solempnitee" (meaning ceremony) are each political qualities in that they are constructed to communicate to other humans something that has occurred. What need is there for marriage or ceremony or borders of a country in nature, where the hunt, something prior to the political realm in immediate importance to human life, is always taking place? Watershed periods such as the one celebrated by Theseus and Athens here only occur in the human political realm. Nature is unresponsive to these political things, these changes that seem so drastic to humans. The idea of conquering itself is a political thing. No conquering ever truly takes place in nature; rather, in the future, small misbalances will eventually be made even again. Each conquering or misbalance is swallowed up by the unresponsive and impartial perpetual existence of nature. 78 Energeia At the end of 1:he Knight's Tale, Theseus, after a long and eloquent speech, announces that Palamon will marry Emily. Theseus' decision only comes about because the marriage would result in an alliance between Athens and Thebes, which would be advantageous for all involved. While this decision initially seems like a fitting ending in that it provides a way to tie up loose ends- among them Emily's status as unmarried- it is one of the main things that the miller attempts to "pay back." Stopping the tale at the marriage of the two does not take into account the difficulty of the second form of conquering, wherein the masculine submits to the feminine and the feminine is thus given the choice of whether or not to submit to the masculine. Theseus assumes that women can be politically conquered by bringing them into the city. This is an assumption that nature can be conquered by human politics. He does not take into account that the city exists within the natural realm and is therefore determined by nature. Despite the fact that nature will never actively seek out the political realm, the political realm still has to face natural problems, such as an earthquake, and also respond to natural opportunities. This is reflected in Theseus' conquering of the Amazons, only to unconsciously submit himself to the will of Hippolita. Politics conquers nature and yet must submit itself to the superiority of nature. While Diana's chastity and punishing of Actaeon is too rooted in nature to identify her with humanity, Theseus' attempt to overcome nature is too bent towards the use of the political realm. Humanity must end up somewhere in between these two pure things. In the same way that the conflict and balance of power between the masculine and feminine form a complete relationship, the conflict between and ultimate resolution of nature and politics forms Lindquist 79 �T the natural existence of humanity as a whole. But how does politics conquer nature (as has been claimed) while also being in its service? Aristotle gives us one way of addressing this problem. In On the Soul, he lays out four qualities of the soul in his definition of a living being, all of which are spoken of as having potentiality. The number of these potentialities that a living thing actualizes determines the group it belongs to as a living thing.3 Rather than be in conflict with these potentialities, the political realm helps humans to actualize these potentialities by eliminating the necessity for each person to hunt, cook and care for himself. Humans, thanks to the potentialities given them by nature, can partake in the higher things rather than exist in the natural realm. While the person living in nature lives for the sake of survival, the person living in the city lives for the sake of living well. 4 Politics is the actualization of nature's potentiality. Thus, politics must conquer nature in order to make these potentialities its own and actualize them, while at the same time only doing this for the sake of the natural potentialities themselves. This is the most important defining characteristic of humanity. While the potentiality and actuality of other living beings is determined completely by nature, humans, by using the city as a place of education where these actualizations already exist, are able to actualize these potentialities themselves. Another living being can never separate itself from nature but humans are able to do this, and it is what makes them unique. Still, the use of the city for the actualization of these potentialities is not completely removed from nature since the city exists within the natural realm and so any actualization must exist in it Aristotle, On the Soul, Book II, chapter 2, 413a20-30. Aristotle, Politics, Book I, chapter 2, 1252b25-30. 3 4 80 Energeia I I I I I I i as well. After the city conquers the natural potentialities by actualizing theni., it ultimately submits to nature because it is still a part of the natural realm. The city is never an entity unto itself (and thus never something which can be absolutely juxtaposed with the natural realm), but rather the thing peculiar to humans that allows them to exist in the natural realm in the best way possible. Part III: Transcending the Conflicts In an attempt to understand the two forms of conquering, the knight, miller and wife of Bath separate them by making them two different actions. The franklin does not separate them. He says: Ther was a knyght that loved and dide his payne To serve a lady in his beste wise; And many a labour, many a greet emprise He for his lady wroghte, er she were wonne. (730- 733) The knight's submission convinces the lady to marry him. This combines both forms of conquering into one action. The knight, by submitting, is conquered according to the second form- that of the feminine over the masculineinsofar as he desires the lady, while the lady, by marrying the knight, is conquered according to the first form- that of the masculine over the feminine because she is brought into a marriage with him. In the franklin's account, both forms of conquering are a result of the knight's submissiveness to the feminine . The occurrence of both forms of conquering is necessary for the emergence of love between a man and a woman. Indeed, Dorigene tells Arveragus that it is because of his "gentillesse" (754) that she married him Lindquist 81 �and that she will be a "trewe wyf' (758). This agreement to marry him comes directly out of the knight's submissiveness. How is this situation unique from the other relationships between masculine and feminine in the Tales? Whereas the woman is drawn into marriage before love exists in the knight's, miller's, and wife of Bath's tales, Arveragus and Dorigene's marriage is a direct result of their love. This is the only time in the four tales that marriage and love coincide. Arveragus' knowledge that mastery does not produce love is the reason that this occurs. He combines the submissiveness before the woman has been brought into the political realm and the submissiveness after this has happened by completely giving the decision of whether or not to marry him to Dorigene. The franklin, after telling the other pilgrims this part of the story, says: Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye. When maistrie comth, the God of Love anon Beteth hise wynges, and farewel, he is gon! Love is a thyng as any spirit free. (764-767) The franklin recognizes, as his main character Arveragus does, that mastery does not make love free , but rather strangles and kills it. After Arveragus has come home from war and the suitor Aurelius has revealed that he now has the right to Dorigene because of a promise she made to him "in pley," Arveragus, adamant that Dorigene keep her "trouthe," proclaims: Ye shul youre trouthe holden, by my fay! 82 Energeia For God so wisly have mercy upon me, I hadde wel levere ystiked for to be, For verray love which that I to yow have, But if ye sholde youre trouthe kepe and save. Trouthe is the hyeste thing that man may kepe. (1474-1479) Arveragus is willing to sacrifice his marriage with Dorigene for the sake of "trouthe." This type of "pledge" or "word" clearly has more than simply a contractual meaning; as the highest thing that man may keep, it is set apart from other virtues as that which describes someone who has the greatest and noblest integrity. Arveragus, by sacrificing himself and hiding this sacrifice from the public, ensures the maintenance of Dorigene's integrity. He would rather lose her than see the destruction of her integrity. Dorigene's challenge to Aurelius was made "in pley." Clearly, she does not understand the gravity of integrity and "trouthe," else she would not "pley" with it. These virtues all exist within the political realm, where men are free from the activities of beasts such as hunting, killing, reproduction and finding shelter. "Trouthe" holds men accountable by provoking and maintaining virtuous actions. Dorigene's misunderstanding of the seriousness of this accountability puts her in a position where she faces the shaming of her higher virtues. Because she brought this shaming upon herself, it is incredible that Arveragus remains submissive to her. In doing so, he holds Dorigene accountable by convincing her that keeping her " trouthe" is the best course of action. Arveragus, whose only involvement in the situation is his marriage to Dorigene, does not necessarily have to take part in the resolution of her dilemma. However, "trouthe" once again shows how it Lindquist 83 �holds men accountable. Because of his love for and marriage to Dorigene, Arveragus does not disappear from the situation, but rather willingly relinquishes his own desires in order for Dorigene to have the ability to keep her own "trouthe." It was Arveragus' "gentillesse," not his ability to forcibly conquer, which convinced Dorigene to marry him; their relationship, founded upon this "gentillesse," holds both individuals accountable for their actions, as they strive to be as virtuous as possible in each other's eyes. The two lovers actualize the greatest integrity in each other in the very act of being forced to split up. Arveragus' desire for Dorigene leads directly to his quickness to sacrifice his desires for her physical body in order to preserve her spiritual good. However, another submission takes place simultaneously: Arveragus and Dorigene together to Aurelius, the man claiming the right to Dorigene as his wife. This submission is only possible because of Arveragus and Dorigene holding each other accountable according to the same idea: "trouthe." Because they experience the same accountability, they go through the same experience together of being forced to split up. Whereas the adversaries of the previous tales have all been either other men who desire the same woman- as in The Knight's Tale-or the woman herself before marriage- in the miller's and wife of Bath's tales- The Franklin 's Tale presents an adversary who attempts to break up the marriage which has already been created by transcending the problems brought about by mastery in the three previous tales. Because their marriage is already established by the time Aurelius deceives Dorigene into promising h erself to h im, he does not have a right to her as does Arveragus; this right is not just contractual or physical because of the marriage, but also spiritual, as Dorigene has chosen to 84 Energeia give herself to Ar_veragus. Aurelius tricks Dorigene and is seemingly rewarded for it when Arveragus and Dorigene jointly submit to his claim that he has the right to her. Why is this submission not a reward for Au relius? After all, he has shown himself to be very clever in making the rocks appear as if they have disappeared; by doing this, he has mastered the opportunity handed to him by Dorigene when she told him that she would be his if he could make this so. This physical appearance attained through mastery is directly contrasted with the spiritual gravity and moral steadfastness held by Arveragus and Dorigene in their submission. Whereas Aurelius masters physical things, or those things that will always be inconstant and changing, Arveragus and Dorigene, because of their belief that spiritual things, or those things that are eternal, are the greatest things, submit themselves to "trouthe." By doing this, their relationship is made eternal since they will both forever be partaking in "trouthe," an eternal virtue. Aurelius, on the other hand, might enjoy Dorigene's body for a time, but she will eventually grow old and all that will remain will be h er soul, which will still have the spiritual goodness she attained by keeping her "trouthe." Unfortunately for Aurelius, he is not concerned with this part of her. By the end of the tale, however, he does realize that his notions of possession of another human being by mastery and not love are ridiculous when he gives Dorigene back to Arveragus because of Arveragus' "grete gentillesse" (1527). The problems presented by mastery were transcended by giving Dorigene the choice of whether or not to marry Arveragus without forcing her into the political realm, or without any need for the first form of conquering. In the same way, the problem of Aurelius is transcended by the Lindquist 85 �two lovers. In both cases, Arveragus and Dorigene leave the world of becoming to partake of something higher and more spiritual, that is, the eternal virtues to which "trouthe" belongs. They leave the world of appearance, where physical things can be mastered, and are connected on a level where their souls will never be separated, since they are together in the keeping of"trouthe." Connected in this, unlike in the other tales, the two lovers tofether face the notion of the political realm itself. Because Arveragus and Dorigene submit to the virtues accepted in political society, they too are accepted; however, they do not submit to these virtues because the virtues themselves are political, but rather because they are absolute in that neither the goodness of the virtues nor the virtues themselves will ever change. By partaking in these eternal virtues, the love of Arveragus and Dorigene is eternal as well and therefore fundamentally distinct from the political realm. The transcending of the political realm starts with the founding of the relationship between Arveragus and Dorigene. In initially submitting to Dorigene, Arveragus takes mastery- the first form of conquering, the form according to which Theseus acted when he conquered femininityaway from their relationship, replacing it with "gentillesse." In doing so, he transcends any problem of mastery. In the other three tales, the second form of conqueringthat in which the soul is given to another person-is a necessary step after the first form; it corrects the first form. Arveragus is able to act according to the second form directly, without correcting the first form of conquering. Furthermore, the relationship between Arveragus and Dorigene does not depend directly on the political realm. In the same manner in which the first form of conquering was removed, the role of the political conquering of nature 86 Energeia is removed as well. Though potentialities for higher virtues such as "trouthe" are' actualized in The Franklin 's Tale, this actualization is a result of the direct relationship between the higher virtue and the individual without the mediation of the city as there was in The Knight's Tale. The Franklin's Tale is the culmination of the conversation concerning nature and politics and femininity and masculinity in the Canterbury Tales. While the knight was too bent on conquering natural differences with politics, the miller, influenced by his own experience, was too quick in thinking that politics could never affect nature in any capacity. The wife of Bath gave too much credit to the forced marriage, believing that submission could only come out of a surrendering of mastery on the part of both the masculine and the feminine. While these three all start with mastery and end in congruence (except for The Miller's Tale, which simply rejects the possibility of congruence between the masculine and the feminine ), the franklin is the only one to start with submission, showing how this transcends the problems that mastery presents. Whereas the other three were held back by the problems of mastery and therefore the political realm, the franklin, through submission, allows us to glimpse the truly w onderful relationship humans may have with higher things. Lindquist 87 �-- WILLIS MCCUMBER The Gamekeeper's Son Rain fell across the field he had left an hour ago, fell like scattered seeds, was surveyed from the birches by a solitary crow, that perched above the weedsBut he was walking under hemlock-branches now, his body bright like a deer's, the rain-swelled stream, dark; the lichens, tattered, richly shoddy, spreading in ancient fans. Rain fell within the hemlock woods, rain ran between the folded palms of fallen leaves, rain spread across the bark of aging trees. He walked again, attended to the rain. He faintly heard his darting, pausing heart, now inaudibly behind, now running to the side, now waiting for his constant coming stridea blood-red pheasant that held its dark green w ings across its back, that blinked the pale yellow iris of its eye. He brought his father's gun, But the dark breath of rain had hidden in the woods its warmer life, had darkened the woods that held the wild pheasants whose snarled trails he followed until they vanished where the birds ascended into the hemlock-thicket overhead. He thought of game-pheasants roosting in the shed, he called to mind their bright, strange stares at evening's dusk; he thought of hounds at dawn, barking, blind, chasing a deer between the trees by smell. When the leaves around his feet exploded bombs of blurring wings, shook his gun and shook the trembling leaves, stock-still, he stood and gathered in his life, stared after what forekn ows, foresees, and flings its nearness like a throwing knife. 88 Energeia McCumber 89 ~ �ALEXANDRA W ALLING City of Trees Deep in trees and mountains on a cloudy day my mind seeps into fog and into rain. I travel low across decay, I taste the leaves and littered needles, I smell the warmth and heaviness the forest cradles in its gentle birth and gentler death. Above the mountains' veil of clouds wind-stunted pines who've caught the fires of heaven learn to grow in curves if they're to grow, not straight and noble like their sheltered cousins far below. These twisted sages of the mountains fight for life and when they die their bones lie bleached and lonely on a cold and rocky peak. La Pedrera No. 2 I Allison Hauspurg 90 Energeia But down below all's soft and thick and redolent with rotting life: the scattered limbs of those new dead provide a nursery; and nothing grudges death the intermingling. I, with my foreign customs, I must send my thought a pilgrim into mists and wander on the borders of my mind, if I'm to hear the woody mountain's rhythm if I'm to learn philosophy from trees that think as forests, not as hermits who preach the wisdom of defiance to their tormentors, winds. Walling 91 �Stuck in Sherernetyevo Kirstie Dodd Untitled I Allison Hauspurg 92 Energeia The autumn Gregory turned twenty-one he decided to drop out of college and go to Russia. He was sick of whittling away existence in cramped-desk academia, forced to listen to lectures in which fat, dull words like "mitochondria" and "cytoplasm" were repeated over and over by his professors. He would often slouch down in his chair during biology class and let the words swirl about his mind like snowflakes above a bleak tundra. After half a semester of dropping grades and interest, he officially dropped out of school. Gregory emptied his bank account, secured a visa, and bought a one-way ticket for Moscow. The next day he called his parents. "I am becoming an expatriate," he told them, aware of how ridiculous such a pronouncement sounded, though his voice was solid with determination. "I am taking a break from school to become world wise in Russia." He heard silence on the other end of the line and imagined his mother's face, her eyes narrowing and her mouth becoming a thin line of disapproval. His father broke the silence. "Do what you have to do, Greg." In a matter of weeks he was walking up the plane ramp into Sheremetyevo Airport, his hands shoved into the pockets of a new limegreen parka his mother sent him in the mail. She might have disapproved of his trip, but as a final symbolic assertion of motherhood she sent this parka to him with a simple note pinned to the top, "Stay warm." Gregory followed the other passengers dow n a long glass corridor toward a sign that said "Customs." A young man in a grey vest was standing at the end. He was yelling in fast Russian into a walkie-talkie while simultaneously directing Gregory and other American arrivals Dodd 93 �1 to a holding area on the left. Gregory sat down and took off his neon parka, a bright shot of lime green in a sea of muted tones. It made him feel silly and loud. After twenty minutes, an attractive Russian woman sat down behind a counter one hundred feet away from him. She had that kind of intangible, Eastern European beauty with wide-set eyes and bone-white skin. She stared through the glass partition right at Gregory, her eyes burning the message "Do not get up. I will not talk to you." They stared at each other for a few seconds, he in his chair and she behind her glass, their own little cold war. He looked away. The chair he was sitting in was exactly like the ones back at his college- rigid, ninety degree torture devices made to keep students awake during hours of lecture. Morning biology class might have failed to teach him how to use a microscope, but he had learned how to be a good observer. Anyone could ask him where all the pretty girls sat in class and he would know. He was using those same observational skills now: most of the airport employees were young women. Dozens of them stomped past in razor-sharp stilettos and grey suits. In front of him, the woman behind the counter was constantly arranging her platinum-blonde hair in a cheap hand mirror. Gregory supplied her internal conversation to keep himself amused: "Foundation? Check. Mascara? Check. Arched eyebrows? Check. Icy demeanor? Double check. Perfect." She was as cold as the air in that purgatory of a holding area. He could tell she had no glasnost, openness, for any soul-searching, American college dropout. After a while, the man with the walkie-talkie came back and talked with her. He told her a joke and she laughed with a foreign-sounding giggle. Gregory could do nothing but stare at them. They talked for a long time, 94 Energeia each intermittently glancing at Gregory as if he were some unimportant sign on a w all. By now he had been waiting for over an hour. Slumped down in his chair, his brown hair was still sticking up on one side from sleeping against the airplane window. He looked pathetic. Either out of pity or protocol the man finally strolled over to where Gregory was sitting. 'Tm sorry for wait, sir. We are needing of passporrrt and veeesa," he said in a loud, professional voice. Gregory, who had begun to doze off, sat upright in his chair. He handed the man all of his documents, reticent to let go of them. In this cold holding cell they were the only proof of existence he had. "Now you go into airrrport. Check back in one hour for documents." With a curt bow he practically goose-stepped through a side door, wielding his walkie-talkie like a parade baton. Gregory looked around for the other Americans from the plane but they had all left. He was totally alone. The woman gestured for Gregory to come near. He walked across the marble tiles, hearing his heartbeat as loud as his footsteps . Thinking she was going to yell at him, Gregory was surprised when she got out of her chair and walked over to a side door, opening it to reveal the main airport terminal with all of the duty-free shops selling expensive watches and perfumes. Gregory was about to step through the door when she grabbed his arm. Strangely enough, she was smiling at him. "Welcome to Russia," she belabored, obviously the only English she knew. Gregory laughed to himself; he had never read any travel books about the oddities of the Russian woman . He was going to have to get used to this. "Spaseeba," he said, smiling back. Inside the main terminal, the vaulted, Soviet concrete ceiling was stubbled with brown tubes of different Dodd 95 �sizes, ugly and imposing. Above him an enormous brown ticker board was alive with letters fluttering into place, announcing arrivals and departures. On his right was a four or five story wall of windows; beyond the panes snow was swirling dutifully. Heavy steel bars connected each sheet of glass to the next, making them look like the prison bars of this airport gulag. A woman with a firm voice announced plane arrivals in different languages over the intercom like she was the prison warden. People were everywhere, walking to their departure gates, speaking in various unknown languages- as anonymous to Gregory as bacteria in a Petri dish swarming about trying to find open space. Gregory passed through the moving crowd over to the shops. Two Russian men in fur hats rushed towards him talking iri the plaintive, deep sounds of their mother tongue. He ducked into a nearby shop to avoid being mowed over by them. The shop was quiet and empty; it felt like the first delicious inhale of breath after being temporarily suffocated. As Gregory walked around the store, though, he started to wish he had not come in. The saleswoman sitting by the cash register was chewing bubble gum, her suspicious eyes trained on him as he walked down the aisles. All of the souvenirs were strange. There were shirts that said "I work for the KGB" and painted spoons and diapers and Soviet replica hats and chocolates with little sickles and hammers stamped on them. There were painted babushka Russian nesting dolls with American basketball stars painted on the glossy wood. Gregory picked up one of the traditional Russian ones. Its little red mouth looked sinister. Holding it in his hands, he stared at the smile for a long time. He set it down and thought sadly to himself about America teaching the 96 Energeia world to chop up, process, and package just about anything. · He could not buy anything from that store; it was made for Amerikanski businessmen who needed kitschy gifts for their wives, not people who actually cared about Russia. He walked out of the shop feeling the hostile eyes of the sales lady on the back of his head. He found a fluorescent-lit restaurant in a small corner on the other end of the terminal and sat down. A waiter came over, bobbing his head to the American rap song that was quietly pulsing over the intercom. The waiter handed him a menu, raising his eyebrows in expectation. Gregory looked over the menu, but it was all in Russian. He decided to make things easy for both of them and simply said "Borsch?'' The waiter nodded, bringing back a steaming bowl of red liquid a few minutes later. As Gregory ate, he noticed the strange mixture of people in the restaurant. Behind where he was sitting, a British couple was arguing. On his left he heard Hindia family of five returning to New Delhi. At the bar there was a drunken old man with skin like tanned leather knocking back shots of vodka like it was water. After he downed the last of it, his wild eyes caught onto Gregory with interest. He came stumbling over to where Gregory sat with his borsch, screaming "Droog? Droog?" He smelled awful-a mixture of rotting cabbage and cheap alcohol. He held out his gnarled hands as if he were begging for more booze money. Gregory looked around uncomfortably, unsure of what to do . The British man near him broke off his argument with his wife, turned and said, "He just wants to be your friend . That's what he's saying in Russian." "Droog?" said Gregory. The drunken man thought Gregory was talking to him. He grinned, showing a line Dodd 97 �of broken teeth on red gums. With a hiccup he stumbled back over to the bar. "That's some Russian hospitality for you," laughed the British man, "Are you here in Moscow for long?" "Uh," said Gregory. He did not want them to know he had dropped out of school. 'Tm here for a student exchange program. This is my first time in Moscow." "Splendid! We're in the oil industry. We try to touch down in Russia a few times every year." He jerked his head at the drunken man, now being led out of the restaurant by security guards. "You think this is bad, just wait until you get into Moscow. You better learn some Russian if you don't want any more trouble from the locals. There are two rules to follow if you want to survive in Russia: wear a warm coat, and for God's sake know Russian." He. leaned back in his chair, laughing obnoxiously. He reminded Gregory of a humanities professor he had last term: the same condescending mannerisms and arrogant tone. He talked to the man and his wife for a little longer. Looking down at his watch, he saw it was time to go back to the immigration counter where the walkie-talkie man had his papers. Gregory jumped on his chance to escape these people. "Well, it's been nice talking to you. Thank you for your advice." Gregory finished his bow l of soup and left the restaurant, leaving a colorful stack of rubles on the table because he was unsure of how much to tip. When he made it through the crowd back to the immigration desk, he was disappointed to see a different, much older woman sitting behind it. "Can I help you?" she said in flawless English. "Yes. I believe you took my papers-" "Name? Origination? Destination?" She stared up at 98 Energeia him with hard blue eyes, the lids frosted with white eye shadow. One half of her face was discolored and scarred, as though she had once been caught in a bad fire. "Gregory Privet. I flew in from New York on the red eye. I am staying in a hostel in Moscow ." He looked around her desk for his papers but they were not there. "My papers- " "There is a problem with your papers, Mr. Gregory. We are still waiting for some documentation from the States in order to approve your stay here. It's Moscow protocol." "What am I supposed to do then?" "Depending on whether your papers are in order you'll either be in Moscow or on a plane back to New York. For now, though, you need to stay on international soil before you can go anywhere." "You mean I have to stay in the airport ." "Yes, Mr. Gregory." "For how long?" "Oh, these things never take that long. I w ould say no more than twelve to twenty-four hours." Gregory raked his hair w ith his fingers and took many deep breaths- the same thing he used to do when he encountered an impossible question on a biology exam. The woman led him out the same door as before and then slammed it behind him, no smile, no-non sense. There was the ticker board above him, still a-flutter w ith plane times. He stood outside the door for a while, letting the wave of travelers surge past him as he thought about what he should do in Sheremetyevo for a day . Feeling stressed, trapped and alone, he made h is way back to the familiar artificial glow of the restaurant, hoping to find the British couple. He needed their knowledge of the airport so he could find a place to sleep for a few Dodd 99 �hours. As he pushed open the door to the restaurant, though, he was surprised to see the saleswoman from the souvenir shop with four armed security guards, her face contorted with rage. She screamed something in Russian, pointing at Gregory. The security guards lunged toward him, pinning his hands behind his back and forcing him into a chair at a nearby table, the same one he had eaten borsch at a few minutes ago. "Mr. Privet, we are taking you into custody for stealing from this woman's airport shop," growled the head security officer, a solid-looking man in his fifties with connected eyebrows. Gregory could feel little lines of sweat forming in the creases of his palms. The saleswoman was leaning on the adjacent wall, arms folded across her chest. She sneered at Gregory like he was some sort of disease, much less a scared, lost American in the Moscow airport. The guards talked amongst themselves for a few minutes, ostensibly about their captive. They made a bewildered Gregory get up out of his chair. Pinching his innocent hands behind his back, they marched him out of the restaurant. It was a strange parade that led Gregory to the security section of the airport; in front was the head security officer, trying to calm down the angry saleswoman, followed by Gregory with his retinue of three other guards. As they were walking, Gregory realized he had frozen the ever-moving crowd. Hundreds of eyes were riveted on this sad-looking youth in a bright green jacket being led by security past shops and the ticker board. When they got to the other end of the terminal, the parade stopped in front of a large door. The head security officer opened it, revealing a long, grey corridor. They marched all the way down to the end and threw Gregory 100 Energeia inside the last door, locking it behind him. He was stunned. The room was small and dim with a low ceiling. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the low light, he felt two furry hands grabbing his arm. He looked to his right and there was the drunken, leather-skinned man from the restaurant, hiccupping and grinning with all of the teeth he had. "Droog?" Dodd 101 �SANDRA QUINTANA The Giantess Before, in the time when Earth, open wombed and panting, Brought forth beasts of prodigious appetite and strength What a birth to be whelped then and there To have crawled from living rock Naked and warm under the cold sky and new air A monster to make young gods tremble and a mother's heart shake Playing in a world that remembered my passing Scarring or shaping as I pleased Licking from my fingers sugar and blood Dappled by old wounds, Scabs and scratches, a map of mistakes and joys, One eyed, all eyed, blind, but great With hungry mouth and rock-shattering cryGulls shriek at the shine from my whalebone picked teeth The whole sea heaves against me, bathwater on my thighs Into the deep, I join it and make a tide And I surface, a new island, Tricking tired birds to rest on my salty flesh Inviting otters to play in the kelp of my mane Atlantis' prelude when I wake The sea sluicing down my legs as I search for someplace new The desert is a summer day's walk, the marsh a mud bath, Alligators unwilling pumice stones! walk tasting clouds on my tongue And lay with wolves at my front and lions at my back A warm mountain collecting nai:ve visitors through the cool night That curl in the hollows, drunkenly secure in my warmth When I rise whatever has made a home of me wakes Shaken and expelled Screeching as my companions get the scent of him. 102 Energeia I stretch my arms up against the pressing palm of the sky Summer beats down, the morning is dark and the clouds are heavy Deep as old smoke and sweltering Rumbling complaints at the loads they carry I tear at the pressure with my nails Rain breaks over me, running channels of muddy water down my back The old wind roars, and the sky opens Cold and pure, purging the world of all that stands Throwing down stars and curses But I stand in the storm, in the earth turned sea Hot bolts tear left and right, searing my flesh There is no place to hide. My arms are up, my back arched. I feel death in the air, See it tear old oaks apart, make the fire -eyed beasts shiver! open my wide mouth. My skull falls back And I laugh Because the world is wide, wider than my hips And there is no space for fear in me Quintana 103 �The Heavenly Condition Sarah Hogan Milton sets Paradise Lost against the backdrop of an immense angelic war waged by Satan against God. Satan's initial rebellion comes about in answer to a decree God has made in Heaven, commanding that all in Heaven shall obey Christ, God's only begotten Son, or else become apostate, fallen, and eternally damned. The notion of a heavenly rebellion and war is difficult to fathom; how could some kind of failure or feud arise from the perfect harmonies of Heaven, even in light of God's threatening pronouncement? As Adam is awed by Raphael's account of things "so unimaginable as hate in heav'n, I And war so near the peace of God in bliss I With such confusion" (7.54- 7.56), 1 so the reader is taken aback by the induction of this chronicle to the history of Adam's fall. The idea that a state of perfect harmony could naturally give way to a corrupt state of war is inconceivable, recalling only God's creation of heaven and earth in its incomprehensible spontaneity: it is the creation of something out of nothing, of evil out of good and of discord out of harmony. To some extent, Satan's rebellion is even more perplexing than God's original creation, precisely because it appears not to issue from God's all-powerful will, but instead to go directly against it. In Milton's history of the world's origins, Satan's rebellion is the first instance of creation aside from the creations of God. Through his rebellion, Satan becomes second only to God in his creative achievements, though not necessarily in his creative capacities. After his revolt, Kneeling Pose I Sarah Fry 104 Energeia All quotations are from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W . W . Norton & Company, 1975). 1 Hogan 105 �Satan gains a reputation as a fearful and powerful creative being whose abilities are recognized even by his enemies. When the archangel Michael speaks to Satan after having vanquished him in battle, he addresses him as the "Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt, I Unnamed in heav'n, now plenteous, as thou seest'' (6.262- 6.263) . Michael proceeds to exclaim: How hast thou disturbed Heav'n's blessed peace, and into nature brought Misery, uncreated till the crime Of thy Rebellion? (6.266- 6.269) His words heed Satan as a powerful creator, his rebellion as an inventive act, and the ensuing evil and misery as Satan's proper progeny. In depicting evil and misery as satanic creations, Milton departs substantially from the account given in Genesis, where evil and misery first appear on earth as inexplicable manifestations of God's created order. According to Genesis, Adam's disobedience brings about evil and misery; in Paradise Lost, Satan's defiance is the primordial insubordinate act that creates evil and misery. In Milton's description of Satan's transgression, there is no obvious serpent on which to shift the blame or trace the cause; he himself is the serpent, and he alone the cause and author of his defiant actions. Though God's decree and the freedom God created in Heaven provide a catalyst and a context for Satan's revolt, God in no way creates the evil and misery that accompany this rebellion. Distinguishing between the apostate angels and men, God speaks of the absolute responsibility of angels: 106 Energeia The first sort by their own suggestion fell, Self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceived By the other first; man therefore shall find grace, The other none. (3.129- 3.132) God attributes to Satan, the leader of these fallen angels, full responsibility for his misdeeds. In speaking of him with such severity, God, like Raphael, acknowledges Satan as the complete author of his actions, thus denoting to him a certain status as a creative being. Milton's emphatic depiction of Satan as a creator invites us to seek within his character the condition that fosters and brings forth creativity. The condition in which Satan exists prior to his rebellion is one of uncertainty and limitation. More generally, it is the condition in which one finds oneself naturally after coming into being, and thus it is a state that is common to all creations. As a created being, Satan is forced to participate in an order that has been established independently of his own power or input. Politically, he is governed by God, his creator, whose authority in Heaven endures unopposed and who has the power to make decrees and assign rank to his hierarchy of angels. God, who has created everything in existence, who is allpowerful, all-knowing, and ubiquitous, rules Heaven by just merit; however, this merit has never been proved by any trial nor attested by any witness, nor has the relative demerit of his subjects been illumined by experience. As only God bore witness to his creation, and only God's allknowing sensibility could be sure of His supremacy without any empirical test, God's subjects cannot be obedient on account of any proof of God's merit or of their own demerit. Satan describes this state of created uncertainty Hogan 107 �after his rebellion leads him to fall from Heaven in final proof of God's superiority in force: But he who reigns Monarch in heav'n, till then as one secure Sat on his throne, upheld by old repute, Consent or custom, and his regal state Put forth at full, but still his strength concealed, Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall. (1.637- 1.642) In this light, God's supremacy and the subsequent inferiority of his created order, whose relative ignorance requires that knowledge be revealed through empirical evidence, allows for and even breeds mistrust, skepticism, and ultimately, the creation of rebellion and war. The condition that leads Satan to create misery and evil and that drives creation in general throughout the poem is one that is common to all created beings. This creative condition consists in a kind of perceived imperfection, in which a creature understands that he is, by generation, inferior to his creator in power and subordinate to him in knowledge. Moreover, it is the condition of owing an infinite amount to one's creator, to whom one is forever indebted by the gift of existence. Though those beings which are descendant of God are born with a freedom that equals that of God's, they are otherwise born into a position of lowliness and servitude in relation to Him; indeed, it is only God's allowance of freewill that keeps these creatures from becoming mere slaves. Thus the faithful angel Abdiel responds to Satan's plan to rebel by saying: Shalt thou give law to God, shalt thou dispute 108 Energeia With him the points of liberty, who made Thee what th.au art, and formed the pow' rs of Heav'n Such as he pleased, and circumscribed thir being? (5.822- 5.825) God's creatures cannot help but belong to Him, to whom they owe their original existence, and they have, relative to God, no belongings of their own except choice and judgment. What is more, until they create or discover some other relationship through which to be defined, they can be defined only in contrast to their maker, and consequently only in light of their comparative inferiority of knowledge, their subordination in power, and their infinite debt. In this sense, it is not surprising that one would seek to overcome this created existence. While the endowment of free will allows a creature to gain a degree of independence, it cannot resolve the deficiency that accompanies the created identity. Creation, on the other hand, the root from which this degeneration first stemmed, supplies a model for a kind of cure. Just as a creature realizes that he is inferior and subject to his creator, so he sees that, by himself becoming creative, he can establish himself in a position analogous to that of his creator, a position of superiority and dominion in relation to a created object, whose debt and obligation to him is unlimited. In this sense, the instinct to create is no different from the instinct to overcome the degenerative condition to which one is subjected by birth. Thus the creative urge has its origin in the deficiency that attends all created existence, and this deficiency has its basis in this creative urge. Through this instinctual cycle, creation becomes naturally repetitive and widespread. While the condition of created existence gives rise to creativity, the created being's decision to accept or Hogan 109 �deny this condition informs the way in which he creates and the subsequent character of his creations. The creations of Satan are very different from those of Adam, whose reproductive creativity allows him to be the father of all men. While Adam's creativity is acceptable to and even commanded by God, Satan's creativity is always offensive to Him and constantly coincides with some kind of revolt. To understand what it is that allows Adam to create in accordance with God's will while Satan appears to be incapable of aligning his creative instincts with it, one must first consider the ways in which each of these characters understands the origins of his existence and his created condition. When he speaks to Raphael, Adam tells of his first experiences on earth as a newly created being, the first of his kind. Adam begins his account of this awakening with candid humility, stating the difficulty of the task at hand: "For man to tell how human life began I Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?" (8.250- 8.251). For some time, he continues to speak in terms of this original ignorance: "But who I was, or where, or from what cause, I Knew not" (8.270- 8.271). Despite his wonder and uncertainty of his own origins, Adam does not conclude that he has come into being from nothing, nor does he determine himself to be his own maker. After Adam discovers his innate capacity to speak and to name what he perceives in the landscape around him, he commands these natural entities, over which God has given him dominion, to tell him of his origins and of his creation: Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here? Not of myself; by some great Maker then, In goodness and in power preeminent; Tell me, how I may know him, how adore, 110 Energeia From whom I have that thus I move and live And feel that 1 am happier then I know. (8.277- 8.282) Despite the ignorance into which Adam is born, he naturally and aptly recognizes certain things as necessary truths. These accepted truths have in no way been revealed to Adam by any empirical proof, but come rather from some inexplicable and innate understanding of his relation to his creator. This fundamental awareness of his relation to a God that is greater than he does not lead him to rebel against God, but rather to seek the way to praise and worship him best. Unlike Satan, Adam does not view his created condition as one of odious subjugation, inferiority, and death, but rather he perceives it to be one of grateful existence and happiness. This particular u nderstanding of his existence allows him to accept and embrace his subordinate relation to his creator. In contrast to Adam, Satan actively denies his origins and rejects the condition into which he is born. It is difficult to know with certitude what Satan truthfully believes to account for his existence, as Satan, "the false dissembler" (3.681), does not always speak in the open, sincere way that Adam does. Throughout the poem, Satan offers conflicting statements regarding whether or not he believes himself to have been created by God. In each instance that he demonstrates doubt in his divine origins, he is before a crowd of angels whom he means to convince of the unworthiness of God's rule. Thus Satan asks Abdiel, his opposer: Who saw When this creation w as? Remember'st thou Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? Hogan 111 �We know no time when we were not as now; Know none oefore us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quick'ning power when fatal course Had circled his full orb, the birth mature Of this our native heav'n, ethereal sons. Our puissance is our own. (5 .856- 5.864) In this speech, Satan not only expresses uncertainty that he was created by God, but suggests that he and all the other angles were self-spawn, authors of their own creations. At other times, when Satan is alone, his words indicate a firm recognition of God as his creator. At one point, while reflecting upon his war against God, Satan says: Warring in heav'n against heav'n's matchless King: Ah wherefore! he deserved no such return From me , whom he created what I was In that bright eminence, and with his good Upbraided none. (4.41- 4.45) Rockledge Farm No. 1 I Allison Hauspurg 112 Energeia Alone, Satan expresses an understanding of God as his creator similar to that natural understanding expressed by Adam when he awakens from creation. This division between Satan's public doubt and his personal sense of conviction leads us to believe that, while Satan in truth attributes his origins to God, he pretends to doubt them in order to justify his rebellion and to convince the other angels of their own doubt and power. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that Satan, were he entirely confirmed that God was his creator, would have attempted to rebel and war against God. Hogan 113 �Such confirmation would render Satan's war absurd and his rebellion foolish even in Satan's own eyes, as it would involve a revolt against a power he has acknowledged as superior. The war would be reduced to a vainglorious attempt to achieve the impossible. While it is unclear whether or not Satan is in fact bothered by having no empirical evidence of God as his creator, his resolute transgression of God's will and his unyielding war against God indicates unequivocally that he has decided to govern himself as if he did not have his origin in God. While it may seem unthinkable or ridiculous for one to govern oneself according to a principle or belief one knows to be untrue, there are many reasons why one's given condition would necessitate the willful production of this kind of illusion. Satan's words after God has banished him to Hell encapsulate this sense of an existence that is at once false and meaningful: "The mind is its own place, and in itself I Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n" (1.254-1.255). These words fail to recognize the inescapable condition in which Satan is fated to exist; at the same time, they accurately reflect Satan's constructed illusion of his existence, an illusion that is itself very real and has valid significance and use; for who, condemned to Hell, would rather dwell in the reality upon which they had fallen than rise and enter into an illusory world of their own creation? The false sense of his condition that Satan creates for himself allows him not to give in to the despair of his true condition. It allows him to continue fighting his war against God with a false sense of hope and purpose, even after God's omnipotence has been revealed to him. Given Satan's capacity to construct around him a false yet meaningful understanding of his condition in Hell, it is possible his initial rebellion against God is also 114 Energeia informed by a false, contrived understanding of his condition in Heaven· as a creation of God. God's creation of Satan is a kind of fall from God's greatness, and Satan sees his subsequent condition as a kind of insufferable Hell that obligates and subjugates him under a "debt immense of endless gratitude, I So burthensome" (4.52). Certainly, if he can find no meaning in his given created condition, the least Satan can do is to contrive a false understanding of his creation that allows him to act with a false sense of power, hope, and purpose. In this sense, Satan's decision to actively reject his origins is a logical response to the absurdly subordinate position into which he is thrown by God's will, and not his own. While this comparison between Adam's acceptance and celebration of his created condition and Satan's denial and rejection of it illuminates both the positive and the negative aspects of the created condition, it does not show why one creature would view his condition in a positive light while another would view it negatively. In order to address this question, one must observe the different ways in which God created Adam and Satan, and one must consider the capacities of the dissimilar substances into which God made them. When God creates Adam, he blesses him, saying: Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, Subdue it, and throughout dominion hold Over fish of the sea, and fowl of the air, And every living thing that moves on the earth. (7.531- 7.534) His blessing, or command, is one that establishes Adam both as the father of all men and that establishes him, as man, as ruler over all other earthly creatures. When Hogan 115 �Adam first becomes conscious of his existence, his ability to name the earthly creations around him demonstrates an innate understanding of this creational blessing of reproduction and dominion. Though less is said of the way in which Satan and God's angels were created, it is clear that they are not created to have their end in reproduction and dominion. Unlike Adam, man, and the other earthly creatures, the angels were not commanded by God, upon their creation, to populate the heavens and father nations. What is more, the angels are incapable of reproducing in the way that earthly creatures do, by breeding with a particular mate. This distinction between earthly and heavenly reproduction becomes apparent when Satan first looks upon Adam and Eve as Eve embraces Adam and the two kiss one another in Eden. The narrator states, "aside the Devil turned I For envy" (4.502- 4.503). While Satan's jealousy stems in part from watching two creatures enjoy the state of paradise that he has lost, the placement of this line just after the image of Adam and Eve, as Satan puts it, "Imparadised in one another's arms" (4.506), suggests that Satan's envy is also of Adam and Eve's earthly, conjugal affection for one another. This particular affection is en viable to Satan insofar as it reflects their blessed fertility and their fate to father an entire world of men. In this instance of Satan's jealousy, we discover a possible explanation for the disparity between Satan's rejection and Adam's acceptance of their created conditions; for while God has blessed Adam with a kind of creative or generative outlet, He appears not to have blessed Satan with anything of this sort. Thus while God endows Adam with a blessing that directly compensates for those painful aspects of his created existence, He gives to Satan no such compensation, thus compelling him to look outside of 116 Energeia God's blessing for a means of overcoming the pain of his created existence. The ways in which Satan and Adam choose to understand the history of their own creation directly affect the nature of their own creations. Adam's creations imitate those of God, exalting the model set forth to him by his maker, while Satan's creations are unlike them, perverting the creational trend that God began. The creational model that God establishes when he creates the heaven and earth and all its earthly and heavenly inhabitants is the paradigm for ideal creation. God, foreseeing the fall of man, explains to Christ why he chose to create both man and angel free to fall or stand, and why the creation of a being whose will is free is greater than that of one whose will is bound, despite the risk of disobedience: Not free, what proof could they have giv'n sincere Of true allegiance, constant faith or love, Where onely what they needs must do, appeard, Not what they would? What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid, When will and reason (reason also is choice) Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled, Made passive both, had served necessity. (3.103- 3.110) God explains that to create what is free is not only good for the created being, but also for the creator, who gains the opportunity to be worshipped and praised more completely. God does not limit his creation of free beings to the creation of men and angels; instead, this freedom is manifest even in Nature as he first creates it. Milton describes this Nature as being "wild above rule or art" (5.297), and Hogan 117 �Adam says to God's created air and elements, "let your ceasless change I Vary to our great Maker still new praise" (5.183- 5.184). Though Nature and man are both described as praising God with their freedom, Nature praises God by simply existing in its free state, while man must choose to worship God. While man is free because he can choose to obey or disobey God's commands, Nature is free because its growth is not fated or predetermined by God. Nature's simple, existential praise of God suggests that the creation of a free being is not only ideal because it allows the maker to be worshipped freely, but because it reflects well upon God as a creator, since it is a greater feat to create something that is free than to create something enslaved. Adam's creativity nearly meets this precedent of creation that God first sets. Through his conjugal relations with Eve and through God's blessing, Adam spawns children; from Adam grows a world of men, and the earth becomes populated according to God's command. In God's own words, "out of one man a race I Of men innumerable" (7.155- 7.156) is born. By having children, Adam is able to reproduce the image of God, the image in which God originally created him. Milton describes this image of God in Adam and Eve as "severe, but in true filial freedom placed; I Whence true authority in men" (4.294- 4.295) . In this illustration of God's image, Milton locates the origin of man's "authority" in the freedom God has given man; this authority can be understood both in the sense of man's dominion over Nature and in the sense of Adam's destiny to become the author, or fa ther, of all men, and to govern the path of his own life. This authority is considered "true" because it stems from a free creator. Thus the creations of man are made in freedom and, consequently, these creations are themselves 118 Energeia free and able to create freely. Like Adam, Adam's children and his chiidren's children are born with free will, and thus may obey or disobey God. In each of these ways, Adam's creation by reproduction is similar to God's divine creation and allows God's initial creation of man to persist even after Adam, man's prototype, has been born and died. Satan's creations, on the other hand, do not reflect God's model of ideal, free creation, wherein a thing comes to be from and in a state of freedom; instead, they are bred from a servile condition and subsequently assume a state of slavery in relation to their maker. While it has been said that Satan is responsible for the creation of war and misery, he is also the creator of many other evils, including the personified Sin and the great mechanized engines with which he fights the war in Heaven. When Satan brings these new things into God's created order, he does not bring them into the world in a manner that is free, despite the fact that he was created to exist in a condition of freedom. Satan births Sin during the assembly he holds of rebellious angels . Though Satan wills the assembly and the revolt that brings sin and disobedience into the world, the actual birth of Sin from his own head surprises him, and does not manifest as a direct effect of his free will. To some extent, even Satan's decision to rebel does not come from the state of freedom with which God endowed Satan; indeed, Abdiel, God's loyal angel, criticizes Satan's decision to rebel against God, condemning Satan as one who is "not free but to thy self enthralled" (6.181). In this sense, though God makes Satan free, Satan enslaves himself by revolting against God and defying the condition in which God made him. Like Satan, Satan's creations are described as being devoid of the freedom with which God first created the Hogan 119 �world. Satan's machines act as an extension of Satan's will, with no free will of their own. While God's creations are constructive, Satan's creations are destructive. Satan's creations hinder the development of those more powerful and impressive aspects of existence, such as free will, with which God originally provided the created world. Many of these creations are even destructive to themselves. One can consider Sin as an embodiment of this self-destructive creation. Sin, who was spontaneously born of Satan's head, conceives a child with Satan, which she names Death. Death proceeds to rape Sin, who then becomes pregnant w ith monstrous hell-hounds, which harass her incessantly. Sin refers to Death as her "inbred enemy" (2.785) and describes the pain which the hellhounds inflict upon her. The incest present in Satan's lineage also differentiates Satan's creations from Adam's, whose lineage is enigmatically expansive: though Adam is the sole father of the human race, his descendants manage to avoid the incest one would imagine so inevitable. Through the creation of Sin, Satan's lineage becomes slave-like, destructive , and incestuous. His inventions and progeny differ greatly from those of Adam, whose offspring are free, constructive, and un-incestuous. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton exalts the creativity of God and Adam while condemning that of Satan, saying, through God's authoritative mouth, that "to create I Is greater than created to destroy" (7.606- 7.607); and yet, as a reader, it is difficult not to sympathize with Satan's plight, with the misery of his created condition, and even with the way in which he addresses this pain by means of destructive and ungodly creation. Part of this sympathy comes from the fact that it is unclear w hat Satan could have done to confront his situation differently, in a way that would have been acceptable to God. 120 Energeia As a creature w~th no blessed creative outlet th rough which to overcome the subordinate and inferior position into which he is born, Satan's decision to create in a way that is odious to God is compreh ensible and w orthy of compassion. In light of the impossible hardships of his given lot, Satan's rebellion seems predestined, and it is as easy to pity him as it is to pity any creature whose path is limited by necessity and determined by fate. Milton does not explain how Satan sh ould have acted given his situation, but he does offer an alternative to Satan's rebellious creation in his authorization of Paradise Lost. In writing this epic poem, Milton presents the reader with a way in which one can overcome their existence as a created being without reproduction, yet in a way that is un-offensive and even pleasing to God. Milton opens his poem with a prayer to h is divine muse: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great argument I may assert eternal providen ce, And justify the ways of God to men. (1.22- 1.26) Milton begins these lines by acknowledging his condition as a being that exists among elements of lowliness and darkness, ignorant and impotent in relation to his divine creator. Though he indicates the suffering w ith w h ich this condition fills him, he does not respond to this pain by rejecting his origins and transgressing God's w ill, but by seeking God's assistance, in order that God Himself might raise him up through inspiring him with poetic creation. Milton's desire for enlightenment through creativity differs from Satan's, as this desire has its end in Hogan 121 �God, and not in himself. Milton states that his desire is not limited to his own self-improvement, but ultimately involves a justification or defense of God. Milton's acceptance of his relation to his maker allows him to create constructively, in imitation of divine creation. The poem that Milton ultimately creates is also similar to God's creations. By calling upon a muse for the inspiration of his poem, Milton differentiates himself from his creation, allowing his created product to have a kind of will of its own and independence from its creator. Through this divinely inspired creation, Milton is able to transcend the lowly existence into which he is born by creating a product which is itself modeled after his God's divinely created order. Apoptosis (Revelation 21 :8) I Justin Lee 122 Energeia Lee 123 �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 123 Pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McCumber, Willis (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Winter 2008 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Winter 2008. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Winter 2008 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f78d2f4867f6635a955962be2f6d64f3.pdf d24a82445899db34b94cb9a143babef2 PDF Text Text • energe1a E nergeia St. John's College . spring 2007 �• energe1a spring 2007 �Table of Contents Young Will Tristan William Evans-Wilent 5 • energe1a Editor Junior Editor Sarah Hogan Willis K. McCumber Staff Magdalen Wolfe Chelsea Batten Max Socol Julia Patterson Faculty Advisor Jennifer Behrens Monumental Insignificance: Poetic Language, Immortality, and the Beloved Rob Irons 25 Translations from Paul Verlaine's Chansons pour Elle John C. B. Dodge 39 Christian Holland Layout Design Untitled Bryan Smith 21 Printer Chris Colby and the St. John's College Print Shop Push-Pull N. Younes 51 Cain, Late Summer Willis K. Mccumber 63 How you are fallen from heaven, 0 Shining One, son of Dawn!-Isaiah 14:12 Emily Tordo 65 2 3 �Young Will Tristan William Evans-Wilent H is first memory was this: he sat on his father's lap, dressed warm. Outside the snow fell, but inside with his father, it did not. The room was yellow and his father read to him. He can still remember the words, though he still does not understand them. Andra moi ennepe) mousa) polutropon) hos mala polla planchthe) epei Troies hieron ptoliethron epersen: pollon d) anthropon iden astea kai noon egno) pol/a d) hog) en pontoi pathen algea hon kata thumon) arnumenos hen te psuchen kai noston hetairon. aW oud) hos hetarous errusato) hiemenos per: auton gar: sphetrreisin atasthalieisin olonto) nepioi) hoi kata bous Huperionos Eelioio esthion: autar ho toisin apheileto nostimon emar. ton hamothen ge) thea) thugater Dios) eipe kai hemin. 1 Man Reading I Caroline Barry His father read those words, half singing them, and the sound even then felt old and his father singing them felt old too. In a voice that was hard and loud his father read to him. He remembers marveling at that voice, at those words, at the ancient sounds they made. Young Will thinks about this without trying on his way to school. He steps on all the cracks and when he passes the oak he knows there are one hundred and thirty-nine more steps, two for each crack in the sidewalk. It is snowing like before, 1. Tell me, 0 Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished-fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hvperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. [Homer's Odyssey, lines 1-10. The translation is the author's.-Ed.] 4 5 �but not as hard. Snow falls on his nose and he feels it turn to water on his skin. "One hundred and seven," Will says to himself. The school, his school, stands in front of him. Will knows it well. He knows the front door will be cold and the walls in his classroom are green. He knows that his teacher's name is Miss Francis and that she is beautiful. He knows the names of the other eight children in the class and knows his favorite is named Mikey Worthington. He knows that today Miss Francis will read from a book entitled Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Young Will read the first half of the book last night and wants to ask Miss Francis what flapjacks are. Young Will is in his classroom now and sits at a table. He smiles and waves at Mikey Worthington, who sits at the other table. Mikey Worthington waves back. Miss Francis clears her throat and Will turns to look at her. She wears a blue dress and has blue eyes. "Good morning," says Miss Francis. "Good morning Miss Francis!" says the class. "Do you know what the first lesson is today?" "Math," shouts Will, and some of the other children shout it too. "That's correct, Will. Let's go and find our math books." The math lesson goes like this: 7+9= 8+8= 11 + 3 = 15 + 1 = 9+7 = 8+3+5= "Sixteen," thinks Will. "All of them." Will writes a big sixteen and circles it and looks to the other lesson that he has been given. 16.7 / 138.21 = 6 98.l / 3432.8 = And so on .. Young Will begins to divide. When he finishes he looks up. He sees Mikey Worthington and Mikey draws a big sixteen in the air. Will nods and writes a sixteen back. "OK," says Miss Francis. "Jane, can you collect everyone's books and put them on my desk?" "Yes, Miss Francis," Jane replies. "While Jane collects our math books, can someone tell me what we're doing tonight?" Children raise their hands. "Yes, Greg?" "We have our play tonight!" "That's right, Greg. Now I want you all to make sure to remind your parents when you go home today. Some of them might not have as good a memory as you all do." Second memory: Young Will's father stands on a stage. People clap and his father claps back. They are outside. People shout and clap and smile. Young Will has been told this is the Olympics and they are in Greece. Men and Women march around in funny hats and clothes with rings on them. They march around in a circle, some waving big flags. When they stop, his father begins to sing, reading to all of them. His voice is loud and projected into a microphone. His father's voice is the same as before, speaking in that strange and ancient language. Will's mother tells him that the language his father is speaking in is called Ancient Greek. Will's mother is proud as she tells him. Young Will plays the part of Thor in the play. He holds a sword made out of tinfoil and wears a Viking hat with horns. The play is about Thor, who meets a great giant and the giant shows Thor things that he did not know. Young Will steps on the stage now and people clap. He sees his father and his mother sitting in the audience. His father waves. 7 �"Behold, I am Thor, strongest of men," shouts Will, brandishing his sword. "Behold that house. I am hungry and maybe there is food inside." The play goes quick. The house happens to be the glove of the giant. The giant introduces himself to Thor and shows him things about the world that Thor did not understand before. When the play ends people clap. Young Will runs to his mother and his mother hugs him. Will turns to his father and takes the pen and pad from his father's outstretched hand. You were great, it says. Thanks, Will writes. Those were a lot of lines to memorize, Will's father writes. It wasn't that bad. Could you hear me saying them OK? I could hear you perfectly, writes his father. Third Memory: Will stands in the same room as before. His mother is crying and his father is hugging her. Will is trying to grab his father's leg to ask him why his mother is crying. His father turns to look at him and Will asks: "Why is mom crying?" His father smiles at him and does not say anything. "Why is mom crying?" Will asks again. His father still does not answer. His mother begins to cry louder. Young Will keeps asking and his father, with a bandage over his head, does not say anything. At school the next day, Young Will and his class go to the school library. They will begin a project there. "Each of you will pick a language and then make a presentation about it. You should also learn a little of that language, like that alphabet, or how to say hello or goodbye," Miss Francis tells them. "I pick English," shouts a boy named Sean. "Any language but English, Sean," says Miss Francis, smiling. "Now each of you look in that stack of books and find a language." The children in Will's class jump up and scramble for books. Will joins them. He sees books with 8 French, Spanish, German, and Italian, but no Greek. He keeps looking ..Soon, all of the children have chosen books and sit at tables scattered around the room. Some of them try out their language. "Wee!" shouts a girl named Nancy. "Wee!" Will cannot find any books with Greek in them. He feels a tap on his shoulder and turns around. An older woman is smiling at him. "Can I help you find anything, young man?" She looks very old to Will, with wrinkles on her skin that look like rivers. "She would know Ancient Greek," thinks Will. "I'm looking for a book with Ancient Greek," says Will. The old woman furrows her eyebrows. "That's a very difficult language, young man. It is what people call a lost language, because no one speaks it anymore. You should try a different language." "That's not true," says Will. "My father speaks Ancient Greek. I've heard him." "Does he?" asks the old woman. "We better ask Miss Francis about this." The old woman motions to Miss Francis, who comes over. "This young man tells me that he wants to learn about Attic Greek." "Ancient Greek," says Will, interrupting her. "Attic Greek is just a type of Ancient Greek," says the librarian, turning to look at Will again. "I told him it is a very difficult language and we both thought it would be a good idea to ask you first." Miss Francis looks down at Will. "I think Will can handle it." "I don't know if you understand, Miss Francis. Among other things, Ancient Greek has a different alphabet, making it very difficult to learn." "Will's a smart boy. He'll be able to figure it out." The old woman looks questioningly at Miss Francis. "Very well. What's your name, young man?" "Will," says Young Will. "Well, just follow me, Will, and we'll try to find a book or two on this Ancient Greek of yours." The old woman leads 9 �Will through aisles of books. They are all brown or black. Will looks at them, wondering what they say. The old woman walks quickly and Will has to quicken his step as he sees her stop at the end of an aisle, staring for a few seconds, and then pulling out two large books. "Here you are, Will. Watch out; they're heavy." The old woman hands Young Will the books. They are very large. Will pretends they are light, trying not to show their weight in his arms. "Thank you," Will says. The librarian looks down and nods at him. Will walks back through the aisle of books and sits down next to Mikey Worthington. "What'd you pick?" asks Mikey as Will sits down. "Ancient Greek. That's the language my dad speaks." "Never heard of it. I chose Spanish." Will looks down at the two books sitting on the table. One is orange and says An Introduction to Attic Greek. Under the letters there is a picture of a woman dressed in a white robe with a blindfold over her eyes holding a scale. The other book looks older and is brown. Its title is The Beginning of Human Thought: The short life of Athens. "The beginning of history," thinks Will. Memory: Will sits on the couch in the yellow room. His parents are standing in front of him. His mother looks stern and his father's face shows no expression at all. "Will," says his mother. "Your father and I have decided to live in different houses. Your father is going to move out to the country and I'm going to stay here." "Is this house not big enough, mom?" "No, Will, that's not it. Sometimes people just decide that they would be happier if they didn't live together, like you and your friend Mikey. I bet if you lived in the same house you might get tired of one another." 10 "I don't think so," says Will. "Mikey Worthington's great." "Maybe you think that now, but I'm sure if he lived with us you would get tired of him." "Are you tired of dad?" Will asks. His mother looks away and writes something on a pad of paper and hands it to Will's father. Will's father smiles at him and writes something on the pad, handing it to Will when he is done. No, not really, but everyone needs a vacation sometimes. "A vacation! Can I come? Is there going to be a beach?" Will's father points to the pad of paper and Will writes it down, handing it back to his father. Nope, no beach Will. But you'll get to visit your father on his vacation every weekend. "Will you come too mom?" "No, Will. Just you." Will now sits at the kitchen table, the two books spread out in front of him along with a piece of paper that is almost filled. aj3ybd~rt0LKA, writes Will. He writes the alphabet and then turns to the book mumbling the letters. "Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda." Young Will says them over and over, louder and louder, trying to say them in his father's voice. He feels his teeth and his mouth and imagines men long gone, ancient men, feeling their tongues hit their teeth in the same way, the same way his father says them, the same way he does. It is as if time has stopped. The door opens and his mother appears smiling with her tired eyes. "Hi, Will." "Hi, mom." "School all right today?" "It was fine." His mother reaches her hand over Will's head, jostling his hair. "Hey mom, don't do that." 11 �"Hey yourself," she says. "I'm entitled." "How was work?" Will asks. His mother now stands with her back to him, taking things out of her briefcase. "Oh, it was good. I have a new case." She keeps her back to Will as she talks. "What's it about?" "Well, a man thinks a company stole an idea of his and wants the company to pay money for the idea the company stole." "But I steal ideas all the time and I don't pay any money for them." "What ideas do you steal, Will?" his mother asks, pouring water into the large iron teakettle. "Like in math I didn't know how to multiply until I was taught how to. That's stealing an idea." "This case is a little different. The man is angry because the company made a lot of money from the idea. You didn't make any·money from learning how to multiply, did you?" "One time I did Mikey Worthington's math homework for him and he gave me a brownie his mom made for it." Will's mother laughs. "Well, I guess you owe someone a piece of that brownie. And you shouldn't do Mikey's homework for him or he won't learn how to do it for himself." "Do you think the company should pay the man some money?" asks Will. "Probably, but they won't have to." "Why not?" "Because that's my job, kiddo." Memory: It is night. Young Will's father sits in the chair reading. Will holds a book. His father looks up and Will gives the book to his father. His father shakes his head at him and takes out a piece of paper. He takes out a pen and writes a note and hands it to Will. 12 I can't, it says. "Why not?". asks Will. His father takes the pad of paper and writes. Want to play a game instead? Will takes the pad and paper from his father. Of course, writes Will, and hands the pad of paper and the pen back to his father. When you want to talk to me, you write it on a piece of paper, and when I want to talk to you I'll do the same thing. "OK!" Young Will says. His father shakes his head and points at the pad of paper. Hi dad, writes Will. What are you reading? A play by Aristophanes, kind of like the play you wanted me to read to you. But this one is in Greek. Neat. How do you read it? I'll teach you someday. The room is silent. The father sits and the son stands across from him. The only sound is the pad of paper that is passed back and forth. It is passed back and forth slowly, as outside, the last of the day's sun goes down. Will you read to me now? H is father reads what Will has written and looks at his son in the eyes before writing. I've forgotten how to read out loud, writes his father. "But I'm tired of this game," says Will, forgetting. His father points to the pad and Young Will writes what he said and passes the pad and the pen to his father. I'm tired of this game too, Will. "Are you ready for dinner, Will?" asks his mother. Will looks up from the table. "Just a minute." "What are you doing there anyway?" His mother moves from the stove to behind Will's chair, holding his shoulders in her hands. "Are those books on Ancient Greek?" 13 �"Yep. I'm going to learn how to talk like dad so we can talk together again." The fingers on Will's shoulders tighten their grip. "Ouch mom, geeze." "Dinner's going to be ready in five minutes," says his mother, taking her hands off of her son and walking back to the counter. Walking to school again, Young Will does not count steps. It is snowing again, but Will does not notice. He mumbles, "Alethia, sophos, nomos, philos, eros, socrates." Even in English they sound old," Will thinks, saying them again with their English names. "Truth, wisdom, custom, love, desire, Socrates." He mumbles them to himself, them and others and does not notice the cold door to the school or the classroom. When it is time for math, Will tries to do it quickly, without noticing the mistakes he never made before. When he is done, Will does not look up for Mikey Worthington, but writes the words he knows, mumbling them still. He spends the whole day like that. He does not raise his hand, does not speak aloud. At lunch he takes the large orange book out from his backpack and sits by himself. He learns how to conjugate the simplest verb, learns the plural and singular, present and past, the first, second, and third person. Young Will goes to his father's house tomorrow. He will speak with him by then. But Young Will must hurry. He still does not know how to say hello. Outside on the porch, Will sits and watches the snow that has turned to rain. The rain falls heavy, and the snow it touches melts. The snow turns brown on the sidewalk and the street and cars drive by slowly. It is cold and damp and Will feels both through his coat. He sits in a chair brought out from the kitchen and sets his books on a small coffee table taken from the living room. There is a notebook on Young Will's lap that he is translating sentences on: Homere epaideue anthropous. Socrates luei anthropon. 14 He translates a sentence and then reads it carefully out loud. The sentc;nces are about Homer and Socrates helping men. Young Will listens to the sound of the rain hitting the porch and the sound of the Greek words being spoken in his voice, both together. His father would know that sound. Will looks up and sees his mother pulling up to the house. She is home early and1gets out of the car, trying to stay dry as she walks up to the porch. "What are you doing out here, Will?" "Just stuff." "It's cold out here, dummy." "I know, but it feels good." Will's mother looks down at the Greek book. "How's the Greek going?" she asks. "Pretty good. I can read a few things." "That's great, Will." His mother's eyes have not left the book. "Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?" "With marshmallows?" "With marshmallows," his mother says, reaching for Will's hair before walking through the door. Will hears her fill up the kettle and the clank of metal as she closes the spat and sets it on the burner. Young Will knows she turns the stove on next, and then takes two mugs down from the cupboard. After that she will reach for a tea bag, Earl Grey, and put it in her mug. Then she will take down the box of chocolate powder and measure three teaspoons of the chocolate into Will's mug. A fire truck drives by, flashing silently in the rain. Once his mother preps the mugs, she sets a frying pan on another burner and pours cream into it. The milk will begin to move with the skin, and she adds a small piece of butter to the cream, mixing it with a wooden spoon. When the butter has completely melted, she turns the burner off. The fire truck has disappeared but Will now hears the siren a few blocks away. Will knows she will be taking the kettle off of the stove now, filling her mug and a small fraction of his with the boiling water. She takes the frying pan and the wooden spoon and 15 �guides the thick cream into his mug before stirring his h?t chocolate, slowly, with a measuring spoon. As she does this, the milk will turn dark like the rain hitting the snow. "Come inside, Will, your hot chocolate is ready." Will knows his mother is reaching for the marshmallows, selecting three from the bag before setting them beside his mug, which . is at his place. "Coming," Will says, taking his notebook and steppmg through the door. He can barely hear the sound of ~e fire truck's siren now. Will sets his books down on the kitchen counter and goes and sits at his place. The mug sits o~ ~e table with the marshmallows around it. He places one m his mug and takes a drink. "I need to speak to you about something, Will," his mother says, sitting down opposite him, her palms pressed on the table. "What?" "I'm very happy that you're learning Greek, Will, and it will make your father very happy too, but Will, he cannot speak to you in Greek." . ,, "Why not, he's done it before." "Of course he has, Will, but not after the car accident. "I know that. He told me he forgot how to talk, but I think he just means English." His mother takes his hand. "Will, your father got hit in the head, hit in his brain, and that caused him not to know how to form coherent sounds to make words with. It also caused him to go deaf, so he can't hear anyone else, either. It's not that he forgot, but that he just can't." Will takes his hand away from his mother's. "Do you know how to speak Greek?" "No, Will." "Then how do you know he can't hear it! How do you know that he won't be able to speak it, that when I talk to him about things in Greek I won' t make him remember>" . Will's voice rises steadily. "How do you know?" 16 "Because I do, Will," his mother says, her voice soft, as his still rings in the kitchen. "I don't believe you,'' Young Will says. "Honey." "I don't believe you,'' in a whisper now, grabbing his books from the kitchen counter and going back out to the porch. Sitting outside again, he says it, over and over again, saying what he believes he too will do, saying it quietly without pause as the rain falls on the snow, saying, "Socrates luei anthropon," saying Socrates releases man. Memory: Young Will sits in his father's new home, in his new study. The study and house are smaller than the old one and the walls are white and the furniture is new, save for his father's desk. Will sits there and reads Twelfth Night slowly. So far it is about a girl who pretends to be a man because she got shipwrecked. The phone rings and Will's father does not look up from his work. The phone rings four more times and Will gets up and answers it. "Hello?" "Hi,'' says a man's voice. "May I speak to Mr. Brightly?" "Sure," Will says. His father is standing next to him now. Will passes the phone to his father. He stares at it and Will puts the phone in his father's hands. Young Will's father brings the phone to his ear and smiles and nods and then hangs up. Will takes the pad and writes, Who was id I don't know, writes his father. The next morning Young Will wakes up early and goes down to the kitchen table with his books. He opens the history, and reads. The sun has not yet risen. Will reads about Socrates. He reads about how Socrates spent his time posing questions to people. The book tells that Socrates was imprisoned by the city and forced to drink poison, forced to 17 �choose between death and exile. He reads how Socrates had chosen death, chosen to put poison to his lips rather than leave home. As he reads the sun begins to climb, rising slowly. His mother's footsteps sound as they come down the stairs. The two eat breakfast together without speaking. The table is cleared and Will takes his books and his schoolbag. It is warmer out today. On his way to school, Young Will watches the last of the snow melting into water and dirt. Will walks the one hundred and thirty seven steps, counting them again. At ninety-four he crosses the small bridge made of iron that leads over the creek. At one hundred and ten steps he hears the sound of children's voices. In class, Will sits at his table and Miss Francis walks over to him. "I missed you yesterday, Will," she says. "I was here." "But you were so quiet. I was afraid you were getting sick." "I'm not sick at all Miss Francis," Will says. Miss Francis winks at Will and pats him on the shoulder. "OK, Will, I just wanted to make sure everything was all right." Will nods at her. The school day goes quickly. Young Will soon finds himself standing outside in the afternoon, waiting for his father. It is even warmer now. Will has shed his coat and holds it in his arms. After a short while, a taxi comes and stops in front of Will. His father gets out and smiles, picking Will up in his arms and hugging him. His father holds him tight and Young Will can feel and hear his breath before he is set down again. The ride to his father's house is long. The taxi makes its way through the town, moving slowly through the traffic, gradually moving out towards the country. Will sits by the window, watching as towns begin to appear, slowly at first, small streets lined with old homes and older gas stations. The farther the cab drives, the fewer houses there are, until even the towns are replaced by open pastures and fields. The 18 houses get older. Young Will sees one whose roof is sagged in, tracing a U ovei: the house. Outside the home, a trailer sits in the driveway, a young girl standing outside of it. As they pass the girl kicks the dirt. Will's father lights a cigarette and Will turns to watch him smoke. He holds the cigarette in his lips, moving it gradually from one side of his mouth to the other. Will's father looks away from the view and sees his son watching him. He takes out his pad of paper and a pen from a jacket pocket and writes on it. Don't tell mom, it says. I won't, I promise, writes Will. Outside now, the road is surrounded by large farms. Will smells the stink of cows and fertilizer that is being laid for spring. The cab pulls into a small dirt road at the edge of one of the farms. At the base of the driveway stands a mailbox with his father's last name painted on the black box with the same yellow paint that was used to paint Will's living room. The cab drives on, past the farm and the forest that borders it. The smell of manure is replaced with pine. After a few more minutes the cab stops and Young Will and his father get out. Will steps into the house with his father close behind. It is small, with a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. Will walks into his room and sets his school bag down. "The house is old," his father had told him, " built with wood from the trees that surround it." Will looks out the window into the forest, touching the walls that line the home, feeling the forest that engulfs the cabin. His father walks into Will's room and hands his son the pad of paper. "Want to go get the mail with me?" Will nods and his father takes his son by the hand. Outside the sounds of birds come through the trees. His father writes on the pad again and hands it to Will. It's the first day of spring. Will takes the pad and writes, Can you hear the birds? What do they sound like? his father writes. 19 �Like spring. Father and son walk slow like this, stopping often to write. Will's father turns and looks at him . His face is older now. It has a beard that is turning white. "Socrates luei anthropon," Will says. His father shakes his head and hands his son the pad of paper. "Socrates luei anthropon," Will says again. He says it louder this time, trying to sing the words like his father did. His father shakes his head. "Socrates luei anthropon." He shouts it now. The sound echoes in the forest. His father has stopped and is looking at him. Will takes the pad from his father and writes it now, tracing the letters slow and carefully. H is father takes the pad and reads. He does not look up from the writing pad. Will pats his father on the shoulder and says the words one more time. His father raises his head and watches his son speak those old words, watches his son's mouth move . "Socrates luei anthropon," Will says, quietly now. The smell of pine is thick. Young Will's father opens his mouth to speak and the sound that comes out is hollow and thin. His father makes the sound again and Young Will does not understand. His father opens his mouth again. The sound that comes from his father's mouth is harsh and quiet. That is not his father's voice. Those are not his father's words. I From domes of ~and on the beach where men made a bridge between earth and the sky, to spaces coiled like fishing line laced in the belly of the soil; through ghost-towns, through a stone-forest, through archways carved in Sequoias, the Winnebago I found myself in every childhood summer had already ranged. On the road to Bird Park in the blue hills of Georgia with Grandpa, the coils of the road like a rattlesnake piled up, the motor groaned and our big rolling house around every curve leaned, a wall of rock on one side of us, on the other an edge, a blue fall, and miles of gorge green, on the road to Bird Park, to waterfalls lost in the forest, to the peak of Blood Mountain (you can make it spying trees with scarlet paint marks) . II Dripping and glimmering in our fingers, ~at gray stones from pebbles and slippery clay m the creek were torn to raise towers in the water. We discovered flakes of gold sometimes, while those long-legged bugs that walk on water glided past like seraphim or UFOs 20 21 �walking on air, barely skimming the invisible skin. Come sundown, laying the river-rocks on dry land in a circle, we made fire, and Grandpa told me the one where the children lost in the forest were snared by daddy-long-leg spiders big as you and me that tied them up to a tree and danced around them and how did he end it? I saw them dancing in the flame. Then he recounted how an excavation crew burrowed so deep they caught the screams (true story) of Hell. I saw their faces in the flame. Come sunup, we hiked around a helical ramp to the top of a tower the shape of a satellite, rising through swaddles of nimbus to where the horizon held five states. They made me help clean out his backyard, a garden of junk he thought would be useful: carburetors, toilet-seats, gramophones, bicycle-wheels, deconstructed air-conditioners, two-by-fours, lawn-mower blades, rolls of insulation, shards of she'e t metal, not to mention things rusted and dissected past recognition. Crude little fences with peeling paint crisscrossed it all into a knot of corridors, and whatever order they followed fled with him who understood alone. When we found our way to his workshop, onyx bees were droning in and out through a fractured pane. I opened the door and witnessed, at a loss, endless rows of boxes, each one full of nails: a universe of things that were never built. - Bryan Smith III Staring past, with hair straight up, his final birthday's garish frosting .. . Suddenly he was younger than me, and I was older. Closed in on by darkness, he spoke to his Lord on a broken phone (its cord reaching through tangles only space, copper hairs jaggedly gesturing for a pulse). He said, "I'd like to go now." 22 23 �Monwnental Insignificance: Poetic Language, Immortality, and the Beloved Rob Irons The Crutch near the Moldy Pond I Zack Hay There has been much ado involving the identification of Shakespeare's beloved, yet he remains an exceedingly problematic figure. The reader is perpetually denied significant particulars of him, and never senses any reciprocity whatsoever in the relationship of the poet and the beloved. Thus, many of the sonnets achieve a connecting, emotional mimesis of the poet's lack: the elusive beloved is the outline without the image, the key without the note, the syllable without the sound. Who is this "sweet boy" (108.5 )?1 What accounts for his "present-absent" (45.4) nature? Is he one of those who "have power to hurt and will do none" (94.1)? Perhaps a better question is this: does the beloved really matter? Perhaps the sonnets themselves constitute the real beloved, born from continuous consideration of mortality; furthermore, if the sonnets really are the beloved, then the reader is presented with an extended (though not continuous) meditation on the nature, powers, and possibilities of poetic language, and on the "becomings" of meaning within the first 126 sonnets. The Beloved as Verse As has been woefully yet needlessly lamented, concrete details of the beloved perpetually escape the reader, and we are left with a mere apparition comprised of generalities- and this 1. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin Group [USA] Inc., 2001). All quotations and punctuation are taken from this edition. Text references are to sonnet number and line number. Considerations of editorial versus authorial arrangements of both sonnet sequences and punctuation lie well outside the scope of this investigation. 24 25 �from the sonnets in which he is actually treated. Furthermore, approximately 28 of the sonnets are addressed to or involve the "Dark Lady," and 26 more are addressed to no one at all. In addition, 6 more sonnets appear as apostrophes to Time or Love. But what if we did know all: his complete character, habits, disposition, every contour of his countenance, the location of each hair on his head with scientific exactitude? What if we had his very words, faithfully relayed by our poet, complete with context? Would not he matter then? Perhaps not, for what a work is potentially about and its subject are not necessarily the same. Dante tells us of Paolo and Francesca, yet their characters serve only as a vehicle to investigate the nature of lust. While Socrates is the chief subject of the Republic, who would argue that the dialogue is primarily about Socrates and not justice? And even all of the autobiographical particulars that the Wife of Bath provides for the reader are readily transcended by a larger narrative scope and its focus on equality between the sexes. As for the beloved, what we do have is a protracted sequence teeming with ambiguity, packed with paradox, and dripping with irony, leading to an overwhelming conclusion: the persona of the beloved, and perhaps the nature of the text itself, is one of indeterminacy and undecidability. In numerous instances the poet overtly equates himself with the beloved. Consider the following: 0, how thy worth with manners may I sing When thou art all the better part of me? What can mine own praise to mine own self bring, And what is't but mine own when I praise thee? (39.1--4) Here the final sentiment is clear: the poet praises himself when he praises the beloved, for they are two parts of the selfsame whole, though perhaps qualitatively distinct, as the poet asserts in line 2 as well as in 74.8: "My spirit is thine, the better part of me." If the subject and the poet are one, and the poet is identified by his poetry, then how far removed is 26 the subject from the poetry itself? The first quatrain of sonnet 55 argues thus:. Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. The first two rhymes assert that the "powerful rhyme" is itself a monument capable of outlasting the most durable of materials, and it is in these same "contents" that the beloved "shall shine more bright." The sonnet is perhaps a powerfully perdurable monument and, thus far, the poet has in fact held time in check. But what of the second claim, that the beloved "shall shine more bright"? Where is he? He is reduced to nothing but two instances of "you" and a "yourself' within the entire sonnet. Here the shining beloved is to the monumental poem as the superficial surface is to the "gilded monuments": there is no substance to the sheen. However, when we read sonnet 54, the beloved's importance is given greater weight, though he is not treated until the couplet: . . . Sweet roses do not do so [die unto themselves]: Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made. And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, When that shall vade, by verse distills your truth. (54.11-14) Extending the metaphor above validates the argument that the beloved has now become the material subject for the poem, but functions only as generic fodder for distilling truth. Here are the terms of the metaphor: Odor Rose Truth Beloved Thus, odor is to a rose as truth is to the beloved. However, the distillation of the rose's odor is only achieved through death. Therefore, in accordance with the implicit terms of the 27 �metaphor, the poetic process is likened to death. The beloved has here been promoted from mere "gilding" to the material necessary for poetic distillation of truth. But as we look further into the sonnets, we see a more explicit and substantive equation of the beloved with the verse itself: "The worth of that [the body] is that [the soul] which it contains,/ And that [the soul] is this [the poem], and this with thee remains" (74.13- 14). The very soul of the beloved is now equated with and embodied in poetry, with the semantic thrust of the claim amplified and reinforced by the mimetic structure of the argument in the form of a chiasmus: that (body) . . . that (soul) ... that (soul) .. . this (beloved embodied by poetry). Just as the body contains the soul, so is the soul embodied in the couplet. Let us now turn to sonnet 96: Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness; Some.say thy grace is youth and gentle sport; Both grace and faults are loved of more and less: Thou mak'.st faults graces that to thee resort. As on the finger of a throned queen The basest jewel will be well esteemed, So are those errors that in thee are seen To truths translated and for true things deemed. How many lambs might the stern wolf betray If like a lamb he could his looks translate! How many gazers mightst thou lead away If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state! But do not so; I love thee in such sort As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report. The couplet in 96 echoes the argument in 74 while mimicking the form: thou . . . mine . . . mine . . . thy. This chiasmus better visually asserts the connection between the poet and the beloved/poem, with "mine" stated and repeated, neatly framing the caesura. The device facilitates the resolution that the couplet by convention strives for, leaving the reader with 28 a sense of completion. Furthermore, line 14 is salient for its metrical irregularity, which is amplified by its contrast with the firm regularity established by the preceding 13 lines. None of these 13 lines contains a feminine ending: therefore, it makes sense to assign the word "being" in 14 only one syllable. While prosody is to some degree conjectural, no reader is capable of rendering "thou being mine, mine" as anything but a double spondee. The resonating effect of the spondees makes the message of the line exceedingly emphatic: the poet is one with the beloved. Further, the beloved is again equated with the poetry itself in the word "report." While the primary meaning of "report" is "reputation,'' it can also signify the poem- that is, the poem is the report. An alternative reading of the entire sonnet strengthens the argument for this secondary meaning. The sonnet's ostensible argument is this: the fair youth, though excoriated for his alleged faults, is of such a nature that error turns to truth through him; but, were it his wish, he could lead admirers astray as a wolf (in the guise of a lamb) could betray lambs. Why are a person's faults referred to as "errors" (7)? And in what kind of person are "truths translated" (8)? And why is deception described by the verb "translate" ( 10 )? Taking into consideration the evidence above that the beloved is either equated with the poem or is verse itself, we can easily explain the language of language used in the sonnet: the poem is the deceptive, controlled, and sheepish response of a poetic wolf to a contrary critic. Furthermore, the phrase "truths translated" (8) hearkens back to the couplet of 54: verse is the very means by which truth is translated, or distilled. Additionally, the only other occurrence of metrical variation in sonnet 96 lies in line 4: "Thou mak'st faults graces .. ."If 96 is indeed an example in the sonnet sequence of an implicit, almost surreptitious commentary on the poet's own craft, the meter of line 4 can then be construed not as an artistic blemish but as mimetic metrical irony: the spondee in the first half of the line creates the "fault" in meter, yet the line then gracefully recovers regularity. 29 �Monuments, Time, and the Problem of Mortality We have thus far seen the following transferences, equations, and transformations of the beloved: first, to the poet; second, to mere ornamentation; next, to poetic material; and lastly, to the very soul of poetry. Therefore, viewing the "real" beloved as the poetry itself, we can read some of the remaining sonnets as reflections on the nature of poetic language. But before doing so, it is necessary first to examine that which perpetually provides angst and anxiety for the poet: Mortality. The opening quatrain of sonnet 65 asks the essential question of the poet's "fearful meditation" (65.9): Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? The poet's answer is tenuously posited in the couplet: "O, none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright." The lasting effects of the poet's work are wholly contingent on a supernatural phenomenon, a miracle, and his hope is reduced to a weak, tenuous, subjunctive "may" (65 .14). What could account for this fearful uncertainty? Why is there such a change in the poet's supreme confidence exhibited in the opening quatrain of sonnet 55? Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. Perhaps there is an increasing awareness by the poet of what he bases his confident claim on in sonnet 55: nothing. The argument is circular, self-referential, and ultimately empty. Why shouldn't these poems be susceptible to "Devouring Time" (19.1)? Has the poet remembered here in 65 his 30 "papers, yellowed with their age" (17.9)? What monument can withstand tqe ceaseless ravaging of time? In order to answer this, we must look at how the poet's language previously functions by examining sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade When in eternal lines to come thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Sonnet 18 is salient within the sequence for numerous reasons: first, it officially departs from the arguments of procreation seen previously; second, we get the first instance of the poet's explicit contemplation of his craft and, more specifically, a meditation on the transformative power (and potential failure) of metaphor itself. Within the author's mind, the first eight lines function as a point-counterpoint argument, framed by a question put forth by the poet to the poet of whether or not to utilize the very essence of figurative speech, whether or not he is to "compare" (18.1) at all. If metaphor (comparison) is indeed the sine qua non of the figurative, then the reader is thus presented with the poet's own analysis of the tropological nature of language. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek meta (over; across) and pherein (to carry), yielding the idea of "carrying across," or transference. Thus, any one particular attribute within a given genus is "transferred" and applied to the characteristics of another genus. For example, consider the Ghost's words 31 �(referring to Claudius) to Hamlet: "The Serpent that did sting thy father's life/ Now wears his crown" (1.5.38_;39).1 In order for the metaphor to function, at least one of the qualities of the serpent is transferred and applied to the characteristics of Claudius: King of Denmark moves on its stomach detaches jaw scaly rational creature kills with poison ectotherm kills with poison featherless biped sneaky etc. etc. The metaphor is valid only if it remains relatively static: if the pig's attribute of either "kills with poison" or "sneaky" is carried over to Claudius, and the metaphor here freezes, the comparison works; however, multiple transferences are problematic to the metaphor's legitimacy, and ultimately it collapses upon itself into risible absurdity: Is Claudius' tongue forked? Does he slither on his stomach? Does he eat mice? Absurd indeed. A similar type of analysis is performed by the poet in sonnet 18: individual qualities of the summer are scrutinized against those characteristics of the youth, and lines 2- 8 argue for the non-validity of the metaphor proposed. Then, remarkably, the poet makes the comparison anyway in line 9: "But thy eternal summer . . ." How is this possibly valid, especially in light of the poet's own rhetorical analysis and negation of the proposed metaphor? The couplet attempts resolution, yet we are left with the same tautological bombast characteristic of the claim in 55: art justifies itself by itself, and alone can build a pre-eminently perdurable monument of immortality. But does the poet really believe this, or must he struggle to build anew, using language in an unprecedented way? 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1963). 32 The problem of monuments in achieving immortality is that, like the metaphor of sonnet 18, they are wholly static. The word "monument" comes from the Latin monere "to remind." I~ order ~o be reminded of something, one ~ust have a static, fixed image of the thing itself. But there's the rub: once ~e object memorialized is set, still, and frozen, it begms to yield to the decay of time. Yet how is one to build a monument of flux? The recognition that "a modern quill doth come too short" (83.7) enlists the poet to invent what is potentially an ultra-modern use of language. The poet must stretch language to "engraft ... new" (15.14) perspectives. Language must be stretched, re-molded, and reshaped; it must be newly stamped in a way that rival poets cannot emulate; the poet is, as a result, "enforced to seek anew / So~e fresher st~m~ of the _ime-bettering days" (82.7- 8). The t subject alone is msuffic1ent to erect a "time-bettering" monument; the subject is static, susceptible to decay. The concept of subject as stasis is juxtaposed with the increasing realization of the poet of how to build this new type of monument: "Fair, kind, and true" is all my argument, "Fair, kind, and true," varying to other words; And in this change is my invention spent. (105.9- 11) The key lies in linguistic variation, change, and invention. "Invent" comes from the Latin invenire, literally, "to come ~~on." !his discovery and "finding out" of poetic invention is mextncably fused with semantic variation, and further refers to the perpetual "coming upon" of how words work and what meaning means. Only through a conscious and concentrated invention of a poetics of flux can the stasis of the subject defe~t decay. Fur~er, this "invention," this discovery, is certamly not exclusive to the poet: "So, till the judgment that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes" (55.13- 14). The judgment here has, of course, strong 33 �theological connotations, as does the word "miracle" in the couplet of 65: "O, none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright." Miracle is connected thematically with the theological implications of the "judgment" in 55, but the "miracle" refers specifically to the poem's potential for perdurability. Keeping in mind the equation of the beloved with poetics itself, one can conclude the following: the "miracle" that yields immortality is achieved through the perpetual, critical artistic flux of "invention" and "judgment" of poetic value and meaning by the reader. Additionally, the "might" of the "miracle" in 65.13 exemplifies semantic flux: is the "might" of the "miracle" one of power, or does this "might" signify the "perhaps" or "maybe" of semantic determination of signifiers set "in black ink" (65 .14 )? His confidence restored, the poet goes so far as to usurp the office of the muse: "Then do thy office, muse; I teach thee how, / To make him seem long hence as he shows now" (101.13-14) . Next, we will examine how the poet proceeds in his new office. Metalanguage, Transference, and Silence The poet begins to question his former method in the opening of sonnet 115: Those lines that I before have writ do lie, Even those that said I could not love you dearer; Yet then my judgment knew no reason why My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer. But reckoning time, whose millioned accidents Creep in 'twixt vows and change decrees of kings, Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents, Divert strong minds to th' course of alt'ring thingsAlas, why, fearing of time's tyranny, Might I not then say, "Now I love you best" When I was certain o'er incertainty, Crowning the present, doubting of the rest? Love is a babe; then might I not say so, 34 To give full growth to that which still doth grow. ~'Time's ~ranny'' (9) is nothing new to the poet, but here it IS constncted and . appli~d. to the immediate workings of language and mearung within the poem itself. But instead of fighting with time, ~e poet solves his dilemma by allowing metaphor to work with and through time: "Love is a babe· then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth g~~w." "Cr?wning the present" meaning of language ~tabI~zes meanmg, but positing growth of metaphor and m~anmgs m 115 .13- 14 indicates an overt departure from the fixity of language seen in sonnet 18. Time is now not simply an inimical destroyer, but is transformed into the ultimate vehicle of semantic sublation: time simultaneously preserves that which it destroys. Let us now turn to sonnet 107: Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage· Incertainties now crown themselves assured ' And peace proclaims olives of endless age. ' Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme ' While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes~ And thou in this shalt find thy monument When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. In line 7 above, the poet "crowns" the "incertainties" of "p~esent". ti~e ~at he ~efu~ed.to in 115.12. But the crowning of mcertamttes IS reflexive m lme 7; the fact that incertainties are able to act as well as be acted upon is indicative of the growing organic fluidity of the poem. Here we have the explicit voicing of the poet's solution to the problem of 35 �monumental fixity: flowing linguistic indeterminacy. The poet can now work with time, for time only "insults ... dull and speechless tribes." The poet's "drops" of ink and "balmy time" (9) heal in a wholly new transformative process that forces "Death" ( 10 ), not time, to "subscribe" to the poet. Here is the pedestal to the poet's monument of differance, its beloved semantic flow of "present-absence" that distinguishes it from all other monuments of man: "And thou in this shalt find thy monument/ When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent" (107.13- 14). This wholly inventive and innovative poetics reaches its climax in the exceedingly distinct sonnet 126: 0 thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow' st; If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May Time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, 0 thou minion of her pleasure! She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure; Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, And her quietus is to render thee. [ [ While many sonnets are conspicuous because of metrical variations, no sonnet is as irregular as 126, with two truncated lines and its structure composed exclusively of couplets. In the sonnet, we see a farewell to the fair youth as well as to conventional form itself. That the poet in the sonnets following 126 (if editorial arrangement be historically accurate) again embraces formal convention only reinforces the idea of the beloved as verse, for the farewell is simultaneous. Sonnet 126 is not simply a poem of precariousness or an agglomeration of couplets; rather, it is the culmination of the author's new 36 ~oetics. We ha: e seen how the "power" of the "lovely boy," · i.e. tJ:ie verse its~lf, can now "hold Time's fickle glass" by allowmg language to work with time. Meaning, through time's sublation, "hast by waning grown." It continues to grow, like "a babe" (115 .13), through the critical "judgments" (55.13) of the poem's lovers (4), i.e. its readers. In the next 6 lines (5- 10) of sonnet 126, "Nature" is introduced as a new foe. Again, viewing the "sweet boy" or "babe" as la?guage itself, nature now presents a new danger: meanmg, nature's "treasure," can become too slippery and protean within the constant flux of time; thus, even nature " [can]not still keep"(lO), or cannot keep still, the meanings left unchecked by form. The connection between meaning and form is clearly a consideration for both poet and reader in 126: the linearity of the argument, pushing the reader forward, is here fused with the cyclic, resonating rhymes of the couplets, resulting in the combination of a "calling back" of meaning with the onward thrust of the argument. The form of 126 renders the reader and the poem at once fixed and fluid: as meaning "goest onwards," form can "pluck ... back" (6) and ground the reader. "Meaning" is etymologically connected with "moaning," and thus the monumental . ' moanmg resonances fill the "missing" lines ( 13-14) with poetic and readerly invention. Furthermore, these tensions gather, explode, and echo on the semantic level in a single word, the final metaphor: "quietus." The Oxford English Dictionary gives three definitions for this word, the first of which is "a discharge or acquittance given on payment of sums due; a receipt." To stop at this meaning of "quietus" is to render the metaphor as fixed and feckless as the one examined in sonnet 18. A second definition: "A discharge from office or duty." Keeping in mind the poet's usurpation of the "office" of the muse (101.13- 14), we see here in the second definition the reinforcement of the idea of the poet's farewell: he quits his office of muse, embracing the silent and the quiet. A third entry in the OED is simply "death, or that which brings 37 �death." Before discussing this third definition, let us more closely examine the etymology of "quietus" and, additiorially, revisit our primary definition in light of our etymological inquiry. "Quietus" hearkens back ultimately to the IndoEuropean root kuei, signifying "restfulness; space of time." From this same root we get the following English words: "quiet," "acquit," and "requite." The poet's magnificent, monumental metaphor of quietus resonates with all three ideas: the poem and the poet both achieve "restfulness" and "quiet"; "quietus" introduces the "space of time" in 13- 14; and here, finally, is his beloved, verse itself, reconciled and "requited." But what of "death," the OED's third meaning? To answer this, let us review the primary meaning of "quietus": "a discharge or acquittance given on payment of sums due; a receipt." The metaphor of quietus hearkens back to sonnet 107, which initiates the idea of the beloved being under lease: "the lease of my true love" (107.3). To whom is "payment of sums" rendered at the end of the lease? It is neither time, nor nature, but Death. Yet no payment will be rendered, for "death to me [the poet] subscribes" (107.10). To "subscribe" literally means "to write under"; the poet, in sonnet 126, hereby achieves a stunning and supernatural reversal of the natural order of things: it is Death that now surrenders to the poet, who forces Death to sign the document and receipt of the quietus, forged with the poet's own fluid "drops" of ink and resonating, "balmy time" of sonnet 126. Here lives the poet's monument of "present-absent" static-flux; here lives well-versed invention; here lives his beloved immortality. Translations from Paul Verlaine's Chansons pour Elle John C. B. Dodge Seated Woman I Thea Chimento 38 39 �II II Campagne savoureuse et bonne A qui j'ai confie le soin Definitif de ma personne, Toi mon dernier, mon seul temoin, Viens \'.a, chere, que je te baise, Que je t'embrasse long et fort ! Mon coeur pres de ton coeur bat d'aise Et d'amour pour jusqu'a la mort: Aime-moi, Car, sans toi, Rien ne puis, Rien ne suis. Companion, delectable and kind, To whom I have committed All my care and attention, To you my last, my only witness, I come now, my dear, to kiss you, To embrace you long and hard. My heart next to yours beats with A free and lasting love until death: Love me, For, without you, I am finished, I am nothing. Je vais gueux comme un rat d'eglise, Et toi tu n'as que tes dix doigts ; La table n'est pas souvent mise Dans nos sous-sols et sous nos toits ; Mais jamais notre lit ne chome, Toujours joyeux, toujours fete, Et j'y suis le roi du royaume De ta gaite, de ta sante ! Aime-moi, Car, sans toi, Rien ne puis, Rien ne suis. I go as poor as a church mouse And you have only your empty hands; In our basements and under our roofs The table rarely sees a setting; But our bed never lies fallow, We are always joyful, always satisfied, And there I am the lord of the land, Of your youthful delight, of your health! Love me, For, without you, I am finished, I am nothing. 40 41 �Apres nos nuits d'amour robuste, J e sors de tes bras mieux trempe, Ta riche caresse est la juste Sans rien de ma chair de trompe, Ton amour repand la vaillance Dans tout mon etre, comme un vin, Et, seule, tu sais la science De me gonfler un coeur divin. Aime-moi, Car, sans toi, Rien ne puis, Rien ne suis. After our nights full of vigorous love, I emerge from your arms drenched and revived, Your precious caress is a righteous one, Without ever deceiving any of my flesh, Your love spreads strength and courage Throughout all my being, like wine, And you alone are trained in the art Of raising my heart to heaven. Love me, For, without you, I am finished, I am nothing. Qu'importe ton passe, ma belle, Et qu'importe, parbleu ! le mien : Je t'aime d'un amour fidele Et tu ne m'as fait que du bien. Unissons dans nos deux miseres Le pardon qu'on nous refusait, Et je t' etreins et tu me serres Et zut au monde qui jasait ! Aime-moi Car, sans toi, Rien ne puis, Rien ne suis. What does your past matter, my sweet, And who gives a damn about mine: I love you with a love true and faithful And you have only done me good. Let's join with our shared poverty The forgiveness they withhold from us And I'll embrace you and you'll hold me And to hell with all those people who talk! Love me, For, without you, I am finished, I am nothing. 42 43 �IV IV Or, malgre ta cruaute Affectee, et l'air tres faux De sale mechancete Dont, bete, tu te prevaux Now, in spite of your put-on cruelty, And your insincere air Of coarse hatred, which, You fool, you pride yourself on, J'aime ta lascivite ! I love your lewd and lustful indecency! Et quoiqu'en depit de tout Que me dicte ton souris Qui m'est, a mes dams et cout, And in spite of the fact that Your smile inspires in me An all too unnatural and forced aversion, It is to my detriment and injury. Rouge aux crocs blancs de sonris, It is my blood on the white teeth of your smile! Je t'aime comme l'on croit, Et mon desir fou qui croit, Tel un champignon des pres, S'erige ainsi que le Doigt I love you as one has faith, And my mad desire that grows As wild as a mushroom, Stands erect as a Finger D'un Terme la tout expres. Deliberately indicating our end. Done, malgre ma cruaute Affectee, et l'air tres faux De pire mechancete, Dont, bete, je me prevaux, So then, in spite of my put-on cruelty, And my insincere air Of the deepest hatred, which, Fool that I am, I pride myself on, Aime ma simplicite. Love my simplicity. Le trop factice degout 44 45 �XIV XIV Jene t'aime pas en toilette Et je deteste la voilette Qui t'obscurcit tes yeux, mes cieux, Et j'abomine la « tournure » Parodie et caricature, De tels tiens appas somptueux. I can't stand you all dressed-up And I despise that make-up That hides from me your eyes, my skies, And I abhor your skirts, long or short, Parodies and caricatures, Of such feminine charms as yours. Je suis hostile atoute robe Qui plus ou moins cache ou derobe Ces charmes, au fond les meilleurs : Ta gorge, mon plus cher delice, Tes epaules et la malice De tes mollets ensorceleurs. I have nothing but hate for every dress That more or less hides and detracts from Those charms, thoroughly the best: Your breasts, my dearest pleasure, Your shoulders and the mischievousness Of your soft enchanters. Fi d'une .femme trop bien mise ! Je te veux, ma belle, en chemise, - Voile aimable, obstacle badin, Nappe d'autel pour l'alme messe, Drapeau mignard vaincu sans cesse, Matin et soir, soir et matin. Damn a woman too much contrived! I want you, my beauty, in something simple, -Obliging veil, playful obstacle, Cloth on the altar of our reverent mass, Delicate flag surrendered again and again Morning and night, night and morning. 46 47 �xxv xxv Je fus mystique et je ne le suis plus (La femme m'aura repris tout entier), Non sans garder des respects absolus Pour l'ideal qu'il fallut renier. I used to be a mystic and I am no longer, For soon Woman will have captured me completely But I still keep an absolute respect ' For the ideal it was necessary to deny. Mais la femme m'a repris tout entier ! But Woman has captured me completely! J'allais priant le Dieu demon enfance (Aujourd'hui c'est toi qui m'as a genoux), J'etais plein de foi, de blanche esperance De charite sainte aux purs feux si doux. I used to pray to the God of my childhood, Now, it is you whom I kneel before. I was ~l .of faith, the purest hope, and pious charity, All spnngmg from an innocent flame so sweet. Mais aujourd'hui But now, you have me brought low, clasping at your legs! tu m'as ates genoux ! La femme, par toi, redevient LE ma1tre, Un maltre tout-puissant et tyrannique, Mais qu'insidieux! feignant de tout permettre Pour en arriver a tel but satanique . . . Once more, through you, Woman becomes the master A master omnipotent and tyrannical, ' But how insidious! feigning to permit everything In order to pursue such a satanic design . . . 0 le temps beni quand j'etais ce mystique ! Oh! Those blessed times when I was a mystic! 48 49 �Push-Pull N. Younes Man I Aschely Cone 50 Leona Marshall, the only female senior scientist selected by the Manhattan Project, was present at the final assembly of the machine. Sunday, July 16, 1945 saw it too, in the center of a wide valley called Alamogordo in the Oscura Mountains of New Mexico. The people sat with the pieces of the machine beneath a tent; this was in turn beneath a steel tower, and at the top of that, a shack. All of this in a kind of man-made conjunction with the noon sun overhead. At this gathering of men, pieces and the sun, the size of the group that had designed the machine had contracted to a dozen or so of the most important members. Those who, by virtue of their seniority, had no technical capacity to fill paced like nervous husbands in the heat. Inside the white tent an exquisite kind of reverse-surgery went on. Six men and one woman, dressed like doctors, put it together. The outermost layer of the machine was a soccer ball of metal hexagons and pentagons, screwed into one another to make a sphere. Attached to the inside of the metal plates were tapering hexagonal and pentagonal cones of tan and brown material that fit together to fill the volume of the sphere. As the cones approached the center of the incomplete sphere being made, they stopped, leaving a spherical cavity the size of a basketball. The cones were two different colors, tan towards the metal plates and, in sharp distinction, brown towards the cavity. The strangely shaped cones were high explosives, made rigid by virtue of a plastic that was itself an explosive. They were beautiful. To the touch they were smoother than eyeglasses, and to the shockwaves that would pass through their disintegration, they were lenses, focusing nearly all the pressure on the cavity at which they pointed. 51 �When the ball was half assembled, the cavity was filled with the core of the machine, but the layers of incomplete spheres continued. The first layer of the machi~e's c~nter was two halves of a uranium egg, each covered m a pcket of aluminum. The halves themselves enclosed a void, this time the size of an orange, the focus of the inward explosion. Leona Marshall recalls holding in her hands the plutonium that filled this void. She ~as reminded of her grandfather's rabbit hutch in the moonlight. She ~emembe.red slipping out of her bed as a ~hild ~d s~eaking 0':1ts1de, carefully avoiding the eruptmg na~ls m the kitchen floorboards. Under icy spring constellations she would hold the kits, marveling at their impossible warmth. In the diffuse summer light of the tent, her hands remembered, and were amazed. The two plutonium hemispheres were the ?1ost beautiful of all the pieces in the tent. They had been rnc~el-plated to save the ex,quisite machining of the metal from bemg eat~n by oxygen. But when the pieces had been plated, the rnck~l­ bearing liquid used had become trapped beneath the skin already laid down. When the pieces were exposed to normal pressure, ugly welts appeared. These w~re carefully ground off and the gaps in the skin bandaged with layers of ~old lea~. When they placed the plutonium inside the mach~e, their reflections in its mirrored surface were broken by islands of warm gold. The two pieces of plutonium were kept apart by a corrugated disc of gold. In the center of this disc, and in the center of the great sphere of pentagons and hexagons, nestled another sphere, again hollow. Within this innermost sphere was nothing but vacuum. The outside of this sphere was beryllium, the red in rubies. The next la~er. was gold leaf, and the innermost layer, polonium. Though it is a metal, and one of the densest, polonium rebels against what it .ought to b~. At room temperature it vaporizes. Clouds o.f its vapo~ will move against a current of air blown over it, and, with a tenacity bordering on will, it deposits outposts of crystals 52 closer and closer to the source of the air. Left to its own devices long enough, the entire sample will translocate to the _ ozzle itself, bearding it with a rime of gray needles. n The innermost sphere imprisoning the restless polonium was the initiator. When the entire machine was crushed, the beryllium would tear through the gold leaf separating it from the polonium and three metals would mix. After the core, with its layers of aluminum, uranium, nickel, gold, plutonium, beryllium, gold and polonium, was placed in the center of the ball of explosives, the outermost sphere was completed and the machine assembled. It was dusk, with storm clouds, when the whole thing was raised with a tackle and chain into the shack at the top of the tower. The six-foot wide ball was a mottled steel gray, broken by tan strips of masking tape. Luis Alvarez was the last man to be with the machine. He had climbed up the tower and into the shack to arm it . The surface of the machine was studded with plugs for the detonators, three to a panel. Alvarez mated cables to the plugs and the cables to the fuse box. As Alvarez tested the connections in the fuse box, lightning outside illuminated the insides of clouds. At 9 o'clock in the evening he climbed down, caught the last jeep ferry to the control bunker, and everything waited for the storm. By 4 o'clock the next morning, the meteorologist predicted a 50% chance that the 5:30 window would be clear. At 5: 15 the storm was passing, though still present, and permission was given to take the 5:30 window. At 5:29:40 Alan Bledsoe turned a pair of keys in a control panel and the machine behind the panel began a five-second countdown. At 5:29:45 a signal was sent from the command bunker down the five and a half mile cable connecting it to the fuse box. A relay switch in the box closed when it received the signal. The closed switch emptied capacitors into the thirtytwo cables connecting the fuse box with the panels on the machine. Each cable was exactly three meters long, forcing 53 �the electrons to arrive at their detonators in the same moment. After the electrons flooded down the wide cables, they were divided into ninety-six groups: three to a panel, one to a detonator. The detonators were no more than hair-thin wires. When the electrons reached the detonators, there were far too many of them to pass through the wires at once. The ninetysix detonator wires exploded. The shocks decomposed the molecules in the tan explosives surrounding the detonators. Turned into a gas, the exploded molecules raced away from each other, pressing on any surface that would resist their force. At the moment, however, the gas moved slowly compared to the wave of detonation spreading through the thirty-two cones of explosive. When the wave reached the brown section of the cones they set off a different explosive, whose shockwave moved slightly slower than the first. This, combined with the careful machining of the explosive cones, changed the shape of the shockwave from flat to spherical. It focused the wave into a different shape and brought enormous, uniform pressure on the center of the gas-filled machine. When the corrected shockwave reached the uranium hemispheres, the pressure imposed upon the metal instantly liquefied it, and a fluid twice as dense as lead carried the force of the explosives to the already-warm pieces of plutonium. 500 pounds of liquid uranium moving at nine and a half miles a second struck the two hemispheres of plutonium. In their last moment of integrity, before they, too, were liquefied, the hemispheres transmitted the force of the uranium to the corrugated gold disc, flattening it. In doing so, the hollow egg at the center of it all was broken open. Its contents mingled. What had once been a sphere of metal the size of an orange steadily decreased in size. When the plutonium became the size of a walnut, ·the mixing of the formerly hazelnut-sized initiator- now the size of a pea- began to have its effect. The alpha particles emitted by the polonium 54 were swallowed by the nuclei of the beryllium. The two protons in the air.ha particles transmuted the beryllium into carbon. The carbon made was unstable, and as soon as it formed, it ejected neutrons. Ninety-five million per second. In the one ten-millionth of a second the initiator had to provide neutrons, it released perhaps nine or ten. These were, however, enough. «» One neutron strikes a plutonium nucleus, and is admitted. The over-heavy nucleus gyrates wildly. It elongates into a dumbbell and snaps in two like a cell dividing. In the infinitesimally small instant when the nucleus divides, a full neutron's mass and charge is converted into light. This streams away from the cloud of chaotic electrons, frantic to rearrange themselves around the two, new nuclei . In the confusion, a pair of unwanted neutrons is ejected into the space between atoms. The two neutrons streak through space at a third the speed of light. It does not take long for the neutrons to find another nucleus to destroy: the force of the liquid uranium has decreased the distance between nuclei to an eighth of what it was, and it continues to do so. The pair of acceptances and destructions breaks apart two more plutonium atoms. The neutrons produced from these streak out to initiate the destructions of four more; then eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, a hundred and twenty-eight; and, in a billionth of a second, the number of neutrons has increased to 200,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo. By the time the eightieth generation of neutrons has been created, enough energy has been released and enough time has passed for effects to begin outside the machine . The light released by this strange process affects the core. The electrons belonging to the shattered plutonium atoms race after the daughter nuclei. If they manage to shroud the nuclei, their tenure there is short. The light drives away the 55 �r1 The enormous speed with which the fireball expands drives the air a~ay from it. A shell of compressed air twenty feet thick races away from the center of spheres, a clot of polonium and beryllium and gold. The floor of the desert becomes a fluid of dust and scrub and jackrabbits. The shell is forced into a circular wave as the sphere intersects the plain. The surface of the sphere of air ripples the passing light, making itself visible. It reaches up and catches birds. It crushes them in atmospheric fists, even as they join its extension. The light reaches the new moon, touches its black surface and returns to New Mexico. Had anyone been looking, they would have seen it made full. nuclei's companions and leaves the core. The race of matter to achieve the being of a point falls short and is rebuffed. · The collapse of the plutonium into itself slows, stops and is reversed by the torrential pressure of the light released. The newborn light winds its way through the soup of uranium and aluminum, boiling electrons from their nuclei. The explosives were, an eternity ago, beautifully crafted molecules cast into beautiful polygonal cones. The energy so deliberately poured into them has been spent in the compression. In the moments after the separation, their atoms find each other and, trying again, enter into simpler relationships. These are very brief. The light finds the simple gasses an atmosphere for the planet it has just destroyed. The pairs and triplets fly out of being as the light strikes their electrons. The loving order that had gathered the splintered explosives is driven from them by strife. Electrons are chased from their nuclei and the nuclei from their electrons. Chaos reigns in the layers of man's outermost sophistication. The light is at the cusp of worlds. < «< The city of Hiroshima unfurls itself to Thomas Ferebee inside the bombsight's eyepiece. He centers the sight's crosshair on a T-shaped bridge spanning two distributaries of the Ota River. The Aioi Bridge was chosen over the war factories because of its proximity to the Second Army headquarters. The two minute radio warning was already being broadcast in the form of a long beep. Ferebee signals to Paul Tibbets who tells the radio operator to send the continuous fifteen-second tone. The 26 year old bombardier with aspirations of major league baseball resigns control to the analog computer in his bombsight. The tone ends and the bomb is released. The arming plugs are pulled out by wires secured to the bomb bay scaffolding, and the bomb now controls itself. When the bomb is 1,900 feet from the ground, it is directly above the courtyard of the Shima Hospital. The fusing devices agree that the bomb is 1,900 feet from the ground, and the bomb sets itself off. Capacitors discharge. Detonators explode. The molten brass from the .45 shells that contained the detonator chemicals seethe into the high explosive. The explosives flash »« The panels of the machine's shell absorb a minute quantity of the light racing through them. As a kind of last testament, they rebroadcast it as a purple-green fluorescence. A similar cry is seen throughout the shack. The detonator wires shout green, the chain screams red. The light leaves the bomb, and enters the world. The air in the shack glows purple. Everything disintegrates. A sphere of white grows from the bomb, embracing the tower until it is suspended where the shack used to be. It has delicate white legs where the heat has boiled the tower's guy wires more quickly than the air. Two hundred feet of space are momentarily replaced by a second sun and the valley bathes in its premature dawn. The fireball touches the ground, making green glass of the sand. Its light leaves the earth. 57 56 I I I I 1 I I I II �-into gas. This glowing, acrid cloud feels an escape. A sixtypound slug of enriched uranium stands between it and its expansion. The uranium begins to move. Faster and faster, down the converted anti-aircraft barrel, the slug moves. A mile in three seconds. Three feet away lies a dead end. A fragile initiator egg waits at the other end of the cannon, in a cup of enriched uranium. There is an instant, a vanishingly brief instant, when the slug meets the initiator. Beryllium is a brittle metal. The slug, spitting radiation and kinetic heat, feels the thin crack. The initiator loses integrity. A mesh of fine lines is woven over its surface. These lines become bolder, become the edges of sharp fragments that break off and separate. Everything is flattened by the blunt slug. From this violence fly nine or ten neutrons. The new krypton and barium nuclei speed apart. The electron cloud of the dead uranium atom is cleaved, like an invisible hand swatting a cloud of gnats. Light and a pair of neutrons fly from the scene. The thick steel case glows. A cloud of purple air surrounds it. A white flash fills the skies above the city. >»> For a span of time un-glimpsed even by the mind, a mathematical form receives incarnation. Acres of equations braided into a thing, the concentration of a million dry desert hours. A perfection and a supreme beauty inhabit the steel shell. But the beauty is like a statue--cold, austere. The instant passes. No God intervenes with pity on the sculptor to make the statue real. The thought of a nation was more and more unfolding its white wings over a Japanese city. Everything falls to earth. «« 58 I I "Just as I looked up at the sky, there was a flash of white light and the green in. the plants looked in that light like the color of dry leaves." "Father Kopp was standing in front of the nunnery ready to go home. All of a sudden he became aware of the light, felt that wave of heat, and a large blister formed on his hand." "Ah, that instant! I felt as though I had been struck on the back with something like a big hammer, and thrown into boiling oil." "The vicinity was in pitch darkness; from the depths of the glow, bright red flames rise crackling, and spread moment by moment. The faces of my friends who just before were working energetically are now burned and blistered their ' clothes torn to rags; to what shall I liken their trembling appearance as they stagger about? Our teacher is holding her students close like a mother hen protecting her chicks, and like baby chicks paralyzed with terror, the students were thrusting their heads under her arms." "That boy had been in a room at the edge of the river, looking out at the river when it came, and in that instant as the house fell apart he was blown from the end of the room across the road on the river embankment and landed on the street below it. In that distance he passed through a couple of windows inside the house and his body was stuck full of all the glass it could hold. That is why he was completely covered with blood like that." "I just could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant . . . I thought it might have been something that had nothing to do with the war, the collapse of the earth that it is said would take place at the end of the world." "When I opened my eyes after being blown at least eight yards, it was dark as though I had come up against a blackpainted fence. After that, as if thin paper was being peeled off one piece at a time, it gradually began to grow brighter. The first thing that my eyes lighted upon then was the flat stretch of land with only dust clouds rising from it. Everything had 59 I r I II I �,..... crumbled away in that one moment; and changed into streets of rubble, street after street of ruins." "Through the house we went- running, stumbling, falling, and then running again until in headlong flight we tripped over something and fell sprawling into the street. Getting to my feet, I discovered that I had tripped over a man's head. 'Excuse me! Excuse me, please!' I cried hysterically." "They all had skin blackened by burns . ... They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from the front or back." "The rescue party brought my mother home. Her face was larger than usual. The skin of both her hands was hanging loose as if it were rubber gloves." "Making their way among them are three high school girls who looked as though they were from our school; their faces and everything were completely burned and they held their arms out in front of their chests like kangaroos with only their hands pointed downward; from their whole bodies something like thin paper is dangling- it is trailing behind them like the unburned remnants of their puttees, they stagger exactly like sleepwalkers." "There were lots of naked people who were so badly burned that the skin of their whole bodies was hanging from their bodies like wet rags." "The skin of their arms is peeled off and dangling from their fingertips, and they go walking silently, hanging their arms before them." "Men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking into the river. All these become corpses and their bodies are carried by the current towards the sea." "People came fleeing from the nearby streets. One after another they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off some of them and was hanging from their hands 60 and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly te~l where their eyes and mouths were." "The child making a suffering, groaning sound, his burned face swollen up balloon-like and jerking as he wanders among the fires. The old man, the skin of his face and body peeling off like a potato skin, mumbling prayers while he flees with faltering steps." "Those dreadful streets. The fires were burning. There was a strange smell all over. I had a terrible lonely feeling that everybody else in the world was dead and only I was still alive." "We saw a soldier floating in the river with his stomach all swollen. In desperation, he must have jumped into the river to escape from the sea of fire ." "I was determined not to escape without my mother. But the flames were steadily spreading and my clothes were already on fire and I couldn't stand it any longer. So, screaming 'Mommy, Mommy!' I ran wildly into the middle of the flames. No matter how far I went it was a sea of fire all around and there was no way to escape." "The sky was like twilight. Pieces of paper and cloth were caught on the electric wires. While we were going along the embankment, a muddy rain that was dark and chilly began to fall. Around the houses I noticed automobiles and soccer balls, and all sorts of household stuff that had been tossed out ' but there was no one who stopped to pick up a thing." "A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth was wandering around in the heavy, black rain. She was heading toward the northern area crying for help." "There were a lot of people who were burned to death, and among them were some who were burned to a cinder while they were standing up." "I walked past Hiroshima station ... and saw people with their bowels and brains coming out. . . . I saw an old lady carrying a suckling infant in her arms." 61 �,...... "Bloated corpses were drifting in the seven rivers, smashing cruelly into bits the little girl, the peculiar odor of burning human flesh rose everywhere." "I had to cross the river to reach the station. As I came to the river and went out down the bank to the water, I found that the stream was filled with dead bodies. I started to cross· by, crawling over the corpses on my hands and knees. I got about a third of the way across, a dead body began to sink under my weight and I went into the water, wetting my burned skin. It pained severely. I could go no farther, there was a break in the bridge of corpses, so I turned back to the shore." "I was walking among dead people. It was like hell. The sight of a running horse burning was very striking." Cain, Late Summer Then we had knelt together, when winter came And water froze, but moved below the ice. Below our eyes, the water plants had swung, Like mute paintbrushes stirring invisible paint, While sand-grains had slid down, one by one, Like loosened leaves falling from the weight Of a small, stopping rain. Then we had lain, In the low eye of the sun. Now I have come To this window. The National Mall, its rows of trees Unfurl here in the heavy air of summer. Tourists Stroll below, pigeons swirl, buildings loom Like crowded portraits hung beneath the sky. I waver in the heat, I see a land of wandering, I see the loosened dust that rises high Until it mixes with the clouds, uncurls like buds In April, and settles on each path and tree. And beyond the paths and trees extends The restless empty surface of the sea. In September, I'll gather the seedpods Of the ash flowers that bloomed this summer. Today, I'm waiting, with rustling stems that wait, Reaching their roots into the dust and mud, For rain to come and turn the dust to living blood. - Willis K. McCumber 62 63 �r How you are fallen from heaven, O Shining ·One, son of Dawn! -Isaiah 14:12 Emily Tordo The flute darkens my eyes, my hair extends its reach I Zack Hay The picture La Rochefoucauld presents to us of self-love, which he defines in part as "the love of oneself, and of all things with regards to oneself' (Maxim 563),1 is so vivid as to have a being all its own. Throughout his maxims on self-love there are myriad connections to be drawn between the character of self-love and the character of Satan in Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost. 2 Satan's character, as described by Milton, is presented in such a way as to make him terribly compelling and persuasive, even more so than the Son of God. His character and his position as one of the higher angels make his transformation into the leader of the rebel angels and his subsequent fall all the more interesting. One is confronted with the questions of how one of God's angels could fall and why, once fallen, he would choose to remain fallen, making a "Heaven of Hell" (1.255). This trait- the flaw of self-love-which dooms him to eventual destruction, is a ruin of his own devising; a fitting end for one who claims to be "self-begot" (5.860) . Though many of the satanic elements of the poem display aspects of self-love as La Rochefoucauld describes it, the foremost of these is Satan himself, their progenitor, who of all the characters present at the birth of the world is the one most endowed with self-love. Satan's self-love is typified by the fact that he has turned away from God, the "almighty Father" 1. Frarn;:ois de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et Reflexions D i-verses (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2005). All passages from La Rochefoucauld's Maxims are my own translations. Their numbering coincides with that of the original French. 2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005). Text references are to book and line number. 64 65 �(3 .56), and instead indulges himself with his own inwar~ musings, putting the love of himself above the love of his creator. Here it is apparent that one who has self-love has no interest in the things outside of the self, except as they can serve it- nothing is to be loved for its own merit, only for the advantage it provides to the one who is possessed of self-love. La Rochefoucauld describes this by analogy to a bee: "It is never still outside of the self, and only settles on subjects which are foreign to it, as a bee does on a flower, in order to glean from it what is its own" (Maxim 563). In turning his regard away from God and instead turning it inward toward himself, Satan is opposing the created order, which consists of obedience to God's will. The origins of self-love in Satan, however, are still a mystery: what is the cause of his fatal shift? To answer ~s question, one must look to the circumstances that provoke his fall from grace. In Book Five we learn from Raphael that Satan "could not bear/ Through pride that sight [of the Son proclaimed Messiah] and thought himself impaired" (5.664- 5.665). At the onset of the poem, the epic voice gives us another account of this pride, saying that "[Satan's] pride / Had cast him out from Heav'n with all his host / Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring / To set himself in glory 'bove his peers" (1.36- 39). In Satan's own words, it was his "sense of injured merit" (1.98) and his "pride and worse ambition" (4.40) that caused him to oppose God and ultimately fall. Self-love appears to have been ever present- to believe oneself to be "impaired" or "injured," one must first have a sense of one's own position and esteem, and one who esteems himself must surely be in possession of self-love. Yet these egotistical thoughts do not seem to be a problem for Satan until God elevates the Son; it is only after God has named the Son "Messiah, King Anointed" (5.665), and set him above all the angels, that Satan realizes how much this rankles. With the ascension of the Son, Satan's budding self-love blinds him to the true state of affairs: "in jealousy there is more self-love than love" (Maxim 324). Owing to his 66 jealousy he is unable to realize that the acknowledgement of the worth of another, namely that of the Son, does not in any way diminish his own- the Son's merit offends his sense of self worth. His eyes are now, as La Rochefoucauld puts it, "blind for only themselves" (Maxim 563). This proves to be the first step towards his fall: he is unable to see self-love encroaching upon him. However, we have not yet answered the question of what the origin of this all-encompassing selflove is, or how it could possibly rear its ugly head in one of God's creations. If we are to say that self-love is ever present (in as much as this seems to be necessary for it to exist at all), how then are we to understand the nature of Satan's fall? From what state could he fall so terribly if not one of innocence? Given that Satan must have been without self-love before the elevation of the Son, the only way in which we can understand how Satan engendered these feelings within himself is if the ability to turn inwards, toward oneself, already existed within him . Given that God endowed both men and angels equally with the ability either to withstand or fall into sin, it would appear that the potential for self-love's existence is encompassed within the notion of free will- the capacity to choose the love of God over the love of self. God explains this to the Son in Book Three: He [Man] had of Me All he could have. I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood though free to fall. Such I created all th' ethereal pow'rs And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed: Freely they stood who stood and fell who fell. (3.97- 102) Thus, free will allows for the possibility that an angel could, as if out of nothing, conjure up these detrimental passions of pride, envy and jealousy, spurred on by self-love. Milton has God reiterate this crucial point to Raphael, as H e imparts to 67 �him his task of conversing with Adam in order to "advise him on his happy state." God says: "Happiness in his pow'r left free to will, / Left to his own free will, his will though free I Yet mutable" (5.234, 235- 237). As we have just seen, the free will of both Man and Angel is clearly a crucial part of the created order to God, de~pite the dangers inherent in such freedom (such as the shift from devotion to God to self-love). And yet why is this? It seems that for God the devotions of subjects endowed with free will carry more weight and have a greater worth than the devotions of subjects devoid of will, as indicated by God's words to the Son in Book Three: Not free, what proof could they have giv'n sincere Of true allegiance, constant faith or love What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid I else must change Their nature and revoke the high decree, Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained Their freedom: they themselves ordained their Fall. (3.103- 104, 106- 107, 125- 128) Here it can clearly be seen that, without free will, the c "allegiance," "constant iai·th ," "I ove " an d " o bed"ie_nee" offered up to God by his subjects are empty and ~ev01d of meaning. Yet this very free will lays one open to the mfluences of self-love and the onslaught of numerous passions. Very early on we see Satan overcome by his pa_ssions and sel~- love, in a state of overwhelming contention with God. In his first speech after being "[h)urled headlong" from the "ethereal sky" ( 1.45) of Heaven, Milton has Satan use obscure ~d befuddling speech to show that, in a state of self-love, passion dominates over reason. We see this same effect of self-love later upon Adam and Eve's eating of the fruit. Their "high passions- anger, hate, / 68 Mistrust, suspicion, discord" (9.1123- 1124) begin to rise, they lose contro! of reason, and the passions dominate, driven by self-love: For Understanding ruled not and the Will Heard not her lore, both in subjection now To sensual Appetite who from beneath Usurping over sov'reign Reason claimed Superior sway. . . . (9 .1127- 1131) To further this link between self-love and the passions, we turn to La Rochefoucauld's Maxim 531: "The passions are merely the various whims of self-love." Without self-love there would be no passions, no sin, and no turning away from God; and yet, we are right back at the question of how selflove comes to be in the first place. It is apparent that in the same way self-love brings about the passions, so free will brings about self-love. As we have seen, this very faculty of free will, which allows one to fully devote oneself to God, goes hand in hand with an equal capacity to fall freely into sin. Furthermore, it is in this very function of one's free will- namely, that of the free offering of devotion to God- that Satan perceives an unwanted subjugation: if out of gratitude for one's creation one must glorify one's creator, then it is as if one were trapped, "still paying! still to owe!" (4 .53 ), for an eternity. In his poignant soliloquy to the Sun where he contemplates his "servitude" (4.32- 113), Satan does not seem to realize that the main alternative is equally, if not more so, a slavery. God says: "I formed them free and free they must remain / Till they enthrall themselves" ( 3 .124- 125). The "enthralling" referred to in this passage can be taken to be that of self-love, the servitude to oneself In shifting from devotion to one's creator to devotion to oneself, Satan is merely exchanging one yoke for another- the dubious yoke of God for that of selflove. As we have seen, God created the natures of both Man and Angel such that He "ordained / Their freedom" and 69 �"they themselves ordained their Fall" (3.127-128), eac~ able, in thought or in deed, to turn from God and op~ose him. . The very instant in which Satan conceives of his opposition to God is also the instant in which he ~nge~ders his self-love. It is in this moment that his thoughts give nse to sin: he does not even have to take up arms and fight the Heavenly Father- just thinking of it is enough. In a ~ama?c parallel to the coming into being of the concept of ~m ':"1th the occurrence of a sinful thought, we see the commg mto being of a bodily Sin. She is sin incarnate, and springs, fully grown, from Satan's head: In Heav'n when at th' assembly and in sight Of all the seraphim with thee combined In bold conspiracy ' gainst Heaven's King? All on a sudden miserable pain Surprised thee: dim thine eyes and dizzy swum In darkness while thy head flames think and fast Threw forth till on the left side op'ning wide, Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright (Then shining Heav'nly fair) a goddess armed Out of thy head I sprung! Amazement seized All th' host of Heav'n. Back they recoiled afraid At first and called me "Sin" ... (2.749- 760) With the advent of sin we are confronted with numerous representations of unnatural events, underlining the depraved and immoral nature of Satan's actions. The first of these events occur when Sin is engendered by a thought and is "born," fully grown, from Satan's head. Though in the course of this narrative we have as yet no examples of what a natural birth might be (given that God is the only creator), this event seems to the reader bizarre, a gross, twisted counterpart to the Greek myth in which Athena, goddess of wisdom, sp~~gs from the head of Zeus. This perverted "birth" has a densive note as well, when one takes into account Milton's early recital of the infernal hosts in Book One. It is there we learn that, for Milton, the Greek gods (or any of the pagan gods for that matter) are.simply the fallen angels renamed, "devils ... adore[d] for deities!" (1.373). While for the "author" of the Greek myths the peculiar birth of Athena is not viewed with any dismay, Milton fully anticipates his readers to be utterly repulsed by the correspondent birth of Sin. To multiply the horrors already attendant on such an unnatural birth, Satan is possessed with a concupiscent desire for his daughter. The resultant rape horrifies and repulses the reader; the sexual concourse between father and daughter follows the aberrant pattern of Sin's birth in that it is wholly unnatural. If we were to follow the trend of our earlier analogy between the natural and unnatural in Paradise Lost and the Greeks myths, we would note that while incest is rampant within the myths of the Greek canon, it clearly has no part in Milton's religious mythology. The unnaturalness of the relations between Sin and Satan stems from the fact that not only is this a depiction of an incestuous affair, but it is furthermore one composed of selflove. We see how the attraction Satan feels for his daughter is no more than the fascination he feels for himself as a result of self-love: But familiar grown I pleased and with attractive graces won The most averse (thee chiefly) who full oft Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing. (2.761- 764) After the first moment where the hosts recoil in fear, they are won over by Sin's "attractive graces,'' Satan in particular because he sees within her the image of himself- as if he were looking in a mirror. Similarly, La Rochefoucauld says of selflove: "One could most likely conclude that it is by itself that its desires are kindled, rather than by the beauty and merit of its objects" (Maxim 563). It is of interest to note that the Sin in the tale recounted above does not, as yet, have a personality; in contrast to the fully realized character of the Sin who 71 70 �is telling the tale, she is more an extension of Satan than she is her own character. She is of him, his sinful thought incarnate; therefore, the act of her rape by Satan is the s_ame as his looking inwards; self-love and love of one who ts as oneself, are equivalent. Here we see Satan in the first unconscious act of "recreating" himself. He is patently not satisfi~d . with the existence God granted him (as evidenced by his Jealousy of the Son), and so he reaches higher. He is attempting. to bring into being something wholly his own for which he will not be beholden to God in any way. As he does not have the same powers of creation with which God has e?dowed the Son, this process of remaking himself by way of his thought and deeds is the only act of personal creation he is allowed. Though he is not able to be his own creator as he would like others to believe (recall his claim of being "self-begot, self-raised" [5 .861]), he can be his own re-creator. Self-love and .resultant Sin two acts of his own creation, are the embodiment of Sat~'s newly realized feelings toward God; these feelings are the first acts of his new "self." The unholy union of Sin and Satan later results in t~e birth of Death, "Hell-born" (2 .687), who in turn follows m the footsteps of his father and rapes his mother. Here we see that the description of self-love, as portrayed by La Rochefoucauld, is similar in many respects to the description Milton provides us with of Death himself: The other shape (If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either): black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as Hell And shook that dreadful dart. . . . (2 .666- 671) The Death presented here is simply another expression of Satan's new self. Of self-love, we learn that "one cannot 72 sound the depths nor pierce the shadows of its abysses" (Maxim 563). The character of Death is described as dark and amorphous, like the abyss of self-love, where "it is concealed from even the most perceptive eyes," and where "it is often invisible even unto itself" (Maxim 563). This parallel between Death and the self-love that possesses Satan is another way of underlining the bizarre nature of Satan's personal recreation. As we see, it is by no means a creation of the same sort as the original creation of the angels, or even the creation of Man and Paradise. From what we now know of self-love, it seems that it is everywhere, constantly being reinforced by every action to the point where it becomes all encompassing: "It exists in all states of life and in all conditions- it lives everywhere, and it lives on everything, it lives on nothing" (Maxim 563). Along with his conceiving of Sin and Death, two of Man's worst scourges, Satan has engendered self-love, which will "torment him in every act of his life" (Maxim 509). Similar to Satan's fathering of Sin and Death, La Rochefoucauld says of self-love: This is where [in the shadows of its abysses] it conceives, nourishes, and breeds- without knowinga great number of affections and hates; it forms some so monstrous that when it brings them to light it either fails to recognize them or cannot admit of them as its own. (Maxim 563) As he attempts to leave through the gates of Hell on the way to Eden, Satan does not recognize his children, these "affections and hates . . . so monstrous," as his own. He says: "I know thee not nor ever saw till now / Sight more detestable than him and thee" (2.744- 745). As illustrated earlier, both Sin and Death represent in body the worst of Satan's inner thoughts and feelings. We see Satan at first repulsed by the appearance of this unholy duo, this bodily reflection of his self; however, he does not even recognize them as such, in contrast to the moment of Sin's birth, when he sees that in her he is his "perfect image viewing" (2 .764) . And yet, as 73 �....... soon as he realizes who they are arid the power they hold to allow him through the gates of Hell into the chaos separating Hell from Eden, God's newly created paradise, his revulsion quickly changes to interest. He refers to them as "[ d].ear Daughter" (2.817) and "my fair son" (2.818) and promises them free reign on earth if they will open the gates of Hellwhich they do. With Sin and Death loose in the world, the descendants of Adam and Eve are first absorbed by self-love and sin and then devoured by death. Later, in a dramatic reversal, we learn that the first two beings engendered by Satan will recoil back on him and their "stings" will be fixed in his head, at which point the Son will banish them all to Hell for eternity (Book Ten). Now there are beings of a perverted nature, which are not directly created by God, and are made possible through Satan's exercising of his free will. Michael says: Author of evil unknown till thy revolt, Unnamed in Heav'n, now plenteous, as thou seest: These acts of hateful strife, hateful to all Though heaviest by just measure on thyself And thy adherents. How hast thou disturbed Heav'n's blessed peace and into nature brought Misery uncreated till the crime Of thy rebellion! ... (6 .262- 269) Through the darkness of his thoughts and deeds, Satan brings into being both Sin and Death. As each is born there is an outcry of "Sin" and "Death" from those who are witn~ss . This spontaneous reaction to name their inner na~re is a terrible parody of the account we are given by A~am, m Boo~ Eight, of his more ordered and thoughtful naming of God s creations. Throughout the narrative we see, in the events that contain the actions of his self-love, Satan's deeds foreshadow events that occur later in the proper mariner. Everything he does is a perversion of all that is right and good; his actions display a distorted version of the way God intended things to be. We as readers are privileged in our ability to note that what Satan doe~ first and perversely, Adam, God's lesser creation, does second and better, or perhaps more accurately, properly. The moment of self-love in which his thoughts turn " [i Jn bold conspiracy 'gainst Heaven's King" (2.751) is, as we have seen, the moment of Satan's falls from Grace. Satan's fall, therefore, is foremost an internal one and not a physical fall from Heaven; this latter event is an external playing out of the internal step already taken. We now understand the fall of Satan as having two parts- the first a fall in thought and the second a fall in body. This is a parallel construction to that of the fall of man, which also can be seen as having two parts: Man falls first with the eating of the fruit, and secondly when cast out of Eden. In addition to the two main parts of Satan's fall we see another distinction demarcated by his physical changes. First we see Satan fallen in mind, then fallen in body, and finally his last change is a physical shift into the form of "[t]h' infernal Serpent" (1.34), by which Milton first names him in Book One. It is this last and final stage of his fall from which there can be no return. Before his physical fall Satan still maintains the outward appearance of an angelic nature, as Abdiel notices: "O Heav'n! That such resemblance of the Highest / Should yet remain where faith and fealty/ Remain not!" (6.114- 116). Here we see the angels stunned and outraged because they realize that his angelic exterior but thinly covers his inward corruption. The angelic reaction illustrates the fact that there is something inherently wrong with such a disparity between one's seeming and one's being. We then see Satan after he is cast out of Heaven, in a state where his glory and that of his cohorts are dimmed, tarnished with disobedience: "Yet faithful how they stood, / Their glory withered" (1.611- 612). For Satan, this diminution of his angelic nature seems to be the hardest for him to bear. We see a Satan who, "darkened so, yet shone" (1.398), stands magnificent in all his fallen glory, weeping at the sight of the fallen hosts: 75 74 �"Thrice he assayed and thrice, in spite of scorn, / Tears such as angels weep burst forth" (1.619- 20). · In Book One, which begins chronologically after Satan's expulsion from Heaven, when we first see Satan, he is waking on the burning lake. He laments to Beelzebub: ([B]ut 0 how fall'n! how changed From him who in the happy realms of light Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads, though bright!) ... (1.84- 87) Later, as he wakes his followers, they are "[ u ]nder amazement of their hideous change" (1.313). Perhaps a more telling recital of Satan's change from "archangel" to "archangel ruined" ( 1.593) is when he is discovered by Zephon and Ithuriel in the Garden of Eden, and they do not recognize him: Know ye not then, said Satan, filled with scorn, Know ye not me? Ye knew me once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar. Not to know me argues yourselves unknown. (4.827- 830) His pure nature and appearance have been perverted; though he is still recognizable insofar as he is known as one of the rebel angels escaped, he is not recognizable as himself. The fact that he retains the outward appearance of his angelic nature makes it all the more difficult to understand his actions. Satan's last and final change occurs when he takes the form of a serpent to tempt Eve. At this point in the narrative, he has already decided to forgo repentance and contrition and instead to turn evil into his good. Here he goes through many changes, at last turning into "[a] monstrous serpent on his belly prone" (10 .514). This form gives name to the title by which we first hear of him in Book One, when Milton in the epic voice asks the question: "Who first seduced them to that 76 foul revolt?" to which he answers: "Th' infernal Serpent" (~ . 33-3~). Wh~n at last ~ata~ :eturns to Hell expecting to give a vtetory speech to his mm1ons, he instead finds himself caught by his own cunning: his troops greet his return with a cacophony o~ hisses and, along with Satan himself, make their final descent mto darkness by transforming into serpents. Like the transformations of self-love, Satan's transformations "surpass [those] of metamorphosis" (Maxim 563). Overall, t?e physical changes that Satan undergoes are consonant with the movement in the analogies in La Rochefoucauld's Maxim 563. At the onset of this maxim on self-love? we are presented with the image of self-love as a bee-a light, natural portrayal of self"love at work outside the self. In the second paragraph of the maxim we leave the beautiful image of the bee flitting from flowe; to flower and desce~d to the inter~al and dark imagery of an abyss. Here there is a parallel shift between the Satan we see in Heaven and the Satan who descends to the abyss of Hell. In each of these paragraphs, _there is a parallel juxtaposition of the images and concepts of rught and darkness with a coming to light and ~ ari~ing. At ~e end of each of these paragraphs, we have a reJectton of this illumination; once things have come to the surface, they are either rejected as out of hand or are denied or. misunderstood, just as Satan chooses to reject God and all ~ngs goo?. It is this rejection of all that is good, followed by his embracmg, by way of self-love, all that is evil, that spurs his resolve to make a "Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven" (1.255 ), the decision that ultimately causes him to fall and stay fallen. . The Satan we are first presented with appears to be brash with pride on thinking of how he has opposed God; his selflove has so enthralled him that the possibility of repentance does not even enter into his thoughts. Despite being banished to Hell, he acts as if there is yet hope of a successful opposition. He claims: 77 �......... A mind not to be changed by place or time! The mind is its own place and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same And what I should be: all but less than He Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free .... (1.253- 259) Here again we see Satan disputing the freedom he had in Heaven and claiming it to be a subjugation, stating that only in Hell shall all be free. And yet, after the resolution has been made to confound God's plan, we see a different picture of Satan--one in which he is contemplating repentance. He muses, "Is there no place / Left for repentance, none for pardon left?" (4. 79- 80). Similarly to the scene in Bo?k One where_ v:,e see Sata~ "[v ]aunting aloud but racked with deep despalr ( 1.126)_, 1t seems that he is once again full of misgivings, doubtmg himself. He then goes on to reject these feelings of doubt and realizes, or perhaps fools himself into thinking, that if he were to repent it would be "feigned" (4 .96 ), and therefore: Ease would recant Vows made in pain as violent and void (For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep) Which would but lead me to worse relapse And heavier fall. . . . ...... .... So farewell hope and with hope farewell fear! Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good . ... (4.96- 101, 108-110) Satan's claim that if he were to repent, the falsity of that repentance would cause him to fall again (this time worse, because instead of simply falling from God's Grace as before, he would betray God's forgiveness as well) seems peculiar, given that he w.as willing and even eager to oppose God in the first place. Despite his curious concern with a second fall from grace, Satan resolves to make evil his good and to pursue his infernal path to damnation and beyond. Once the fallen angels, upon making the resolution not to fight by force of arms, decide what they will do, they proclaim: To do aught good will ever be our task But ever to do ill our sole delight As being contrary to His high will Whom we resist. If then His providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good Our labor must be to pervert that end And out of good still to find means of evil, Which ofttimes may succeed so as perhaps Shall grieve Him, if I fail not, and disturb His inmost counsels from their destined aim. (1.159- 168) With the fallen angels firmly set on this course of action, we learn of Satan's desires to fight God by confounding the prophecy concerning Paradise and destroying the happiness of Man. Satan seems to realize that by destroying Adam and Eve's innocence he will harm God even more than he could in a direct offense that he could not win. In Paradise, Satan is immediately distrusting of the fact that Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat of the tree. He says, "Knowledge forbidden ? / Suspicious, reasonless" (4.515- 516), as ifhe were seeking out any hint of slavery or imposition to utilize in his temptation. Satan targets Eve, as she is susceptible to passions and therefore most likely to be overruled by his faulty logic. Confusing her in the guise of a serpent, he makes her think that if a serpent may be given speech by eating the fruit, then she, who already has speech, would gain even greater intelligence, placing her above Adam. This we clearly see to be wrong, yet still she eats the fruit and 79 78 �then convinces Adam to do the same, dooming their chances at immortal happiness. However, unlike Satan, they are both able to repent and receive forgiveness for their transgressions. The reason for this is that for each of them the impetus to trespass comes from without: for Adam, from Eve, and for Eve, from the serpent. For Satan, the pride and self-love that leads to his fall comes from within, engendered by him, as he was not. This relation of the serpent to Eve and Eve to Adam is a perversion of God's order, of "[h]e for God only, she for God in him" (4 .299); instead we have: she for serpent, he for serpent in her. In speaking to the Son, God states: "The first sort by their own suggestion fell/ Self-tempted, self-depraved. Man falls deceived / By th' other first: Man therefore shall find grace,/ The other none" (3.129- 132). For this reason there is forgiveness for Man but not for Satan. While fallen Man will retain a paradise within, which is ultimately more important than the physical paradise lost, Satan is left with nothing but a hell, inside and out. Returning to the question of why Satan fell, it seems that we may clearly lay blame on self-love, the terrible perversion that caused him to fall from his intended place in Heaven. In much the same way, Man's fall is also a perversion of the true state for which he was intended- that is, to live in Eden and eventually to ascend and take the places of the fallen angels. Given our position as beings born of original sin, one may then ask if we see in man's own fallen glory a reflection not only of Adam and Eve, but of Satan as well. Though it is not explicitly stated, La Rochefoucauld hints at a belief that all men have self-love all the time, in varying degrees. The abyss of self-love is the darkest corner of our hearts, where we dread to look for fear of what we might find; in this we see the legacy of the first fall: Man's self-love. In Maxim 509, La Rochefoucauld writes, "To punish man for original sin, God has let him turn his self-love into a god to torment him in every act of his life." Though we will forever be "tormented" by self-love, our salvation seems to stand on the fact that we 80 can recognize the self love within us, whereas Satan cannot. 81 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 81 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hogan, Sarah (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2007 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2007. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 2007 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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JOHN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY :!=lrn~tm~~ . 2006 ��ENERGEIA STAFF Copy of a Detail . from Masolino :S Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha (Brancacci Cha('el, Florence, 1425 ) ... ............................. front cover Michael "Mac" Ward ~~cli~fs~~:~· ................................................ inside front cover Winch Parts .... .................. ............ ...... . .................................. 4 Alex Lorman Creation ................................................................................ 5 Caroline Barry Editor: Junior Editor: Assistant Editors: Faculty Advisor: Alexis Nemer Sarah Hogan Clare Cortright Matt Mangold Kris Klotz Rebecca Green Christian Holland Draw inf! for Freshman Laboratory ................................................. 8 KristinaTiimitrijevic Questioning Moses: An Essay on Book XI ofAugustine :S Confessions .................................. 9 Chelsea Batten Malherbe :S Consolation to Mr. du Perier on the Death of his Daughter a verse translation .................................................. ............ ......... 24 Peter Kalkavage Alleyway..................................................................................... .32 Kevm Grizzard The Word and the Image: ~~i~:Waa;~~g Straightness .................. ............ ...... .. ......... .. .. ....... .33 Layout and Design: Kris Klotz Clare Cortright Matt Mangold Alexis Nemer Drawing for Freshman Laboratory ............. ... ........... ...... .......... . 68 Kristina Dimitrijevic i~:'a1hawifs~V: ···································· ································ 69 Hucks Last Day ........................................................................ .. 70 Christopher Colby Thanks to: Chris Colby and the St. John's College Print Shop A Current Past ..................................................................... ...... 79 Katrina Gersie Belinda Cortright Drawing/or Freshman Laboratory .......................... .................. . 80 Kristina Dimitrijevic Conversation and Community: On the Phaedo .......................................................................... 81 John Verdi Self-portrait with Camera ...................................... inside back cover Rachel Bartgis �Creation Caroline Barry Winch Parts A lex Lorman 4 There is something to be said for time apart, though this girl is too young to say it. If asked, she might say that she hates her brother. He always runs through her sand castles and so do the other children on the beach after she 's spent hours working on them . Importantly, sand castles only stay up when the sand is damp, and she wants to trace patterns with shells on them. The space under the lifeguard stand, dark and cool, is like a fort; the sand stays damp and doesn't itch her legs. It is as close to being in a room as she can find here. At that age, five or maybe older, the idea of being alone, of being separate as a goal unto itself doesn 't occur to her once. Her father says that his daughter thinks concretely but since she is always skinning her knees on concrete she doesn ' t like how that sounds. So the girl says she thinks rocks : smooth and tough and all different and just what they look like and nothing else. She crawls under the lifeguard stand when the lifeguard is looking away from her. He watches the women in bathing suits, and she can pick out, easily, which will make him look. When one of them walks by, or swims (though she notices they don't swim much) the girl runs underneath. She is glad she is small enough to avoid being noticed. She sits for a moment. She looks at her brother and father in the ocean, not swimming, as they don 't, but trying to jump over each wave without getting their heads wet. Her father has to lift her brother up sometimes. Her brother is starting not to let him do that. She jumps with them on some days, except she likes getting wet. She thinks about going underneath the waves, holding her breath, letting them carry her back to shore on her back. She thinks about the words "back to shore on my back" and likes them, since they almost rhyme and the "sh" sound is her favorite She recognizes the arms that are lifting her up, and the voice too. The face is blurred. 5 �Energeia sound . As she gathers sand together, building it up into walls and mounds, she says, softly "back to shore on my back, back to shore on my back, back to shore shore shore on my back, back to shore on my back." The castle is a good one, since the sand is so good today. The tide is out, but the beach is damp enough for her bridges to stand up without waves coming close to overturn them. "Back to," she sings, " back, back, back.'' In the last few days she has perfected a system of making bridges by molding them slowly, carefully over her foot, before pulling it away as they dried . She sings as she does this too"shore, shore, shore on my. " Bridges are her favorite, and now she can make them. She wishes she could make a castle with only bridges but doesn 't want to destroy the castleness of the thing. There are connections between all the towers and smaller buildings, going in circles around each other. Her castle is like a web. Each circle has circles. The tide is coming in and she looks at where her mother is reading a thick book on a blue beach chair far behind her. Her mother likes to know where they are all the time. She likes to know where her mother is too. She looks at her castle thinking there should be more space under here so she can make it as big as she wants . She wants to make a city, or at least a town . She could make a village if she had enough time to do it. That 's the real problem, time. Her parents don 't like being on the beach late into the afternoon. If only ... " Hey, kid ." No. " You mind moving, we need to move this thing." A life guard who 's too close, and all she can see is his nose painted white, and why do they do that anyway, and his hair is white blond, and he's too close, and she just finished making it, and her legs are starting to itch even here, and she didn 't do anything, and he 's standing on her bridge, the biggest one, the one that took longest, just standing on it, crushing it, for no reason, and she spent hours on that bridge, it was perfect. She 's crying and hates that she is, but can't stop it. She cries and cries. Her bridge! Her best bridge! He had no reason to do it! 6 BARRY Everything's wet. " What happened? What's wrong?" She always hates when she's asked this. Nothing's wrong with her. But her poor, poor bridge! She sees where his foot was, how just by putting his foot in one place he made the whole thing fall. How 's that part of the castle supposed to be connected now? That was the tallest tower. That sort of thing is important. Her best bridge! No reason . She 's still crying. She feels worse than when her knees get cut up on concrete. She hadn ' t known there were worse things . She made it. She thinks of something else she 's heard: she created it. Created it out of nothing. There was sand, and she made something, and now there was nothing but sand again. He made her creation nothing but something he couldn ' t see to step away from . She shouldn ' t have bothered. Nothing is wrong with her. Its him , he broke it, broke her bridge, he killed it, he ... " He tried to kill me, he tried to kill me! " She says it loud. She wants everybody to hear. He broke it. A part of her is wondering why she's saying this. Another part, a strange and harder part, wants to punish him. He deserves this . He looks afraid, starts talking quickly, saying he just asked the kid to move, they need to move the chair, the tide, all that. He sound so much like she does when she's scared, that her heart is wanned, if only a little bit. Her mother laughs, so now she hates her mother even more than the lifeguard. Laughing at this. She cries harder the more her mother laughs at her, though while her mother is laughing she 's also rubbing her back, saying nice things. She doesn't like how easily she is confused by all of them. Her mother says she understandsshe will take care of it. She keeps crying, mostly because she does not want to be put down again. Sitting near the blue beach chair now, her legs and anns and eyes are dry and she thinks the phrase again. " Back to shore on my back"-it is an almost rhyme she has created, and said fast enough, it becomes something like an almost song. Her mother is looking at her, but doesn't make her say anything. She doesn ' t try to think up a castle or even look at the sand, only out at the ocean, where the never fully touch. two types ofblue _ 7 �Questioning Moses: An Essay on Book XI of Augustine's Confessions Chelsea Batten . c::- 1,/5'/o~ rO. - ~.J~M ·. ·le -.µ t,,.._ ~;~.. '~ ~· . - .-s#- ~~NP. h · ·.... ·~ · ..., . •?C ;' "'~tj(?, ; '; '. .· ~,;~ ,~ - ~ ...~~ Drawing/or Freshman Laboratory Katrina Dimitrijevic 8 Length of days is subject to peculiar variation. Good days go by too fast, while a long day is one occupied with onerous work or tiresome people. But there also is a kind of day whose length seems to stretch into eternity, longer than any hard work could make it. rich with the rare goodness that 1 usually only realize in memory. I grew up beside the Pacific Ocean, and the kind of day I mean is one that often starts just before noon, when the fog burns off and the waves begin to sparkle. The day must end well before the sun goes down, because if the kids are not in bed by the time it is dark. their weariness will make them unmanageable. The span of this day is only five or six hours if one measures it by a clock. I have stood out past the white water, submerged up to my neck, where the waves murmur as they slowly swell past, until they curl into slopes that shine like glass under the sun. I linger with my cold toes reaching into the dark, and the sun full and blinding on my face, waiting for the next set to take me into the shore. In that period, time stretches into both ends of infinity. How can I explain how it feels, the peculiar serenity of that moment? I know in that moment how long we have been there and how long we will stay, and I don't mind acknowledging that we will not really be there forever. I have the same peace inside as if we had been, and will be. I don't fear the day ending, even though I know that it will. Such serenity is unique to those moments. And now l look at the prospect of writing about time and find myself growing frantic. l have read this book, the Confessions, several times now; I have read through it, and read over it, and read into it. Though I am pleased to find that I can now understand St. Augustine's explanation of time, I do not feel any better about the burden that time lays on me. As Augustine himself said, "! have been talking about time for a long time . . .. l am in a sorry state" 9 �Energeia (R.S. Pine-Coffin, Chapter 25), and I feel myself in exactly the same state. The understanding of time does not console me or make me feel more capable of dealing with mortality, as I hoped that it would. I can only claim that I have spent much time thinking of time, and now I must spend more time refining the articulation of my thoughts. The only good that I seem to be serving anymore in this occupation, is that of fulfilling an academic requirement. But that is where Augustine begins, as well-with a requirement, and one much more stringent than mine. God's calling on a man has two parts; it involves a general requirement of holiness and right living, as well as a specific direction for that man's particular energies. The mystery inherent in calling is that God-fully powerful and unconstrained by timeplaces a demand on mortals to carry out His work. To say that He ordained this means of carrying out His will sounds true, but to say that He needs men to accomplish His will, as if they were His only resource, belittles His omnipotence and His deity. Augustine says as much when he asks, "are you unaware of the things that I tell you? .... If you see them, why do I lay this lengthy record before you? Certainly it is not through me that you first hear of these things." (l) This question is not rhetorical. Writing the story of his conversion is his calling, but he would choose another occupation if he could-" I have long been burning with desire to contemplate your law ... " (2) As he writes his book, he feels time siphoning away his opportunity for this contemplation, this central desire, and it makes him frantic. "Every particle of sand in the glass of time is precious to me . .. " "I do not wish to allow my time to slip away by undertaking any other task ... " "No moment of time passes except by your will. Grant me some part of it for my meditations on the secrets of your law." "let me drink you in and contemplate the wonders of your law ... " (2) There was a year in my life when nothing at all was happening for me. I had few friends, uninteresting work, no great joys and no great trials. Then I met a man who had just returned from a safari in the Serengeti Plain, before which he had been filming a documentary in India. He was rich and at leisure, and seemed full of his own abundant existence-full enough, at any rate, of advice for frus- 10 BATTEN trated young women. He told me, "the only thing holding you back is you ." But he was wrong. I was never without plans for escape from my drab life; I never lacked the will to rebel. What held me back was a belief that I could not shake off, that God had called me for that time to stay where I was. I often wished that I could shake it off, but there it was. For I do not much fear experienci ng pain, but I am in terror of being stagnant. When I worry, it is seldom over what will happen; instead, I worry about when anything wi ll happen. Like Augustine, I have a central desire for how I would li ke to spend my life. He says to God, ''Give me what I love, for truly I love it and this love, too, was your gift. Do not abandon what you have given me." (2) I believe, with him, that my central desire is planted by God- I did not ask for it, and certainly life would be simpler without its nagging persistence. How can I help concluding that this desire is also God's will for me? But as Augustine had not yet had his weakness swallowed up in God's strength, I have yet to fulfill this thing that is my desire and God's calling on my life. So I live in frustration, submitting to God 's demand of my obedience, submitting to a calling that seems to have nothing to do with my heart's fundamental desire. What does God do this for? Why did He give me a desire that He does not allow me to try to fulfill? Augustine 's response to God's intractability is not to insist on an answer. Rather, he seems as ifhe would persuade God by cajoling-" Listen, my God, as I tell you the cause of my longing." (2) He proceeds to meditate on the character of Christ as the efficient cause of God 's will. Of all biblical metaphors on which to dwell, his choice is curious. " He is your Word, by which you have made all things .... he is the one of whom Moses wrote." (2) This provokes him to consider what a boon it would be toquestion Moses regarding the Son of God, to whom Moses attests in the first words of the Bible. But these words-"ln the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"-seem sufficiently straightforward. The words indicate the interconnection of time with creation. Furthermore, as Augustine asserted just before, in accordance with the Gospel of John, time and creation came about through the ceiving 11 �Energeia mary agent of God's will, the one whose Person most belittles the necessity of humans to carry out God's will. "He was the one whom you sent to find us when we were not looking for you, and you sent him to find us so that we should look for you." (2) What more could Moses tell him? The point that Augustine dwells on is not the anticipated answer of Moses. Instead, he considers that Moses' answer would not illuminate his own understanding unless God mediated between them with Truth. And as God Himself is the Truth, then God Himself must mediate. As Augustine says in chapter nine, the Truth is synonymous with the Word. Again, we see that the activity of the Son is necessary to carry out God's will, this time in teaching the believer. What would be the good of questioning Moses at all? The existence of earth and the heavens is in the "voice" that proclaims the truth of their being creation, for they could not have created themselves. But that truth could not be known by Augustine, either, unless God whispered it to him. Certainly there are many to whom God has apparently not whispered this truth. Why examine earth and the heavens, or even logic, when the answer can only really come from the activity of the Word? Why not merely ask for the illuminating Truth? Quite often, one does make such a prayer. Quite often, one's prayer is refused, leaving us again with the intractability of God. Why does He confuse us, and then refuse to answer us? To see how a man uses truth as arbiter in his own mind, Augustine makes a comparison to the mundane act of a craftsman. The craftsman takes things that already exist and uses his intelligence to direct him, his physical senses to transmit the idea, and tools as the means to work on his material. Finally, he consults the truth, "which presides there" in his mind, as to whether his desired effect has been carried out. This process is described as being all very commonplace. A man judges of his own work according to his own idea. Is the truth by which he judges a truth of his own making, as well? He can compare the idea in his mind to the effect-the likeness between the idea and the effect is where the truth must come in, and there is little room for error unless the man is half-witted or willfully de- 12 BATTEN himself. He may forgive imperfect likeness, as craftsmen will, because there is enough likeness to serve the purpose for which he began the work. If we think of truth as degree of likeness between the ideal and the effectual, there seems to be no room for relativity. Truth is simply the percentage. A moral evaluation may be relative; a numerical evaluation is not. Let us compare this to God, the Truth, and His work of creation. Presumably, there is no difference between His ideal and His effectual. The percentage is total, the likeness perfect, between them. For this reason, we may indeed call Him the Truth. And Augustine seems to indicate that this is at least partly due to the tool, or channel , that He used for "this vast work" of creation. (5) Not having anything material to work with, '"it must therefore be that you spoke and they were made. In your Word alone you created them." (5) The idea of something being created " in" the Word is curious. If Augustine had said " by the Word," I would have taken the Word as being God 's tool. But a craftsman does not make a thing " in" a tool. Augustine begins to examine the nature of this Word, comparing it to the voice of God that spoke when Jesus Christ was baptized. In that case, God worked within the creation, using words that sounded in time and then died away, to express His Word, "which is silent and eternal .. . far, far different from these words which sound in time ... the Word of my God is above me and endures for ever." (6) The Word in which creation takes place seems to be something like an agent with its own will, or sharing God's will- not lifeless as a mere tool must be. If it exists outside of creation, it must be changeless; thus Augustine can call it "eternal." If it does not require speaking, in the sense of a sound beginning and ending, we can consider it ''silent." And ifthe Word is with God, and is God, as the Gospel of John states, then the Word must be whole and perfect as God is. There we must confront the nature of the Word being uttered all at once and eternally, for time consists of beginnings and endings. Here Augustine coins a synonym for the Word, to illuminate its character. He calls it the "eternal reason," which dictates morta l beginnings and endings. It works in time. An example of this is the 13 �Energeia Word subjecting itself to the laws of time and earth, making " himself audible to the bodily ears of men, so that they should believe in him and, by looking for him within themselves, should find him in the eternal Truth." (8) So the Truth, the arbiter of men 's minds, receives the Word's communication and compares that effect to some ideal in their minds . Is this ideal , to which the effect is compared, one of desire? Some proof or reason they longed to see, a need they longed to fulfill , a power they hoped to possess, a glory they hoped to witness? Whatever it is, the effect of the Word matches the ideal within men 's minds. Thus they " find him in the eternal Truth"-in the total percentage of what they were looking fo r. Here, at last, Augustine gives us the identity of the Word. The Word is "your Son, who is your Strength, your Wisdom , and your Truth." (9) A creation made "in" Wisdom is one governed by order and will. A creation made " in" Strength attests to the power that enforces that order and will, and even the right to do so. A creation made "in the Beginning" means it was made within the bounds of that period of time. So, a creation made " in" the Truth can similarly mean within the bounds of Truth, which governs not time but satisfaction . Without a creation made in Truth, men would not question the meaning of their lives, for there would be no answer. It is plain enough, from life experience or from reading the Stoics, that the appurtenances of life are not themsel ves the meaning. They point to the Truth in which those accessories are made, and in which men themselves are made. And the Son is the embodiment of them allStrength, Wisdom and Truth. Rightly should Augustine shudder as this mystery unfolds. I too shudder at its inexorability. When the creation is sublime as this, it seems a meager complaint to say, as Augustine does, "l cannot sustain my blessings." (9) But that is where l began from. Knowing that my murmurs are piteously insignificant does not make them go away. It only stifles them. Augustine says "l do not wish to let my time slip away by undertaking any other task when l am free from necessity of caring for my bod ily needs, of studying, and of giving to others the service 14 BATTEN which l render them, whether it is my duty to give it to them or not." (2) But with the elusiveness of time, I feel sometimes that even indulging such necessities allows time to slip away. Even with a spa1ian resolution like Augustine 's, my sense of urgency cannot be assuaged. Is there any way to escape frustration at time 's escape? Even when I am devoting my attention as fully as possible to what is at hand , and even when what is at hand is exactly what I wish fo r, and I know that it is what I wish for, time itself intrudes so that I cannot sustain my blessings. As an example, I can tell a story of something that occurred last summer. It is a hot, beautiful day in July and I have taken my eightyear-old brother and two of his friends to the park. We have run around all afternoon, exploring museums and climbing on sculptures and racing each other across the amphitheatre. The boys and I are on the brink of exhaustion, slurping ice cream off wooden sticks, when we see that the fountain is playing at the other end of the park. The boys shove their ice cream sticks into my hands, strip off their shoes and their shirts, and jump into the fountain 's basin with twenty or thirty other kids . It is all gloriously messy and potentially unhygienic, so naturally l must stand back and look prudent, as they kick water at each other, and catch water from the fountain jets in their mouths, and splurt it back out in each other's faces , from lips still sticky with ice cream. And me? There is nowhere in the world that I would rather be, unless it was in the fountain with them . I put away from my mind all thought of how I' m going to get them dry enough to take home without staining the seats in my mom 's car, as well as the thought that it is getting later in the day and I'll be vilified by all the parents for letting their children eat ice cream so close to dinnertime. And if somebody gets sick from swallowing dirty fountain water, l will be the one liable. l don't let any of that bother me. Instead, as I feast my eyes on the careless beauty of their childhood, l feel a cold hand creeping into my warm thoughts . That word, "childhood," does it. This moment will not last. It has not lasted for me-here l am watching, instead of playing in the fountain with them. The day must end, so must my brother 's childhood, and his simple happiness, and his perfect trust in his older sister. I am assailed by the fear, am I paying enough attention ? Am 15 �Energeia I keeping this perfectly in my mind so that I will always have it? I know that the moment is contraband, stolen from circumspectness as well as time. Maybe that knowledge distracts me. Sometimes, just knowing that time is there is enough for it to win despite my best attempts to thwart it with memory, or to extend it with diligent, relentless attention to the present. I concur with Augustine 's lament, "but now my years are but sighs." (29) We cannot partake of eternity with impunity. We don 't belong there, and what we can enjoy of it, we must enjoy as interlopers. We must have time because we are created- we must have a beginning and an end . God places a call on us, a demand as to how we should act in time, and in doing so He shows us something of who He is and how He works outside of time. In the beginning of this chapter, Augustine said, "by setting [these things] down I fire my own heart and the hearts of my readers with love of you, so that we may all ask, 'Can any praise be worthy of the Lord 's majesty?" (I! ~ur mundane work leads us to trust the Truth, which He has put w1thm us, so that when He communicates to us by the Word subjecting itself to time, Truth will make us believe. We receive blessings in time, such as the love that God gave Augustine, and the summer day He gave me with my boys. They are troubling gifts because we cannot keep them. Augustine says "in endurance we await the fulfillment of your promises." (9) Why does it please God to make His creatures wait? Put another way, "why is it that what He has created is not also eternal?" (IO) It is nonsense that anything created should be eternal.. That question is one asked by men who are trying "to savor the taste of eternity" but are still obsessed by time: [T]heir thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendor of eternity which is for ever still. ( 11) In that summer day, I was doing my best to seize my mind and hold it still, trying to grasp the stillness of eternity for a moment. I 16 BATTEN almost did it, but the consciousness of time intruded. Augustine asks, whether that is because time itself keeps moving? To this question, he gives a clear answer. "If, therefore, the present is time only by reason of the fact that it moves on to become the past, how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is is that it is not to be?" ( 14) The present is the only time that can actually be, for the past and future do not exist in actuality. But the present has no duration-" if its duration were prolonged, it could be divided into past and future ." ( 15) In this small way, the present, that short moment that Augustine spoke of earlier, is like eternity. In the rapidly vanishing presentnot a hundred years, not an hour, not a minute fraction of time, but whatever instantaneous interval that the present is-there is no past and no future, but only the glorious now in which everything is happening at once. But these moments must come at the expense of each one that follows, for it takes time for human beings to grasp the moment's importance and to savor it. As we try to hold on to the · moment wherein we stumbled on eternity, each part of it slips away in the past, gone back into its secret refuge, lost to us and leaving us no idea of how to find eternity ever again. I hoped in studying this book to find that memory and hope are a man 's means of enjoying eternity as best he can, but even hope and memory are ersatz versions of the glorious now. If I enjoy something in memory that has been seen, am I not missing the fresh impressions of the present? If I Iinger on a hope of the future, I am probably missing the coming-to-pass of a future I might well have been hoping for yesterday. It is no consolation to suppose that the past and the future do not actually exist. They must, for prophets have seen visions of the future, and we have proof of the past in photographs, stories and scars. But in acknowledging the past and future , we find that we do not have them as they were, or will be. We have them only as "a present of past ... [and] offuture things ." (20) To those who exist in time, the past and future are merely players in the present, shadows 17 �Energe ia in the mind that shape how we handle the present. " If the future and the past do exist, I want to know where they are." ( 18) I concur with the petulance that demand expresses, but what does it actually mean? Augustine wants to collect into his keeping all the events and impressions that ever have been and will be, to hold on to the sensation of the past, which we lose when it is gone, and possess the certainty of the future , which we cannot enjoy until it occurs. He longs for the all-at-once that only God enjoys. In an attempt to possess the all -at-once, the stillness of eternity, we measure passing time into periods. Because of this, Augustine can call time an "extension of the mind itself." (26) In an attempt to seize itself and hold still, as Augustine prayed that men 's ' minds might, the mind stretches to encompass all the impressions of aperiod in their fullness, and to absorb them all at once, like someone burying their nose in an enormous bouquet to smell all the flowers simultaneously. We who dwell in time have imposed our bounds on everything about us, including things that are not conscious of time. We call such things " regular" and then direct our motions hy them . But Augustine insists that time is not the movement of heavenly bodies or anything else that we call "regular." The earth 's movement round the sun does not change in pace, but sti 11 we call a day long or short. Length of time is really measured by the depth of the impression left by the moments as they pass. A long day impresses me with the tedium of its tasks, or the nastiness of the people I encounter. A summer that went by too fast saw me so active and eager that I did not absorb all the possibilities it presented. I say, J measure time. What I measure is the impress produced in you by things as they pass and abiding in you when they have passed: and it is present. I do not measure the things themselves whose passage produced the impress; it is the impress that I measure when I measured time. Thus either that is what time is, or I am not measuring time at all. (F.J . Sheed, Chapter 27) We divide our " regular" periods for convenience, calling a year 18 BATTEN shadows longer than a day because there will likely-hopefullybe more impressions in a year than in a day. But I know exceptions to that assumption. This is because the impression 's depth depends, at least in part, on me. If I am not paying enough attention to the present, the events rush away and I remember only the franticness 1 experienced, rather than the actual events. When a mother says her child grew up .. too fast," it is likely she remembers chiefly her urgency that she should bring him up right, the difficulty he gave her, her fear that he would turn out badly. Suddenly he is grown and she has little memory of how he looked at her from the crib, the feeling of his hand grasping hers, his anns around her neck, his smile when he encountered something unknown. If you ask her about how it is to raise a child, she will sigh with dissatisfaction, remembering mostly the teenage year:, the difficulty he gives her now in exchange for long hours of his past, the time she spent caring for him and lulling him in the middle of the night as a baby. But can she remember how the baby felt against her heart? Yet sometimes, by grace, these impressions bolt through our Jack of attention. I remember how it felt to rock my brother to sleep when he was a baby. The room was dim and silent and 1 was not only bored, but in pain. My legs were going numb under his weight, my arm ached from cradling his head in the only position that could induce him to sleep, my fingers cramped from tipping the bottle gently over his mouth. Suddenly I looked down at his face , and the immediate importance of the moment broke on me like a wavethe warmth of his soft, solid, compact, body, the contented regularity of his breathing, the tininess of his ribs swelling against me as he breathed, the downy flush of his skin, the enonnity of where I was and what I was doing, his terrible fragility in my heedless hands . I never thought to pay attention, but the impression shot through my carelessness. There I realized that I must always look at him that way, in every moment of his life. I must watch . This kind ofimpression, or the kind that I described in the essay's beginning, denotes a different kind of " long" in the concept of a "long time." Those two times were not ful 1of a disorderly array of impressions pushing through the bottleneck of my attention. com 19 �Energeia Instead, they brought one impression that went deep enough to plumb my attention. What does it mean to be present where we are, all the time? Does it ever put us at a disadvantage? When I am out walking in the sunshine, is it best to dwell with all my energy on the movement of my body, the freshness of the wind, the cracks in the sidewalk, the odor of the cars' exhaust? Or should I think about my essay and what I will write? It is good for me to walk and it is good for me to think about my essay, but I have to do both things and lot of others besides, and if! took time for each one individually, I would not be able to do them all in time. (Jn time! What else would I do them in?) So I walk while thinking about my essay, and only sporadically notice the movement of my body and the warmth of the sun. then I trip over a crack in the sidewalk and am distracted from my train of thought on my essay, and cannot recall the brilliant exposition I was planning. Have I cheated myself in the whole process by combining two activities this way? The impress of everything skimmed past me. Two hours pass quickly from the day while I was trying to juggle too many things at the same time. I get home and try to write and cannot think of anything to say. My body is tired without appreciating the exertion I gave it. I absorbed almost nothing in two hours except the experience of overtaxing my senses and my mind. But what else could I have done? I had to walk to keep my body healthy. I had to think about my essay. I had to go to work and I had to sleep and I had to read for my seminar. In order to sleep that night, I had to be able to tell myself that I had done everything at least in its outward appearance-that I had at least made an effort to accomplish it all. Without the imperfect attempt I would have got even less finished in the time I had. Did I have that time, really? What does " having" time mean? If the impressions by which we measure time can often escape the metaphorical grasp of the mind, how can I use a word as visceral as "have" to describe my relationship to time? "Having time" is an expression we use to indicate our readiness to commit our attention to something. If my friend asks me to help her and I say that I don't have time, that means that my attention is 20 BATTEN committed to something else in that anticipated period. Reasonably, I say that I cannot do two things at once; however, in the case of walking and thinking about my essay, I did. Very well-I cannot devote my attention to two things at once. I cannot help my friend clean her apartment and at the same time do my seminar reading. 1ant, and But both things are important. My friendship is impo1 it could suffer if I am not willing to sacrifice some of my commitment to my own needs to help my friend. Both needs must be met. Where is the extendedness of time now that I need it? When the present moment is taking place, passing on its way through the attentive mind, "it [gains] some extent in time." Does th is mean that the moment's '"timeness" was swelling out? Is it sim ilar to when an image passes by a convex mirror, causing the th ing's reflection to swell in size? All the possible impressions in that moment, being immediate, inflate the fullness of that moment. Or maybe it's only an aspect that swells out, since the impressions of a moment may be infinite, and are called a "disorderly throng" by Augustine. If 1give up my commitment to myself in order to help my friend, the moment swells with the beauty of her smile, of her gratitude, and of our relationship. If I refuse to help her, the moment swells with my own relief at not having to cram my reading later on, as well as with her disappointment, and my remorse and fear that she will find another friend who can help her, and like me less as a result. All of this in a moment! I suppose my possession of time is only a euphemism for my possession of choice as to what I want to watch go past in a moment. But now I ask a third time about the calling of God, wherein choice about the time I have decreases, inviting bitterness to increase. I interrogate God, who exists outside of time and makes demands on those who are doing their best to serve Him in time; who calls me to stay when I would go, to devote my attention to one task while other opportunities are "wafted away into the past" (PineCoffin, 27); who makes me watch as "the past increases in proportion as the future diminishes, until the future is entirely absorbed and the whole becomes past." (27) If, as Augustine said earlier, I only experience the present of past things and of future things, then it is only this present that I 21 �Energeia must watch disappear. Moreover, time is known only by events passing through the mind, so the diminishment of the future is only in relation to me. As far as God is concerned, the future does not go anywhere. To Him, it never was the future. Only in my own mind does an event cease to exist-to God, it is eternally present. And this, Augustine says, "is true ofa man 's whole life, of which all his actions are parts. It is true of the whole history of mankind, of which each man's life is a part.'' (28) We, in time, make the decision to dismiss something into the past, or to call something the future, rather than claim it in the glonous now. Can this be helped? Augustine response to it is this outcry: I see now that my life has been wasted in distractions, but your right hand has supported me in the person of Christ my Lord, .. . who is the Mediator between you, who are one, and men, who are many. He has upheld me .. . in order that I may be rid of my old temptations and devote myself only to God's single purpose, forgetting what I have left behind. I look forward, not to what lies ahead of me in this life and will surely pass away, but to my eternal goal .. .. Then I shall listen to the sound of your praises and gaze at your beauty ever present, never future, never past.(29) Being in time is itself one of the distractions from the glorious now; perhaps it is the worst, for it is certainly the most petty. Of all things that can tear our thoughts from the eternal goal, is not the least worthy, the most crippling, a fretful meditation on the tearing itself? I would rather devote my attention fully to an absorbing distraction than fret over the possibility of being distracted. Admittedly, I want a remedy. "My thoughts, the intimate life of my soul, are torn this way and that in the havoc of change." (29) And I am not content to wait for God's summons to heaven in order to know rest from that havoc. I want to learn how to be still now. Augustine's language is drastic-"so it will be until I am purified and melted by the fire of your love and fused into one with you. Then I shall be cast and set .firm in the mould of your truth" (29, 22 BATTEN 30)-but he does not state positively that this state of being must wait until our bodies are dead. He says that " ' never ' has no meaning when there is no time.'' (30) 1 will make so bold as to claim that for myself. In the act of loving God more, l am striving to be fused into one with Him. l fl cannot reach it, 1can at least reach toward it. When I am firm in the Truth, what effect will that have on my relationship to my calling? Will my desire change to one that is fulfilled by where l am? l have been writing about truth as a gauge of the likeness between the effect and the ideal, and accordingly, being firm in the Truth will mean that the effect of my life perfectly reflects the ideal of what is in my mind ... or will it reflect what is in God 's mind? Will they not be the same, ifI am firm in His truth? In the first chapter, Augustine wrote that " 1 write this book for love of your love." (I) That, then, was what he was striving for, even against his central desire to contemplate the beauty of the Lord. He was reaching for oneness with God, loving God by obeying a call that seemed less than what he was made for. "To the best of my power and the best of my will I have laid this long account before you, because you first willed that I should confess to you, 0 Lord my God." (I) And Augustine says that in this calling, God frees us, and we "will find our true happiness in you." If we obey out of love, even against our will, we ignore the frantic demand of time. Trusting that god will bring us w here He wants us to be allows us to partake in His lack of"never." Doing so, we look like spendthrifts ofome, spending it lavishly as if eternity were at our disposal. Indeed, eternity is at our disposal, if our lots are wholly thrown in with God. And then that calling becomes not only His command, but also our choice, and we " shall no longer be miserable in ourselves, but will find out true happiness in you." ( 1) It was Moses' happiness to write of the Beginning. In questioning him, Augustine does not crave the substance of the answer, but the answer as only Moses himself could tell it. For Moses had a call to fulfill, which he did in the Word. An answer such as Moses could give, having seen God face to face and carried out a work that wrought miracles in the desert and in his own person, would be not only convincing with its truth, but compelling in its joy. 23 �KALKAVAGE Malherbe's Consolation to Mr. du Perier on the Death of his Daughter a verse translation Peter Kalkavaae In his long poem, Consolation aMonsieur du Perier sur la Mort de sa Fille, Franyois de Malherbe consoles a lawyer friend, Frarn;:ois du Perier, by trying to shake him out of his seemingly interminable grief at the death of his five-year-old daughter, Marguerite. 1 The poem is on a grand scale and is exquisitely crafted. Harsh in the extreme, it is anything but what most ofus would call consolation. The sentiment of the poem derives largely from Seneca, whose works Malherbe translated. Several stanzas of the poem are directly.indebted to the Stoic. The most striking is stanza 12, where the poet accuses his friend of self-aggrandizement and hypocrisy: N'est-ce pas se hair pour acquerir la gloire/ Debien aimer autrui? ["Is it not the case that to hate oneself is to gain the reputation for loving another well?"] These lines echo a passage from Seneca's Epistle 63, which, in Malherbe's translation, reads as follows: Le pleurer excessifest plut6t marque de vanite et de vouloir etre estime ajjlige, que d 'une veritable amitie ["Excessive weeping is more the mark of vanity and of wanting to be esteemed afflicted than of a genuine love"]. The marks of stoic doctrine are evident throughout the poem: the emphasis on reason as the moderator of passion, the need to bear up uncomplainingly in the most painful circumstances the connection between moderation and courage, the recognitio~ that there ~re no exceptions to the natural order of things, the acceptance of misfortune and death, the alignment of our will with that of the divine, and the claim that tranquility of mind is the highest human good. Malherbe 's consolation, however, departs from both stoicism and the poet's official Christianity. Although the poem ends with the will of God, the dominant theme here is malevolent fortune. In 1 The original_ text.of this poem can be found in the Senior Language Anthology. For t~e h1stoncal backgrou~d,_ see the notes in Antoine Adam 's edition of M_alherbe s works m Oeuvres. B1bhotheque de la Pleiade. Editions Gallimard D1.1on, 1971. ' 24 stanza 4, Malherbe speaks of •'the worst fate" that hunts down "the most beautiful things.'' And in the stanzas devoted to Francis I, we hear that the celebrated knight-king, having dried his tears, was contre fortune instruit-"instructed against fortune." Franc is, in other words, did not so much seize the day as realize that no amount of crying would ever bring back the son fortune had taken away. He rose up against his enemies not with fort une 's bless ing but against what fortune had done to him . The malevolence of Lady Fortune finds its keenest expression in the other Lady who appears in the poem-la .Mort, whom the poet depicts as cruel, deafand im placable. Although fo rma lly a Christian, Malherbe never consoles du Perier by eliciting his friend 's trust in God's providence or his hope for a life after death. Even the "heavenly mansion" in stanza 6 seems to be rhetorically indistinguishable from the references to the pagan underworld. It is true that Malherbe ends the poem by urging du Perier to submit to the divine will: Vouloir ce que Dieu veul est la seule science/ Qui nous met en repos [" To will what God wills is the only science that puts us at rest"]. But this is mere resignation. It is a far cry from the joyous merging of the human and the divine will at the end of Dante's Comedy, or from Piccarda's sublime utterance: " in His w ill is our peace" (Paradiso Ill. 85). There is no grace in Malherbe 's world. Harrowed by evil fortune, man is left to his own devices and must seek consolation and peace in the power of his unaided reason . The poem was probably written in 1598, the year of Marguerite 's death. It is a revised version of a poem Malherbe had written some years before to a man named Cleophon, whose daughter, like Marguerite, died very young. That her name was Rosette adds an ironic pang to the most beautiful-sounding line of the poem: Et rose elle a vecu ce que vivent !es roses ["And a rose, she lived what roses live"]. The present translation is an experiment in rhythm. I wanted to see how closely I could mimic Malherbe's stately alexandrines and half-alexandrines while also preserving the rhyme scheme. The shortcomings of this experiment will be immediately evident, as English iambs often overpower my attempt at anapests. I offer this translation in the hope that it will lead readers to a careful study of the original and encourage them to examine the differences between French and English verse, especially in matters pertaining to rhythm. 25 �Energeia KALKAVA GE Consolation a Monseiu r du Perier sur la Mort de sa Fille Consolation to Mr. Perier on the Death of his Daughter Frani;:ois de Malherbe (1555-1628) Ta Doleur, du Perier, sera done eternelle, Et Jes trsites discourse Que te met en !'esprit ' lamitie paternelle L'augementeront toujours? La Malheur de ta fille au tom beau descendue Par un commun trepas, Est-ce quelque dedale, ou ta raison perdue Ne se retro uve pas? The sad lot of your girl descended to the tomb Through death that claims all men , Is it some winding maze, where reason can 't resume Its path back out again? Je sais de quells appas son enfance etait pleine, Et n ' ai pas entrepris, Injurieux ami, de soulager ta peine Avecque son mepris. I know full well what charms her childhood did contain, And never have I tried, Like some abusive friend, to mitigate your pain With scorn for her who died. Mais elle etait du monde, ou !es plus belle choses Ont le pire destin : Et rose elle a vecu ce que vi vent les roses, L'espace d'un matin. But she was of the world, where the worst fates pursue The most beautiful th ings: And a rose, ah! she lived what roses always do, The brief span morning brings. Puis quand ainsi serait, que selon ta priere Elle aurait obtenu D'avoir en cheveux blancs termine sa carriere, Qu'en fUt-il advenu? Assume that it were so, according to your prayer, That the course she had run Had brought her in the end to shocks of silver hairWhat good would it have done? Penses-tu que plus vieille en la maison celeste, Elle eGt eu plus d'acceuil? Ou qu ' elle eGt moins senti la poussiere funeste, Et !es vers du cercueil? Do you think that when old, having reached Heaven's gate, She'd meet with better terms, Or would feel any less the dust of her estate, The coffin's hungry worms? Non, non, mon du Perier, aussit6t que la Parque 6te l' iime du corps, L'age s'evanouit au-dec;:a de la barque Et ne suit point !es morts. 26 So your grief, du Perier, will it eternal prove? And those speeches of gloom That are fixed in your mind by strong paternal love , Will they heighten grief's bloom? No, no, my du Perier! When fatality dark From body wrests the soul, Then one's age disappears on this side of the bark, For the dead , plays no role. 27 �KALKAVA GE Energeia Tithon n'a plus !es ans qui le firent cigale: Et Pluton aujourd ' hui, Sans egard du passe les merites egale D' Achemore et de Jui. Tithonus lacks the years that made him insect seem, And Pluto now, with slim Regard for what is past, holds in equal esteem Archemorus and him. 1 Ne te lasse done plus d'inutiles complaintes: Mais sage a l'avenir. Aimes une ombre comme ombre, et de cendres eteintes Eteins le souvenir. So tire yourself no more with a pointless lament, But wise to what's ahead , Love a shade as a shade, and extinguish the scent Of ashes that are dead. C'est bien,je le confesse, unejuste coutume, Que le coeur afflige Par le canal des yeux vidant son amertume Cherche d'etre allege. There's a custom quite just-it cannot be deniedThat a heart filled with grief, By voiding through the eyes the binerness inside, Will try to find relief. Meme quand ii advient que la torn be separe , Ce que Nature a joint, Celui qui ne s'emeut a l'ame d'un barbare, Ou n'en a du tout point. I'd go so far to say, when the tomb pulls apart What Nature has made one, That he who is not moved has a savage 's heart, Or simply just has none. Mais d'etre onconsolable, et dedans sa memoire Enfermer un ennui, N'est-ce pas se hair pour acquerir la gloire De bien aimer autrui? But all comfort to shun, and with memory's flame To put oneself through hellIs this hate of oneself not just pretext for fame In loving someone well? Priam qui vit ses fils abattus par Achille, Denue de support, Et hors du tout espoir di salut de sa ville, Re~ut du reconfort. Even Priam, whose sons by Achilles cut down, His hope for help all past, And beyond any thought of safety for his town, Took comfort at the last. quand la Castille, inegale ases armes, Lui vola son Dauphin, Fran~ois, King Francis, when Castille, no match for him in war, Stole his Dauphin away, 1 Tithonus was the mortal beloved of Eos or Dawn. Zeus granted him immortality at the request ofEos but not immortal youth. With the passage of time, he became so old and weak that Zeus finally transformed him into a grasshopper. Archemorus, when just a baby, was killed by a serpent. The seven Argive leaders who marched against Thebes slew the serpent and honored the child, taking his death as a portent of their victory. 28 29 �KALKAVAGE Energeia Sembla d'un si grand coup devoir jeter des larmes Qui n'eussent point de fin . Appeared, from such a blow, to be fated to pour II les secha pourtant, et comme un autre Alcide Contre fortune instruit, Fit qu 'a ses ennemis d'un acte si perfide La honte fut le fruit. He dried them nonetheless and like Hercules rose Against fortune, now tame, And for theft so malign he brought home to his foes The bitter fruit of shame. Leur camp, qui la Durance avait Presque tarie, De batallons epais, Entendant sa constance eut peur de sa furie, Et demanda la paix. Their camp, near the Durance, all dried up in the path Of that host thick as fleece, When they heard he stood firm , grew afraid of his wrath And at once sued for peace. De moi deja deux fois d'une pareille foudre Je mes suis vu perclus, Et deux fois la raison m 'a si bien fait resoudre, Qu ' il ne m 'en souvient plus. As for me, I've been struck by this thunderbolt twice, Made all crippled and sore, And twice so well-resolved by reason 's sound advice, I think of it no more. Non, qu'il ne me soit gried que la tombe possede Ce qui me fut si cher: Mais en un accident qui n' a point de remede II n' en faut point chercher. Let no grievance from me blame the tomb's icy wall For holding one so dear: But in accident plain that has no cure at all , Look for none to appear. La mort a des rigueurs a nulle autre pareilles: On a beau la prier, La cruelle qu'elle est se bouche les oreilles Et nous laisse crier. Lady Death has her toils, in which she has no peers, One implores her in vain: Cruel creature that she is, she just covers her ears And leaves us to our pain. Le pauvre en sa cabane, ou le chaume le couvre, Est sujet a ses lois: Et la garde qui veille aux barriers du Louvre N'en defend point nos rois. The poor wretch in his slum, who must sleep on the floor, Is subject to her laws, And the guard who keeps watch at the King's royal door Can't save him from her claws. De murmurer contre el le, et perdre patience, II est mal apropos: Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science Qui no us met en re pos. When our patience we lose, when we whine at Death so, Why, it's foolish at best, While to will what God wills-that is all one need know To put the mind at rest. H is 1B3.rs outfu:rn thatday:1 2 Franr,:ois is Francis I ( 1494-154 7) and Caslille is Charles V of Spain. The kings were mortal enemies. It was believed that Charles had poisoned the French king's eighteen-year-old son. 30 31 �The Word and the Image: Investigating Straightness Erica Naone Alleyway Kevin Grizzard 32 The line is at the center of all human inte ll ectual creation. It is the vehicle for words on the printed page, the vehicle for a11, the unit of measurement for sections of poems and sections of music. The mystery of the line comes out in these th ings. It is a thing we see in the world around us, and it is central to ourselves. Our perceptions of the world, and our link to it, seem to depend on our knowledge of the line. The line, as an object we see and as an object we portray, gives us a way to examine the processes we use to perceive and think about the world. Imagination seems to be a kind of thinking about the world that allows us to manipulate objects such as the line in ways that do not necessarily correspond to the physical world. Because of this, we can use the line to ask how acts of the imagination work. Geometry is a beautiful place for this question, because the Iine in gometry is a point of focus for both reason and imagination. Geometrical diagrams and proofs both provide ways to envision possible objects in space, while the reasoning supporting these proofs lends them a ground for be lief. The line is a basic unit in this sort of investigation, and so it offers a chance to separate and understand these functions. The best place to go within geometry to see this is when things unravel and reform in a strange new way: the moment of the divergence ofnon-Euclidean geometry from Euclidean geometry. Here is a crack through which we can see imagination in action, and in action in relation to reason. We will try to understand how straightness is affected by the split between the geometries. When Lobachevski uses the term " straight line," does he mean the same thing Euclid does? If straightness is the same in each geometry, how can straight lines maintain their essence while exhibiting vastly different behavior with regard to when they intersect? By looking at postulates, definitions, and geometrical diagrams, we will try to understand how 33 �NAONE Energeia straightness is expressed in each geometry. Beginning with Euclid, we will see what must change to make Lobachevski's geometry possible, then how that change reflects back to Euclid. In doing this, we will gain insight into the role of the imagination. I. Imagining the Straight At the heart of the difference between Euclidean and Lobachevskian geometry is Postulate 5, which states: 1 That if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than two right angles. As id~ from the statement of this postulate, we can get as far Euclid I.28 without finding a difference between the Euclidean and Lobachevskian geometries. The foundations and early structure of each system are identical. I.29, Euclid 's first invocation of Postulate 5, becomes the thrown gauntlet that separates the two. Lobachevski 's denial of Postulate 5 precludes 1.29. From then on, Euclid deals with geometrical objects that will have no place in Lobachevski's world: triangles which always have an angle sum of two right angles, parallel lines that are both perpendicular to a third line, and the square. Proposition 1.29 is the moment Euclid mandates a single angle of parallel ism. He writes: A straight line falling on parallel straight lines makes the alternate angles equal to one another, the exterior angles equal to the interior and opposite angles, and interior angles on the same side equal to two right angles . Euclid needs Postulate 5 to be able to say that ifthe interior angles on the same side are less than two right angles, then the lines are not parallel and will intersect. In other words, Postulate 5 is the crux of the proof for 1.29, and 1.29 turns out to provide a foundation for propositions that explore the form of regular figures. Postulate 5 1All 34 references to Euclid refer to his Elements, as translated by Thomas L. Heath. here functions as an article of faith. It is a belief on which a large section of the structure of Euclidean geometry rests . Soon, we will explore what makes it a belief and why we believe it or disbelieve it. For now, we will observe its relation to parallel lines, triangles, and the square. This relation may not be obvious from the structure of Euclid's Elements, but Lobachevski is careful to emphasize it in Propositions 19-22 as part of his preparation for the break with ordinary geometry. Before drawing a hard and fast sp lit, Lobachevski reframes Euclidean ideas of triangles and parallels as possibilities rather than facts. In doing this, he emphasizes the chain connecting them to Postulate 5. In 19, Lobachevski proves - in full agreement with Euclid, though not with the same method of proof - that the sum of a triangle's three angles can't be greater than two right angles. In 20, the preparation for departure begins. Lobachevski writes: If in any rectilinear triangle the sum of the three angles is equal to two right angles, so is this also the case for every other triangle. 2 We can compare this to Euclid's treatment of the question in his proposition I.32: ln any triangle, if one of the sides be produced, the exterior angle is equal to the two interior and opposite angles, and the three interior angles of the triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid gives one possibility for the angle sum of triangles, and it is the only possibility in his world. Lobachevski highlights the triangle with angle sum of two right angles as an important possibility, but it is not the only one for him . Though if just one triangle exists with an angle sum of two right angles, it will dictate the rule for all other triangles, Lobachevski allows that such a triangle may not exist. In that case, the rules will change and a different world will emerge. His proposition 20 opens the way to new possibilities for the angle sum of triangles, while at the same time acknowledging the special position of the triangle with angle sum of two Tight 2All references to Nicholas Lobachevski refer to his Theory of Parallels, as translated by George Bruce Halsted. 35 �NAONE Energeia angles. This shows the Euclidean triangle as a border case, standing right at the edge ofLobachevski's world. We will return to this idea later to explain and expand it. Proposition 21 is a lemma allowing Lobachevski to complete 22. 22 is where he actually departs from Euclid. It is the Lobachevskian foil to 1.29. He writes: about how we are able to make this choice. This problem will give us plenty of room to explore the question of imagining the straight in words and in images. ' The question of Postulate 5 boils down to a question of straightness, and a picture can help us see why. Postulate 5 gives one result for: If two perpendiculars to the same straight line are parallel to each other, then the sum of the three angles in a rectilinear triangle is equal to two right angles. In other words, Euclidean triangles can only exist if Euclidean parallels exist. I.29 is where Euclid declares the angle of parallelism as the right angle. Proposition 22 is where Lobachevski points out the possibilities for the angle of parallelism and decides to use angles of parallelism that are smaller than a right angle. This choice requires the denial of Postulate 5. The effect this has on triangles makes sense because Postulate 5 tells us that if two lines incline toward each other and a third line crosses them, the three lines will make a triangle. This will always happen unless there is no inclination, that is, unless the two lines stand at right angles to the third. In denying Postulate 5, Lobachevski will therefore affect relations of three lines, changing the way parallels are made and the way triangles are made. As a result, the rules about parallels and triangles will change if we change Postulate 5. To accept Postulate 5, Lobachevski writes, is.to lay "the foundation for the ordinary geometry and plane geometry." The other assumption, he says, "can likewise be admitted without leading to any contradiction in the results, and founds a new geometric science, to which I have given the name oflmaginary Geometry." For now, we will accept that we will not find a contradiction in Imaginary Geometry. Instead of following Lobachevski down his path of strange triangles and equidistant curves, we will linger in the doorway. What happens at the moment of assumption? How are we able to admit the new possibility of a system without Postulate 5, and what are we doing when we do? For that matter, how were we able to accept Postulate 5 in the first place? Lobachevski 's geometry illustrates that the acceptance or denial of Postulate 5 has always presented a moment of choice, and it requires us to think . Lobachevski suggests another. According to Euclid, the lines will meet. According to Lobachevski, they may not meet. Lobachevski 's suggestion seems outlandish. It seems that if a line ~an be called straight, it will have the predictable behavior described m Postulate 5. The link between straightness and inevitable intersection seems _im.possible to question. The lines are heading toward each other, pomtmg toward each other, inclining toward each other. Thoug~ t_ ey seem able to do nothing other than cross, Lobachevski 's h Propos1t10n 24 provides an interesting alternative: The farther parallel lines are prolonged on the side of their parallelism, the more they approach one another. The di~erence betwee~ ordi~ary and imaginary geometry is that, for ordmary geometry, 1fthe Imes are straight, there is no room on the ~lane for them to keep approaching each other. Straightness forces the 1s~ue, and they must cross. For Euclidean straight lines to avoid crossmg, they must march side by side, perpendicular to a line thrown across them, keeping an equal distance between them at all times. ~obachevski's straight lines lack this soldier-like quality. Straight Imes can y~arn f~rever toward one another, never drawing back, never standmg aside, and yet they still may not meet. From this we s~e that eith~r straightness is di~erent for Lobachevski or his str;ight Imes are bemg placed under different conditions. We will return to the second possibility after making an examination of the first. If there are two ways for a line to be straight, contradiction 37 36 �Energeia seems close at hand. It seems one sort of straightness must be revealed as "truly" straight or "more" straight to keep lines from being both straight and not straight at the same time. Even if we can imagine that there might be two ways for a line to be straight, how do we imagine this? The concept can be stated: Maybe there is more than one way to be straight. The imagining can somehow occur in terms of words or reasoning. The picture makes this look like a lie. As soon as the possibility of two sorts of straightness arises, all drawing becomes problematic. There seems to be only one sort of drawn line that we recognize as straight, but it is unclear how we recognize this at all. Beyond this, if we could identify how we know a line is straight, it seems impossible that we could identify two separate conditions without identifying two separate objects. In a picture, we have little chance of making any headway on this. We seem able to ask the question and justified in asking it, yet at the same time completely unable to represent the picture visually. How can this geometrical idea make sense in words if it cannot make sense in a picture? One more way of stating this problem will delineate the domain of the question more clearly. Euclid's Postulate 5 situation is easy to draw: First, NAONE Lobachevski's is much harder. There is always one "incorrect" element to any single attempt to draw a picture for the extension of Lobachevski's straight lines. If the statement we're trying to represent in a picture is, "Imagine two straight lines that incline toward each other, yet do not meet," our attempts to draw it will look like this: ' / lines incline toward each other / lines do not actually meet Then, Each picture captures two out of three elements of the statement and belies one of them. One other possibility would be to draw the two lines inclined toward each other but very, very far apart. This would account for the great distance of parallelism corresponding to each angle. This is still unsatisfying, because it fails to deal with the lines in their ultimate extension. It does not provide "ocular proof ' 38 39 �Energeia that the lines will not eventually cross. The unsatisfying quality of all these pictures defines the domain of the question Lobachevski raises about straightness. He tells us that he uses straight lines, and then asks us to imagine those lines doing things that would have been impossible in ordinary geometry. The new behavior he asks us to imagine seems impossible to draw. The name he has given his geometry raises the question of imagination. Synonyms for imagination all suggest sight. They are words like "picture," "visualize," "try to see." How can we imagine what we cannot see? How can it occur to us to imagine it? To get closer to this, we will look closely at the definition of a straight line and at Postulate 5. We will try to understand clearly what the words tell us and how they tell us. We will then look at the images associated with these words and at how they become associated. In doing this, we will try to zero in on the act of imagination Lobachevski requires, and find to what extent we can represent it in words, to .whatextent we can represent it in image, and how closely these two actions are related. II. Euclid's Definition of a Straight Line Straightness is the line of our eyesight in any space we encounter. We use it in the same exploratory way, and we use it to relate objects to each other. The correlation between straightness and eyesight is so strong that definitions of straightness are full of implicit references to eyesight. We see this in Plato's definition of straightness: that in which the middle covers the ends. As Heath points out in his notes to Euclid, this definition makes sense to us because we can imagine ourselves looking along the line and having it come to our eye in the form of a dot. Heath suggests that Euclid is trying to get away from talking about straightness in terms of eyesight. In seeking to define straightness in terms of geometry, the goal is to set down a definition on paper that makes sense apart from the unconscious physical action of eyesight. We need to do this because, if we link straightness to eyesight, we are tied to what the eyes see and how they see. The mathematical sense of straightness would then be a concept distilled from a physical experience, and bound by the experience to function as it does in the ordinary, physi- 40 NAONE cal world. If we can remove it from its bond to eyesight by defining it without words that appeal to the visual, straightness enters the domain of the mind rather than the domain of the body. As such, reason becomes able to construct an account for straightness. Once this is done, imagination can suggest possible adjustments or expansions, and reason can determine whether these suggestions are feasible . This account is teetering on the edge of a famous philosophical problem: Does a concept such as straightness exist in our minds a priori, or is it abstracted from our observations of the physical world? We will not deal with this problem directly here, though some of this discussion may bear on it. For now, we will consider it only as it relates to the problem of what we imagine when we imagine Lobachevski 's straightness. It is clear from the difficulty of his ideas and the difficulty we have drawing pictures to match them that, as far as the behavior of Lobachevski's straight lines, there are not many examples of this in the physical world. It looks like whatever happens to the straight line in Lobachevski 's world happens inside the mind, within the realm of reason and imagination. This is strange. If straightness did come out of experience, how could we arrive at a different idea of it without having first seen it working in a different world? On the other hand, if straightness existed a priori in our minds, how could we have more than one concept of it? This Lobachevskian twist on Meno's paradox introduces the question of creativity. The strange new vision of straightness Lobachevski offers does not seem to be a thing we ever encounter in the physical world. Does this mean human creativity can walk forward into the void and there envision things that have never been seen or thought before? Perhaps the mind does not arrive at non-Euclidean behavior for straight lines by distilling that idea from experience or by having a pre-existing notion of it. Perhaps the mind dreams these things up out of nothing. If the mind can really do something like this, what is it doing? Is it discovering something that existed all along? If so, in what way could it have existed, if it lies outside our experience and outside what was already in our minds? What faculty does the mind use to make this discovery or this creation? Is it reason or imagination or both? These questions also go far beyond the scope of this essay, 41 �NAONE Energeia but they lend weight to the question of how we imagine a straight line. Lobachevski suggests new and exciting possibilities for human capacity: if the mind can make a system free of contradiction, even with such foreign and puzzling material as the denial of Postulate 5, this triumph of creativity opens countless possibilities for thought. Returning to the question of straightness, we will go forward using a provisional understanding. The idea of straightness must be expressed apart from the physical, because it must be possible to adjust it or reveal things in it that are not obvious in our physical sense of straightness. To do this, Euclid writes his definition of a straight line. We will look at this definition and its relation to Lobachevski 's definition, seeking after the nature of the shift from one system to the other and how it occurs. Euclid's definition appears to be the first step toward non-Euclidean geometry. Because he places the idea of straightness outside of the physical, our reason and imagination now seem able to manipulate or change it in a way they could not have done before. The temptation to define the straight line in terms of the physical is great. We see this not only in Plato's definition of the line, which depends directly on eyesight, but also in many of the words in the constellation surrounding the idea of straightness. Words like "distance," "direction," and "shortest" all fall into this category. An examination of these words will reveal that they depend on a preexisting concept of straightness, and that the foundation is often the physical. For example, one possible definition for a straight line might be that it is a line that points in only one direction. The idea of "pointing," however, is hard to define without recourse to the idea of a pointing finger or the motion of the eyes. The idea of direction is hard to define without saying something that resorts to straightness, such as, "to go in one direction is to go straight there." As it stands, these words can all define each other within their constellation. Perhaps the definition of straightness emerges from the circular sense of all of these words together: Once the mind has considered how straightness may relate to direction, then to distance, then to length, perhaps an idea of straightness itself can form. This idea of straightness, however, seems entirely limited to the physical, existing there as much as the words in the constellation 42 do. This said, it remains to show how Euclid's definition is unlike these others, how it actually steps away from the physical. Euclid's definition ofa straight line is: A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself. What is this definition saying? Reading it, we still seem to take our physical sense of a straight line and use it to understand what Euclid means. Perhaps we fall back on the sense of straight we got from drawing lines with a ruler in kindergarten. We may remember what it is like to even something out. Perhaps we think of sanding something, of dropping down to one knee to close one eye and look along the surface with the open eye, squinting, and looking out for any uneven parts of the surface that might stick up. How has Euclid left eyesight out of this definition, when we can imagine ourselves doing something physical to see ifthe line lies evenly, on the lookout for any wayward points that might stick out from the surface? Words never can completely escape the physical. They are sensual things, and retain their sensual associations. They can, however, suggest an understanding that transcends the physical. The word "evenly" gives more than a physical sense of straightness. It opens the way for a precise mathematical sense of a straight line, an idea grounded only within the mathematical world. Heath translates the words "lies evenly" from a Greek expression based on the word 'fem~. This word can mean "equal," "fair," "impartial," "even," "level" or "flat." This shows that the word "even" here is not about the line's extension. This idea of evenness seems to get away from where the line is pointing, and concentrate instead on its construction within a small segment from one point to another. The word "evenly" draws us to a sense of the line's breadthlessness, its onedimensionality. To be even is not to deviate from side to side. It is to make each point connect in a precise relation with the one before. This may seem to refer to any lines, straight or curved. All lines are breadthless, after all. Once we examine the way a straight line explores its space, we will see that this definition can extend beyond the breadthlessness of lines into an understanding of a line's posi- 43 �., NAONE Energeia tion in space. It may seem questionable to bring in the idea of space while trying to define the idea of a straight line, but this seems to be the nature of the beast. The ideas of straight and curved seem to have meaning only when Jines are placed in a space. We see this in the difficulty we have in defining these ideas without using selfreferential definitions or definitions that depend on the line's relations with a multitude of other objects. A curved line is breadthless, just like a straight line. The curved line, however, provides the possibility for enclosure. To see this, we will get help from Lobachevski. His definition of a straight line is: A straight line fits upon itself in all positions. By this I mean that during the revolution of the surface containing it the straight line does not change its place ifit goes through two unmoving points in the surface: (i.e., if we turn the surface containing it about two points of the line; the line does not move). Imagine a line illuminated on an otherwise dark surface. Ifwe think of what the line tells us about the surface, a straight line turns out to tell us very little. Imagine the surface stands vertically, and its axis of revolution is a straight line running over the surface vertically at the center of our view. If this is the case, we would be unable to tell whether the surface were spinning or standing still, because the straight line would never change. If the line were curved, on the other hand, the line would appear in a different position depending on the position of the surface, and, ifthe surface were spinning, the line would describe a multi-dimensional region in space. So, the curved line does not explore a breadthless region of space, while the straight line does. By this understanding, what we have done is interpret "lying evenly" as "exploring a breadthless region in space." In other words, we have said that the straight line's one-dimensionality allows it to exist in an infinite number of planes at once without changing its position, while the curved line can only exist in one place at a time. This seems like an idea of straightness that has in fact gotten away from eyesight, though Lobachevski's introduction of motion raises new questions. By introducing motion, he makes straightness 44 depend on a different constellation of words. Ideas of"plane" and "dimension" are necessary, and there is a question of how we know how to tum the surface about two points. We do not seem to have produced a definition that can stand alone. We have, however, made progress toward the moment of the shift. To get farther, we will examine Lobachevski 's definition of straightness and how it relates to Euclid's. III. The Two Definitions Side By Side A big question about Lobachevski 's definition is how close it is meant to be to Euclid's. We know that the behavior of straight Jines changes from Lobachevski's Imaginary geometry to Euclid's ordinary geometry. Is the root of this difference in how they define a straight line? The answer to this question seems to be no. We can certainly say that Lobachevski's definition could replace Euclid's without altering the workings of ordinary geometry. It is a little more uncertain whether Euclid's could replace Lobachevski's without altering imaginary geometry. If it could, why would Lobachevski have written a new definition? The main difference between the two definitions centers on Lobachevski's explanatory sentence. He seems to be attempting to interpret what it means for a line to lie evenly with the points on itself by introducing a test for straightness: the revolution of the surface that he describes. Lobachevski's interpretation draws our attention to the line in relation to other geometrical objects. He uses motion to demonstrate this relation. Motion provides us a test for straightness that can be performed in the imagination and does not rely on line of sight and the sense of straightness we get from extension. We can see this by imagining an application of Lobachevski 's test using only the sense of touch. If there is a rope spinning in the center of the room - a rope like a jump rope -then, if it is held taut or straight, it will fit upon itself in all positions. We can bring our hands as close as we like to the rope, and it will only touch us if we touch it. On the other hand, if the rope is slack or curved, we will approach it uncertain of our relation to it. Our hands may rest in empty space one moment, and then be slapped by the rope the next moment. If the straight line is the center of a move- 45 �NAONE Energeia ment it remains motionless amid motion, standing transfixed, anchor~d in an infinite number of planes. Lobachevski's new definition appears to be an effort to explain Euclid's definition. Through his explanation, Lobachevski makes it possible further to remove the definition of a straight line from eyesight. If we take the sta~ce that Lobachevski is interpreting Euclid's definition, not changing it, we can say that the definitions are interc~ang~able, and that the root of the difference between the geometnes hes elsewhere. Before moving on, however, we should note that one po~sible consequence of Lobachevski's definition is a different att1_ude _oward t t motion in proofs. Using motion to help define the straight h~e sets motion and our intuitions of its workings deep in the foundations of Imaginary geometry. We will return to this idea. Accepting that the two definitions of str~ightness _are not fundamentally different, we will examine properties of stra1ghtn~ss that are the same in Euclid and Lobachevski. Both Euclid and Lobachevski use the straight line's motionlessness or pure one-dimensionality as a tool for measuring. The straight line provides_ the best test for equality, because it will always fit over another st~a1ght line. Curves, on the other hand, can be of equal length, without fitting over one another: A B If two curves of equal length intersect in all points, they could also intersect in one point or in two points. Sometimes, there are even more possibilities than that. Two straight lines of equal length that intersect, however, can do so only in either one point or all points. There is no middle ground, and that also gives a sense of what it means for a line to lie evenly with the points on itself: there is no room for it to shift around in relation to other lines. The straight line becomes a gold standard for equal ity. It gives us a way to measure geometrical objects and detennine whether they are congruent. Both Euclid and Lobachevski make use of this property when they prove congruency by use of superposition. By examining superposition, we will see that the straight's role as standard for congruence may point us toward a further removal of the mathematical sense of straightness from the physical sense of straightness. This examination will take us into several proofs, and the purpose oflooking closely at these proofs is to find how Euclid's straightness relates to Lobachevski's straightness. IV. The Study of Superposition Euclid's most famous use of superposition is in Proposition 1.4: A B If two triangles have the two sides equal to two sides More than this, even if they are of equal curvature, and could fit over each other the manner in which they approach each other matters. For exam~le, these two curves would fit over one another if one slid over the page onto the other, but not ifthe page was folded in half: 46 respectively, and have the angles contained by the equal straight lines equal, they will also have the base equal to the base, the triangle will be equal to the triangle, and the remaining angles will be equal to the remaining angles respectively, namely those which the equal sides subtend. 47 �NAONE Energeia D A E B F It seems clear that Euclid uses superposition reluctantly, as a last resort. As Heath points out, if Euclid really considered superposition a valid form of proof, he could use it all the time and save himself a lot of trouble. For example, there is Proposition 1.5: In isosceles triangles the angles at the base are equal to one another, and, if the equal straight lines be produced further, the angles under the base will be equal to one another. A without resorting to superposition. As Euclid places lines atop each other in 1.4, he ends up having to reveal his understanding of what it means for a line to lie evenly with the points on itself. This comes out in the form of assumptions he must make to put superposition to use. He writes: For if the triangle ABC be applied to the triangle DEF, and if the point A be placed on the point D and the straight line AB on DE, then the point B will also coincide with E, because AB is equal to DE. Here we see the point we made about the straight line as a test for equality. Because AB and DE are equal straight lines and one is applied to the other, they must coincide at all points. Also, their length must have the same "shape." There is no difference in curvature, and therefore no reason why equal lengths should not wholly coincide and share the same endpoints. A little later, Euclid has established that B and E will coincide, and so will C and F. He concludes that BC and EF will coincide and be equal to each other because: if, when B coincides with E and C with F, the base BC does not coincide with the base EF, two straight lines will enclose a space, which is impossible. D E Euclid proves this using 1.4, but he could easily use superposition instead. He could apply triangle ABC to itself, so that the line AC falls on AB and AB upon AC. He could then follow an argument much like the Lobachevskian argument we will examine momentarily. Because Euclid chooses to avoid unnecessary superposition in this and many other cases, we can conclude that he confines its use to situations that require it. 1.4 presents a situation where he must use superposition. Heath points out in his notes to 1.4 that many other geometers assume 1.4 as a postulate. This is because there seems to be no way to prove it 48 This line could well have been the source of Lobachevski 's interpretation, because it tells us that pure straightness between two points cannot mark out a region in space, only a breadthless length. This seems to be what Lobachevski is getting at his definition: There is only one path between two points that can be called straight. More than that, and straightness no longer fits upon itselfin all positions. So we see that Euclid, in his use of superposition, clarifies his ideas of straightness at the same time. He uses straightness as a ground for congruence, and we find that this rests on straightness 's quality of consistent action in space. It has one path from one given point to another. Equal lengths of two straight lines will coincide if placed over one another. The straight line is an exploratory tool we send out into space. Its predictable behavior depends on the 49 �Energeia NAONE undistorted quality of space. For straightness to function as Euclid and Lobachevski use it, their geometries must operate in homogenous space. It must be possible to lift triangle ABC and place it atop triangle DEF while trusting that triangle ABC will make this transit entirely undistorted. This is the spatial property of homogeneity, and straightness depends on it. Without it, straight lines lose the ability to measure each other, and the ground for equality is undermined. Because straightness depends on homogeneity, the possibility of straight lines provides evidence that homogeneity is a property belonging to the space. What we have discovered about homogeneity will prove useful in our coming examination of Euclid's postulates. Now we are in an appropriate place to contrast Euclid's use of superposition with Lobachevski 's. Here we return to what we mentioned earlier about Lobachevski 's introduction of motion. While Euclid used superposition guiltily, Lobachevski showed us in his first definition that he will not shy away from it. We can understand this by thinking ofLobachevski's case as the opposite of Euclid's. Euclid uses superposition reluctantly, making possibly unintentional assertions as he does about the function of straightness in space. Lobachevski, on the other hand, seems to rely on the sort of assertions Euclid made. His use of superposition is meant to be reassuring. It demonstrates that his space and his straightness work the way they had to work for Euclid. In other words, his use of superposition shows that his space must be homogenous. If it were not, a proof by superposition would demonstrate nothing. Lobachevski uses superposition to prove Proposition 24: The farther parallel lines are prolonged on the side of their parallelism, the more they approach one another. To prove this, Lobachevski draws a Saccheri quadrilateral, CABD, where AC and BD are perpendicular to AB and AC=BD: l A r B 3 This could be done by drawing diagonals FA and FB . Then triangle FAE equals triangle FBE because FE=FE, angles FEA and FEB are both right, and AE=EB (Side-Angle-Side). That said, triangle ACF must equal triangle BDF because 50 He asserts that ACD and BOC are acute angles and are equal to each other. We know they must be acute if they are equal to each ~ther. If not, we could cut the quadrilateral in half with a diagonal lmeA~ and thereby locate two triangles with an angle sum equal to two nght angles. To prove the angles equal to each other Lobachevski uses superposition: ' We can ea.sily see [that ~he angles are equal] by thinking the quadnlateral supenmposed upon itself so that the line BO falls upon AC and AC upon BO. I~ ot~er ~ords, Lobachevski imagines taking the quadrilateral and fhppmg 1t over, showing that the quadrilateral is exactly the same whether viewed from above the plane or below the plane. . Lobachevski's attitude toward superposition is obviously very different from Euclid's, because this method of proof is entirely unnecessary here. Lobachevski is about to erect a perpendicular EF from the midpoint E of AB: AE E1 = lzisr A E B Once he does this, it is easy to use congruent triangles to show ACD ~qua! to BOC.' IfLobachevski had at all cared to avoid superposition, he would have used this alternate method of proof. Instead, he chooses superposition. This is interesting, because, with the alternate proof easily ~vailable to anyone reading his work, it is easy to confii:m the assert10n Lobachevski makes via superposition. In this case,_1t seems that the real reason Lobachevski uses superposition here is to show that his lines are truly straight and his space is homogenous. Before expanding this, we will look at a second example of superposit~on in Proposition 24, and then take the two examples together to thmk.about what Lobachevski is asserting about space. Lobachevsk1 says EF must be perpendicular to CD: Since the quadrilaterals CAEF and FOBE fit one anFA=~B, ang.les CAF and DBF re.suit from th7 subtraction of equals from equals, and it was given that AC=BD (S1de-Angle-S1de). Therefore, angle ACD =angle BOC. 51 �Energeia other if we so place one on the other that the line EF remains in the same position. f c A t [ E D t B Here, Lobachevski asks us to fold the quadrilateral in half along EF. We know B must coincide with A because of Euclid's argument in I.4 and what it implies about straight lines. If EB is applied to EA, they must coincide in all points. Because there is no curvature, equal lengths correspond to equal lengths and Band A coincide. The same argument applies to sides AC and BD. Once we know C coincides with D, we can use the second argument we looked at from I.4. Since C and D coincide, and F coincides with itself, FC and FD must coincide, for otherwise two straight lines will enclose a space. We then see that angle CFE must equal angle DFE. Euclid's definition I 0 states: NAONE tant becaus:, ha~ing jus~ denied Postulate 5 in Proposition 22, Lobachevsk1 has brought mto question his concept of straightness. The temptation now exists to say that Lobachevski's straight lines are actually curves. Proposition 24 - with its reliance on ideas of space and straightness identical to what we see in Euclid's I.4 _ sa~s otherwise. The lines cannot "actually" be curved, and we know this because Lobachevski both flips and folds the quadrilateral. Performing both flipping and folding keeps out the possibility of curvature when we remember that this proof and the process it invokes could b: applied_ to any lines in Lobachevskian space. We can get away with drawmg one curved line in quadrilateral CABD: line CD, for example. This curved line could be drawn curved to represent acute angles DCA and CDB, and also to represent other facts of the Lobachevskian universe, such as that EF turns out to be shorter than AC and BD: f L E When a straight line set up on a straight line makes the adjacent angles equal to one another, each of the equal angles is right, and the straight line standing on the other is called a perpendicular to that on which it stands. So, by applying an argument similar to I.4 's, we have proved what Lobachevski set out to prove. It is again true, however, that simple congruent triangles could have proven the same thing: 4 ·t://ts:f A E B D =1 B The shape in this pict~re cou~d be flipped and folded without failing ever, a second Sacchen quadnlateral, CGHD, drawn using our curved line CD as a side: GH = CD G------1H c D A B From these two examples, it looks like Lobachevski wants his reader to go through the argument from I.4 and see that it applies in Imaginary geometry, as well as ordinary geometry. This is impor- No matte~ h?w we draw_GH, ~uadrilateral CGHD cannot stand up to_ bo~h fhppmg ~nd foldmg without somewhere failing to coincide with itself. In this way, Lobachevski demonstrates through super- Referring back to our previous congruent triangle proof, we can say that triangle CFA = triangle DFB and that triangle FAE= triangle FBE. Because of ~is, angle CFA = angle DFB _nd angle AFE = angle BFE. Therefore angle CFE a - angle DFE and we can agam apply definition IO from Euclid. 4 52 53 �Energeia position that his understanding of straightness must be the same understanding Euclid uses in 1.4. Because congruent triangles confirm the truth of the statements he proves by superposition, both the statements and the method inspire increased confidence. Along with this, the homogeneity that was at the ground of Euclid's use of superposition turns out to exist in Lobachevski's space as well. The enunciation of Proposition 24 can be seen as still another way of asserting that straight lines continue to be straight. Since we have said that parallel lines always occur in the Lobachevskian world with an angle of parallelism less than a right angle, 24 reminds us that a denial of Postulate 5 is not a denial of the directionality of straightness. We see the inclined lines and say they must be headed right for each other. As we noted before, Lobachevski uses 24 to acknowledge that they are. They will approach ever closer as they are prolonged. The difference is that somehow there is room for them to do that without crossing. From this examination, it seems clear that the straight line itself, in terms of what we know about it from its definition, has not changed from Euclid's world to Lobachevski's. Lobachevski has used superposition to show us so. The homogeneity that straightness depends on is still present, so we know there must be something else that accounts for the difference in a straight line's behavior from one geometry to the other. Since Lobachevski does not seem to have betrayed straightness itself, our attention must return to Postulate 5. Postulate 5 represents both the problem and the solution: the problem because a picture of Lobachevski 's denial of Postulate 5 seems impossible, and the solution because it is in Postulate 5 that the change takes place. We will examine Postulate 5, keeping in mind the distinction between word and image. V. A Postulate's Function In section I, we discussed the problem of drawing the re- 54 NAONE suits ofLobachevski's denial of Postulate 5. How can we visually represent what happens to Lobachevskian parallel Jines when they are extended? How can there be space for straight lines to approach each other more and more yet never cross? At this point, it seems fair to raise the question of the curvature of space. In the modem understanding, Lobachevski 's geometry is often called the geometry of negative curvature, and the consistency of Lobachevskian geometry has been linked to the consistency of Euclidean geometry by mapping the Lobachevskian plane onto a negatively curved surface in Euclidean space. Should we account for the questions raised by Postulate 5 through an appeal to negatively curved space? Does this explain the difficulty of drawing Lobachevskian straight lines? While an account for these things could certainly be devised using the idea of negative curvature, we will avoid this argument here, for several reasons. First, to call Lobachevskian space the space of negative curvature is to take Euclidean straightness as the standard for straightness. It is an effort to explain Lobachevskian straightness in terms of Euclidean straightness. We observed previously that Euclidean space does seem to have a special status as a boundary case. It is the space in which there is a definite angle sum for the triangle, a definite angle of parallelism. Its figures do not fluctuate the way Lobachevski's do. This is interesting and appealing, but insufficient reason to declare the Euclidean straight line the true straight line. Why not just continue thinking of the Euclidean world as a boundary or limit? The smaller Lobachevskian objects get, the more they behave like Euclidean objects. We could think of Euclidean straightness as the behavior of vanishingly small straight lines. Perhaps it is only in an ultimate case that there is so little room that lines that incline toward each other are sure to cross. Alternatively, perhaps we could say it takes curvature for figures to stay in the sort of balance 55 �Energeia required for concepts such as similarity to hold true. After all, only a curve can remain equidistant to a straight line in Lobachevski's world. Pairs of straight lines always head either toward each other or away from each other. Perhaps Lobachevski's straightness represents the truly straight, not Euclid's, and Lobachevski's geometry results from finding a way to draw lines "straighter" than Euclid draws them. These are only suggestions, intended to show there is reason to question our assumption that Euclid's lines are truly straight and Lobachevski's have negative curvature. It seems that, if we avoid recourse to negative curvature, we will be able to discover more about the straight. In addition to this argument, it seems important to remember that negative curvature is a modem concept. Nowhere does Lobachevski indicate that what he actuafly means by "straight" is "negatively curved." With this in mind, it seems worthwhile to see if his concept of straightness makes sense when we believe his straight lines are truly straight. This attempt does present difficulties. As we have said, it takes several pictures to represent Lobachevski's denial of Postulate 5, and the impossibility of combining these pictures into one makes them appear to contradict each other. Euclid'sacceptance of Postulate 5, on the other hand, can be represented with just one picture. The ability to translate the words of a postulate into a single image suggests a wholeness to the concept those words define. It is difficult or impossible to translate Lobachevskian geometry into a single image. This causes the visual sense to register a lack of wholeness in the concepts of Lobachevskian geometry, and that lack of wholeness can look suspiciously like contradiction. The trouble the visual sense has in Lobachevski's world seems ironic coming just after our discussion ofLobachevski 's use of superposition. We relied on our visual sense very much doing that. How can we trust it for superposition when we can't trust it to show us how straight lines might disobey Postu- NAONE late 5? . Here is where a distinction between word and image may come mto play. We drew three pictures earlier that together represented two straight lines that do not obey Postulate 5. Each picture contained two of the elements required for the situation but contradicted the third. So the statement, "Imagine two straight Jines that incline toward each other yet don't intersect," became: ""' / lines incline toward each other /lines donotactuallymeet The sentence describing the situation can be broken down into three parts: the statement that the lines are straight, the statement that they incline toward each other, and the statement that they don't intersect. Each of these parts can be stated individually and make sense, just as each can be drawn individually without difficulty. The contrast between word and image comes when we try to hold the ideas together in one sentence or one picture. The sentence seems to be all right. We know what it is trying to say. Our reason can place all three concepts in relation to each other ' 56 57 �Energeia and they do not contradict. As we have seen, nothing about the definition of straightness requires that the lines intersect. If there were something contradictory as far as reason is concerned about holding our three notions (straightness, inclination and non-intersection) together at once, it would have been possible to prove Postulate 5. The odd thing is the picture. One of the advantages of a visual representation is that it freezes a number of concepts together in one moment. In our earlier discussion of triangle congruence in Proposition 24, a picture makes a great difference. The geometric understanding required to see the congruent triangles is minimal, yet a person seems much more likely to "see" them if a diagram is available or the person draws a diagram using a description of the proof. In any sort of complicated proof, the urge to draw a diagram is almost irresistible. This serves the function of wholeness. The diagram performs the task of holding given concepts in relation to each other, thereby freeing the mind to seek new connections and add new relations which can then be represented in the picture. Concepts that hold together without contradiction are thus a necessary condition for the production of an intelligible diagram. The inability to draw a picture of a group of concepts suggests the concepts cannot actually be held together in the same moment without contradiction. The question is whether the ability to draw a picture of a concept is a necessary condition for its noncontradiction. One way to approach this question's effect on Lobachevskian diagrams begins with an examination of what it is to be a postulate. We saw that the different behavior ofLobachevskian straight lines does not have its root in the definition of a straight line. Instead, we have laid responsibility for this at the feet of Postulate 5. How can an adjustment so dramatic be made to a postulate without altering the nature of the thing in question (in other words, without altering its definition)? Here we can seek a distinction between the function of a postulate and the function of a definition. As we see from Euclid's definitions, definitions name objects and give the situation in which these objects may exist. For example, here is definition 23: Parallel straight lines are straight lines which, being in the same plane and being produced indefinitely in both 58 NAONE directions, do not meet one another in either direction. The thing defined only exists if the situation described in the definition can exist without contradiction. If, for some reason, there were no way to draw two straight lines in the same plane, Euclid's definition for parallel lines would be irrelevant, and parallel lines would not have any sort of existence. A postulate, however, forms the basis of any situations that can exist. It lays out the ground rules for construction. It places definitions in relation to each other. In this way, a postulate may actually be about the nature of the space in which geometrical objects exist. Consequently, it may in some way determine what objects can be placed there. Each postulate Euclid gives tells us more about which geometrical objects can exist in space. Postulate I, for example, gives the ability To draw a straight line from any point to any point. This is what allows us to place the straight line in the position of importance it occupies, and seals it as a standard of equality. The straight line can connect any two points, while no other given curvature can be guaranteed to do the same: A -========c .~. B This postulate seems to be at the root of our knowledge that straight lines and planes can fit into space without being bent, and therefore provides grounding for our notion that space is homogenous. Postulate 2: To produce a finite straight line continuously in a straight line, defines space as limitless. Postulate 3: To describe a circle with any center and distance, tells us space is limitless, as we saw in Postulate 2, and homogenous, as we saw in Postulate I. Postulate 4, That all right angles are equal to one another, also seems to be an effort to establish homogeneity. A perpendicular will produce the same equal angles every time, no matter where it is erected. This analysis suggests that Postulate 5 is also mandating something about 59 �NAONE Energeia space through its declaration about the behavior of straight lines. What could that mandate be? The fact that Postulate 5 is first used as late as 1.29 seems like good evidence that it serves a purpose seconda~ in. importance to the homogeneity and limitlessnr:;:. of space. A significant number of proofs - those of absolute geometry - can exist on the foundations provided in Postulates 1 through 4 alone. Postulate ~ becon:ies necessary for Euclid later, in service of a different spatial quality. An analysis of the use of Postulate 5 and its consequences s~ems likely to discover this additional principle .. In Rules f~r the I!zrection ofthe Mind, Descartes accused the ancients ofhidmg their tr~e methods by always presenting their work in the form of a synthesis, concealing the analytic effort required to provide the foundation for that synthesis. If he is right to suggest this, it could b~ that Postul.ate 5 was found necessary after an analysis of the logical foundat10n needed for some later concept. The Pythagorean theorem seems a likely candidate. Heath gives evidence that it was known well before Euclid, and the structure of Book I of the Elements clearly gives the Pythagorean theorem in I.47 as a culmination of what has gone before. One look at the diagram for 1.47 suggests the necessity of Postulate 5: H r D 1-------' E The proof of the Pythagorean theorem - or any statement of the Pythagorean theorem - requires the notion of t~e. square. !he squ~re is constructed in Proposition 1.46, and Proposition 1.29 is a key mgredient in its construction. Attempts to construct the square within absolute geometry will yield the following figure: 60 If we construct this figure in Euclidean geometry, the method is in fact the method needed to construct a square. We cannot, however, immediately prove it is a square. In quadrilateral ABCD, angles A, B and D are right angles, but there is no way to prove angle C a right angle without 1.29 or some form of appeal to Postulate 5. Indeed, quadrilateral ABCD will actually change with our answer to the question of Postulate 5. Ifwe accept Postulate 5, angle C becomes a right angle and the figure is a square. If we deny Postulate 5, angle C becomes acute and what we have is a Lambert quadrilateral. It seems extraordinary that the figure should change with a decision we make. We performed a definite construction, and it seems that this should have produced a determinate figure. Instead, we find that in the Lobachevskian world, the same construction produces something distinct from a square. More than that, the figure's identity when constructed within absolute geometry is completely uncertain. Within absolute geometry, we are unable to say anything about the quadrilateral 's fourth angle. It is only when we step out of absolute geometry and into either ordinary or Imaginary geometry that we perform the act of determination that tells us about the fourth angle. This figure exists at the edge of what homogeneity and limitlessness can provide. The fourth angle requires that space have another property, since it raises a question that cannot be answered without that property. Homogeneity and limitlessness alone are insufficient bases for the situations that can exist in geometry. The space of absolute geometry thus seems less a legitimate space than a way of classifying propositions that can exist in either ordinary or imaginary geometry. We say they exist in the space of absolute geometry because they are not altered by the third property that must be introduced to provide a space able to meet the demands of the objects that can be constructed within it. This tells us something important about the two geometries: Lobachevski 's geometry 61 �Energeia is not a space governed by the first four postulates alone. Quadrilaterals show us that this would be insufficient: many of the properties ofLobachevskian objects would then remain undetermined. Instead, Lobachevskian space possesses a spatial property that is the opposite of the spatial property introduced by Euclid's Postulate 5. He shows as much at the end of his Proposition 22, when he comes to the limit of absolute geometry. In his first 21 propositions, he has boiled down a series of if-statements that illustrate the divergence of ordinary and Imaginary geometry. Nothing in absolute geometry can determine either path as correct. The adoption of one of the two possible assumptions at the end of Postulate 5 is the moment when the third property of space is determined, and it is the moment when we can distinguish a square from a Lambert quadrilateral. Any effort to construct a square will discover this, and an analysis meant to arrive at a proof of the Pythagorean theorem would reveal the necessity of Postulate 5 for that purpose. To find a name for the third spatial property, we will examine its consequences in Lobachevskian space. These consequences are clear to us because they are represented by points of divergence. Anything that is true in Lobachevskian space that cannot be true in Euclidean space must be a result of the third spatial property. In Lobachevskian space, squares cannot exist: they must have an angle sum of less than four right angles. Triangles all have an angle sum of less than two right angles. The angle of parallelism is less than a right angle. More than this, these figures all have a unique property we do not see in Euclidean space. Similarity is not possible. If the angles are congruent, the figures are congruent. From this, we see that the third spatial property is closely related to angles. This makes sense because the third Lobachevskian spatial property is the negation of the spatial property Euclid introduces in Postulate 5. Postulate 5 mandates the behavior of straight lines in relation to each other. Its tie to angles is therefore clear, since rectilineal angles are formed by the relation of two straight lines. To say that the third spatial property governs angles is to say that it governs the behavior of straight lines in relation to each other, rather than that it governs the essence of straight lines. This is what we have seen from our examination of the definition of the straight line, and it suggests a 62 NAONE strange thing about straightness. Since it is difficult to explain the meaning of straightness without putting it in relation to other objects, it seems straightness may ultimately be a sort of relation rather than a property. This third spatial property affects angles, and therefore controls the behavior of straight lines. We will call it the property of measurement, remembering that its consequence in Lobachevskian geometry fundamentally links size and shape. Lobachevskian space is homogenous, meaning that an object will retain its shape when it is moved from one spot to another. Because of the property of measurement, however, it will not maintain its shape when its size is altered. Within the Lobachevskian universe, objects therefore have an absolute size, and not merely a size in relation to other objects. We said earlier that both ordinary geometry and Imaginary geometry adopt a Fifth Postulate of some sort. We saw that the first four postulates do not sufficiently determine space. We also see from the differences between the two geometries that their Fifth Postulates are opposites. We will say the Euclidean Fifth Postulate gives space the property of relative measurement, meaning that arbitrary measurements can be applied to Euclidean objects and that an object's shape is not fundamentally related to its size. The Lobachevskian Fifth Postulate gives space the property of absolute measurement, meaning that space inherently provides a system of measurement and that an object's shape is fundamentally related to its size. An example of the property ofabsolute measurement in action is Gauss 's demonstration of the calculation of triangle area in the Lobachevskian world. He accomplishes this by identifying the largest triangle in Lobachevskian space and using its area as a standard for all other Lobachevskian triangles. Obviously, this sort of method of area calculation would fail in the Euclidean world. We will now recall how this discussion of postulates began. We were asking how the dramatic shift between the Euclidean and Lobachevskian geometries could be achieved by altering a postulate only. How could we avoid unintentionally affecting the definition of a straight line through our alteration? The answer now seems to be that the definition of a straight line and its implications can be accomplished on the ground of Euclid's first four postulates alone. 63 �Energeia Ifwe are right to say that the definition of the straight line is essentially the same in each geometry, then it must rest on limit_lessness and homogeneity. If it could not rest on only these two spatial properties, we really would see two ways of being straight: one way of being straight within the space of absolute measurement, and one way of being straight within the space of relative measurement. Having said this, we can answer an earlier question: how can we trust our visual sense of superposition when we cannot trust our visual sense of Postulate 5? The answer again lies in these spatial properties. Superposition, as Lobachevski uses it in 24, occurs according to Postulates 1-4. It requires only homogeneity, and can therefore exist in the same way in space regardless of whether that space's measurement is relative or absolute. Euclid's Postulate 5, on the other hand, determines space as having relative measurement. This is the area in question, and it is with regard to the postulate of measurement, Postulate 5, that our visual sense becomes suspect. This leads us in tum to our first and most important question: How is it possible to imagine Lobachevskian geometry, especially when its denial of Postulate 5 causes our visual imagination to balk? Our ability to half-draw Lobachevskian diagrams has seemed especially puzzling. It is curious that many Lobachevskian ideas can be represented between two contradictory diagrams, but the concepts cannot be held together within one diagram. This difficulty representing Lobachevskian geometry visually begins to come clear. As we said, postulates provide grounds for construction. They are the rules governing the way in which objects may be placed in relation to each other. When we discussed the definition of the straight line, we stressed the necessity of defining the straight line apart from the physical, and, particularly, apart from the visual. This now m_akes sense, because our eyesight, and therefore the roots of our visual sense, exists within the physical world, and the physical world seems to exist in a space where the principles of homogeneity, limitlessness and relative measurement are all operating. We have many sorts of evidence for our existence in a space of relative measurement. We are able to recognize shapes no matter what their size. We are able to make drawings to scale. When we draw triangles for geo- 64 NAONE metrical demonstrations, we tend not to think the size of those triangles is important. As we saw from quadrilateral ABCD, the third spatial property must be determined. Absolute measurement and relative measurement are mutually exclusive properties in space. Objects will actually change from one space to the other, as we saw when the square became the Lambert quadrilateral. The spatial properties of our physical space must be fully determined. We saw that without fully determined spatial properties, the space of absolute geometry seemed to be more a way of categorizing than a fully functional space. Because our physical space is fully determined, its measurement must be either absolute or relative. Because our physical space and visual capacity are thus determined, we are left completely unable to represent visually the aspects ofLobachevskian space and straightness that depend on absolute measurement. The Lobachevskian situation of two straight lines that incline toward each other without intersecting falls squarely within the jurisdiction of the property of absolute measurement. It is a different story, however, when we separate our claims about space from our visual sense. This was what we had to do in order to make cognition about Lobachevskian space into a possibility. Only in the realm ofreason and imagination, divorced from the determination of our own physical space, are we free to make different and opposite determinations about space. When we close off our visual sense, we find nothing contradictory about a space existing with the fundamental properties of homogeneity, limitlessness, and absolute measurement. We can reason about this. We may even be able to develop some sort of physical intuition about what it would be like to exist within such a space. We cannot, however, apply the same visual sense to the space of absolute measurement that we use to look at a drawing on a piece of paper. This suggests an incredible thing about imagination: Our minds are able to reason about space that exists under entirely different postulated laws from the laws of our physical experience. This is a powerful statement of the freedom of creativity. If creativity is this free, can other postulates be fundamentally altered? Perhaps. For an intelligible space to result from such alteration, it would need to remain sufficiently determined to contain its objects fully. It could 65 �Energeia not produce objects that simply point to a need for another postulate, as we saw the quadrilateral do in the insufficiently determined space ofabsolute geometry. Changes in some of the spatial properties would produce even more vast effects than were produced by changes to the property of measurement. An attempt to deny homogeneity, for example, would be far-reaching indeed, as it seems from our earlier discussion that such an attempt would significantly affect the concepts of equality and congruence. If such an effect could be reconciled without contradiction, then even stranger geometries may be possible. This sort of speculation suggests that the word "imagination" does not apply only to the visual sense. Here, imagination suggests possible alterations to the ground of our system, and it is then up to reason to determine the feasibility of those alterations. Perhaps the metaphor of building can provide an account for this. Imagination is the scout, seeking possible sites for the building. This happens in the daydreaming and idle speculation that produces the question, "What if things were different?" This seems to lie at the root of the Lobachevskian Fifth Postulate. Suspicion about the solidity of Euclid's Fifth Postulate, and failed attempts to prove it, seemed to invite dreams of remaking it altogether. Reason is then the builder that determines whether an appropriate building can be placed on the chosen site. We see this in the construction of the Lobachevskian system, and in the tests for noncontradiction that ultimately link its consistency to that of Euclidean geometry. All this depends on the mind's operating apart from the postulates of the physical world. It is still unclear whether those postulates were learned from experience or had a prior existence in the mind. Nonetheless, it is suggestive that the mind can create a space apart from them, that it is possible to alter them. Imagination's ability to change the rules is at the heart of its mysterious power. As all these possibilities open before us, what do we see when we look back to Euclid? We see Euclidean geometry as the root of this freedom. As we learned to define and postulate without recourse to the physical - as we learned that these things must be stated even when they seem obvious -we learned at the same time how toquestion, even questioning into the properties of space itself. This gave 66 NAONE us the key to imaginings beyond any physical experience. This is an exciting place to be, and a metaphysically worrying one. We mentioned that the consistency of Euclidean geometry has been linked to that of Lobachevskian geometry. This means that if one contains a contradiction, so does the other. At this point, the question of what is true takes on an even stranger appearance. It is tempting to conduct inquiries thinking that noncontradiction and truth are one and the same. The link between ordinary and Imaginary geometry makes it unclear how that could be. Can one geometry be declared true and the other false without creating a contradiction and destroying both systems? Is it possible that both Euclidean and Lobachevskian geometry could be true ? Our newfound ability to alter the postulates that ground the space in which we reason makes it difficult even to identify the necessary criteria for a statement to be "true" or "real." What does it mean that our thought can range as freely as we have seen it can? At this point, we may run to the physical world. Observing that our physical space is homogenous, limitless, and possesses relative measurement, we may declare Euclidean geometry true. This does not free us from Lobachevski 's questions, however. The Russian mathematician suggested toward the end of his Theory ofParallels that we measure the distances between stars, looking for triangles in the sky large enough to have an angle sum significantly less than two right angles. Whatever we may think about turning geometry into an empirical science that way, it seems we have been through enough questions about straightness and postulates to notice that our inability to draw lines using Lobachevskian postulates does not preclude the possibility oflines being drawn within a space of absolute measurement. It is far beyond our ability here to provide answers for the great metaphysical questions we have touched on. It is not clear what is true or what is real. The source of the postulates we use to think about space is a mystery. There seems to be no way to say what a geometrical object really is. When we do try to think about these questions, however, it may be inspiring to remember how free our minds can be, and that our imagination sometimes has the power not merely to discover the rules, but also to change them. 67 �January Love Sarah Wilson Lips like graceful autumn leaves Suspended in white ice Eyes like the light above the water 's surface Giving those beneath something to swim for Drawing/or Freshman Laboratory Kristina Dimitrijevic 68 69 �COLB Y Huck's Last Day Christopher Colby The Navajo Weaver's Song With Beauty before me, it is woven. With Beauty behind me, it is woven. With Beauty above me, it is woven. With Beauty below me, it is woven. And in Beauty, it is finished. -Halo of the Sun "Halo of the Sun had a tongue that could clip a hedge," Huck chuckled. "I met her in Tuba City, Arizona at the Federale's reservation trading post after Jim and I were done with our raft adventure. She was selling her weavings with Tiana Big Horse, her mother. I was crazy in love with her, Thule. Her father said to me, out the side of his mouth in the Navajo way of talk, that Halo of the Sun and I had "the sickness." I guess he was right-at night I ran five miles by the light of the moon just to sit with her on the chopped wood stacked outside their shack. Her father told me, 'When you marry a weaver you'll need plenty of firewood to boil the wool that they spin and dye.' Tiana Big Horse, like Halo of the Sun, was a weaver and spinner, too." I sat next to my grandfather on the edge of the dock as he spun his story for me: it was just before the War began, and I was ten years old then. The River at Terrebon is five miles wide here. "We set up a squatters' cabin downriver from here where I trapped muskrat and mink. Her loom was next to the iron Franklin wood stove near a window. Halo of the Sun always spun outside in 70 front of our log cabin, seated in the sand on the riverbank, summer and spring, fall and winter, looking out to the river, her spindle cupped in the cradle of her bare foot. Halo of the Sun had all the fi rewood she ever needed from me. The missionaries who married us baptized her first ' renamina b her ·Maria' before they would agree to our marriage, since I was a white man-though certainly no Christian- and she, a Navajo, was ce11ainly more spiritual than me. But she always remained Halo of the Sun to me." Huck sat forward with his chin on hi s cane, his curly whi te hair and walrus moustache billowing in the breeze like whitecaps on the water in front of us. "When she was happy, she sang; when sad, she danced.'' We watched a barge glide by downriver, sil ent as a bird, loaded with wheat or corn from the granary silos in Minneapol is, on its way south to Moline and New Orleans. Huck saw the name on the stern and laughed. .Miss Behaven. "What did you read in school today, Thule?" Huck asked me. " We read a very old English poem, about when He was taken off the cross and laid in Mary's arms." "Tell me." "He lay there awhile in her arms, weG1y after the great struggle. " Huck gazed awhile at the river. "You have a way with words, boy. Now leave me." Halfway up the hill to his house I looked back at Grandpa Huck and saw him dab his eyes with his handkerchief. When my mother, Clare, and 1came down later with his lunch, she bought a flask of whiskey and two cigars. She left us, taking with her the carafe of water she had left in the morning after tucking and shuffling his blanket around his shoulders. It was mid-September now, and the first chill of winter was in the air. " Enough, Clare, leave me. 1 have a great sadness in my heart. Go now." 1 lay on my back on the gray boards at his feet, picking at slivers of wood that I stuck in my mouth and chewed on while Huck took a long pull of his glass. 71 �Energeia "Whatcha thinkin ' about, boy?" he asked with his soft, nasal twang. " Last summer, when I took care of Pyrimus and Thysbe." Huck twisted, stined, pawed with his fingernails at the wooden arm of his chair, and looked at Thule. "It was you, then?" I turned away and cried. " I meant no harm, Huck." When he laughed, I knew I was forgiven, and I sat curled between his legs, his arms wrapped around my shoulders and his chin resting on the top of my head, the two of us looking out at the river. And it happened in this way. "Thule, I'll give you ten bucks to watch Thysbe and Pyrimus while I'm away this summer." Thysbe and Pyrimus were his favorite beagles. He kept in two cages at the back of his house. When he was younger, Huck took his hounds on the chase when he hunted rabbits. That was years aao and he hadn 't let them out since he had become too old to hunt b' anymore. To the scourge of all his neighbors, they barked and howled day and night. "I wish Daddy wouldn't keep them in separate cages," Clare said once. "They wouldn't wail so at night if they were kept together. Dogs are like people, they need to touch each other and not be penned up like prisoners." It was early summer, and I was out of school. During the summer months I stayed at Grandpa's house on the river in Tenebon to keep him company with Clare, but mostly, I think, to keep me away from our farmstead in the county outside Terrebon. The youngest child, I always seemed to cause more bad than good, and I was a constant source of hindrance to the hard work that was daily farm life, busiest at that time. I was the sickliest runt of the litter, always underfoot, and my older brothers and sisters, my father and his brother Davis, had no time now to watch me, who always had a penchant for mischief. "I'll be gone a month out West, and I want you to take care of them for me while I'm gone." 72 COLBY Before he left, I called him Huck once in front of my mother. Clare's hand flashed out and slapped me. "You call him Grandpa when you talk to him." It was so unlike her, and it hurt more than her slap. Now Huck had told me to call him by his first name earlier that summer. It had been a time of big magic for me. Huck took me out on the River in his boat for the first time; I had never been allowed in the rowboat until then . "Thule, until you learn to swim you can't come fishi ng in the boat with me." When Huck packed his fi shing pole, bait, and flask of whiskey and rowed away leaving me standing on the edge of the dock alone, I cried and stamped my feet in a fit of angry tantrums which he turned his face away from as he rowed upriver with one of the dogs. But I was too scared to jump in the river and learn to swim. Day after day he rowed away, and I watched him in misery as he disappeared around Love Point and across the river towards an island off Devlan to his favorite spot near Water Rat Sandbar, a long, willowforested island where water moccasins, snapping turtles and catfish thrived. I was waiting on the dock when he came back one warm June afternoon. I grabbed the line he threw me and helped him out with his string of slapping cats' while Pyrimus jumped and nipped at my bare ankles. "Grandpa, teach me to swim." He looked at me long and hard; a smile tickled the edge of his drooping mustache. " Watch Pyrimus, boy." Huck grabbed the dog by the hunk of fur on the back of his neck and, with the other hand, the fur on his rump. He lifted him up and tossed him in a graceful arc into the river, his legs splayed wide in the afternoon sunlight. Pryimus disappeared in a splash and bobbed and popped to the surface, treading the water with his two front legs; his tail wagged with excitement as he swam to shore. When he walked onto the beach next to the dock, Pyrimus shook from himself a cascade of flying water. 73 �COLBY Energeia " See what he did in the water, boy, with his front legs?" I could smell whiskey on his breath and the stink of fish and river on his hands and shirt and pants. Huck grabbed me by the collar and the back of my belt and threw me over the side of the dock. The cold black water swallowed me and I sank, my ears ringing in fear and my eyes closing in panic. I could feel the river gulping like a windstorm around me, and when my feet touched the sandy bottom I kicked hard down at it while my arms flail ed crazy around me. When my head was out I whipped the water with my arms, but I didn 't sink again. The water stung my eyes and nose, and I spat water from my mouth, coughing. Huck was on the edge of the dock, hands on his knees, bent over laughing and shouting at me. "Swim, boy, swim!" When I reached the dock, he leaned over, pulled me up and sat me down ~n warm, sun-burnt wood. I was shivering and still coughed. Huck sat next to me, his arm wrapped around my shoulder. Pyrimus, his eyes laughing at me, licked my face. Next morning I helped load the rowboat with two bamboo-fishing poles and their red and white cork bobbers, a dog, and a whitehaired old man. I sat cross-legged in the small, triangular seat at the front of the rowboat, the very figurehead of a young god on an old clipper ship, facing fearlessly the calm sea as the ship leaves port under full sail. Halfway to the Water Rat Sandbar he told me I was always to call him Huck from now on. When Huck reached me on the edge of the dock after Clare slapped me, my check still stung, and I swallowed tears and wiped my eyes. Clare had never hit me before. Huck sat down next to me. " Look, Thule, let's keep this our secret. When we' re alone together, you call me Huck. Otherwise, around Clare and anyone else, just call me Grandpa." We sealed our trust with a spit on the palms of each other's hands and said with a solemn oath, "Cross my heart and hope to die, 74 so help me God." By the time Huck asked me to watch Pyrimus and Thysbe. I was all owed to go out in the boat by myself. Clare and Huck argued about it for days before Clare finally let me go. "Clare, he's got to cross the Ri ver alone someday," Huck said. "I ' ve taught him all I can of the ri verways. Let hi m go ." I could hear Clare crying in her room when I tried to ki ss her goodbye that first morning. "Go away," She screamed at me. But halfway down the hill to the dock she caught up with me. My bamboo pole got tangled in her shawl when she hugged me and covered my forehead with kisses. " Don't go down river, Thule," Huck said. " I know yo u' re going to want to do it someday, we all are tempted by it. But stay away from The Great Black Swamp and the Island of The Butterfly Tree. Since Adam and Eve's time it's been a dangerous place. And now, like all men, you' ve got the taste of the apple in yo ur mouth.'" My mother stood with Huck on the edge of the dock until I turned a bend in the river and lost sight of them. Out of the mist Water Rat's Sandbar loomed ahead of me like Treasure Island ... Huck wasn't too well the rest of that summer, and he went west to Arizona and the hot dry air around Camelback and Tuba City where some of Halo of the Sun's fam ily still lived. Halo of the Sun had died the winter before, and Huck wanted to see family that couldn't come to her funeral. Most lived in shacks at the foot of the Suspicion Mountains near what is present-day Scottsdale. I was so proud to take care of Huck's two hunters. We were pals, the three of us that summer. "Take 'em out everyday and run 'em, Thule. I can 't anymore," Huck told me when he got on the train. " But make sure you put them back in their pens alone each night." 1 did . We ran through fields of greening wheat washed by hot summer winds and I spent lazy-lulling afternoons bare-assed in the clear 75 �Energeia cool water near Rat's Bar while snakes and snappers warmed themselves on the rock in the swirling water. On a big flat rock offshore of Rat's Bar I lay to dry in the afternoon sun like a turtle as minnows nibbled at my ankles and golden sand bubbled up between my toes. By the dock was a table where I cleaned the fish I caught for our supper later that night. After sunrise, Clare never saw me- - 1 always brought a sandwich with me in the boat-until supper, when we ate the fish I caught that day. Afterwards, she saw me again only after sunset, when she rang the great cowbell on the porch calling me home to bed. One afternoon, Pryimus and Thysbe played together in a way 1 had never seen them play before. "What are they doing?" 1 asked Big Wayne, a boy who lived down the street from Huck's house and whom I had known for several summers on my stays at Huck's house in Terrebon. He was older than me and, in the blunt language of a thirteen-year old kid, told me what they were doing. It was a coarse word I had only heard in school locker rooms, whispered, tossed fleeting from other boys with hushed secrecy. It had no meaning for me. Soon Big Wayne and I had a regular crown of neighborhood boys and girls every afternoon sitting in circles around Pyrimus and Thysbe in the woods near Huck's house, behind the wood shack, watching them at their endless dance and play. Day after day we watched them play. It was hot that July, and folks kept their windows open to the cool Minnesota breezes that blew fresh off the river at night, smelling of the great here and now, wisteria, and a bit of forever, too . "Thank God those dogs are quiet now every night," Clare said to me. "It's good you let them out and run them everyday so we can sleep a little more." Huck came back later that summer, more tired, I thought, than when he left, and quieter than before. Summer was nearly over. I was burned brown from the summer sun and in late August I went back with Clare to our farm outside Terrebon, for Clare, and even I, were needed now, as the harvest-time had just begun. Back to the dreadful days of school, tedious farm chores and the winter of boredom that was my home 76 COLBY life. When I saw Huck for my birthday in mid-September, Thysbe had a litter of pups sucking at her stomach in her pen. "I just can 't understand, Thule, how this could have happened : Pyrimus and Thysbe are never together, " Huck said, "I just can 't understand. " He scratched and shook his head. Nor could I, until I remembered, like a sudden thunderclap of lightning over Rat 's Bar in the back of my memory, their ritual dance and play at the wood shed. "Can I have one of them, Huck?" We had all gathered at Huck 's house for the weekend : it was my birthday, and rather than have Huck, who was rather weak and tired these days, travel the twenty miles to the farm to celebrate it with us, we spent the weekend with him. Huck always loved family gatherings at his big house on the river, even more so now that Halo of the Sun was gone. I named him Lucky. I have been a river man all my life, and love to watch the fog as it burns offin the morning sunlight. I begin now to see the shape my death is about to rake, like the river islands hecomi11g more visible around me as the fog lifts. When I looked at myself in my mirror this morning, I felt like Helen of Troy must have, wondering in her pitiless old age how she could ever have been loved, and, like her, I wept that I had ever been carried away now that I am grown so wrinkled and craggy. My eyes looked back at me, and my face spoke only ofthe passage oftimes gone by. The river is five miles wide here. Up river, a boat was just barely visible on the horizon north of where he sat on the dock's edge. Winter was in the air, and Huck saw that boat coming slowly towards him with two people in it. When it touched the dock next to him, Halo of the Sun sat smiling up at him . "Come on, Huck. Time we go downriver to The Island of The Butterfly Tree together. Pay the man his toll. " A wind rushed in Huck's ears; sun fi lled his eyes with pulsing 77 �flares of streaming rainbows and light: the River stood still and calm before him, wide as forever. The tiller man held his hand out and took a tarnished lndianhead penny from Huck's fingers . When I came later that afternoon to gather him for his supper, the rowboat had been tied to the dock. Grandpa Huck 's wheelchair was empty. On the table a tumbler lay on its side, the flask nearly empty now; an uncut cigar lay next to it. Huck's blanket lay in a halfcircle around the wheels of his chair like an abandoned and empty cocoon's shell. I sat down in the cane-wickered chair, took off my shoes and stockings and wrapped Huck's blanket around my shoulders. Cl~re found me later that afternoon sitting on the edge of the dock, while my feet dangling in the swirl of cool water. The river is five miles wide here. On some fall mornings, l can see from my office window the barely discernable shadow of Water Rat's Sandbar in the river mist. The river is five miles wide. When I got home that night, my daughter Clare wrestled with old Lucky in the back yard, and Marian 's supper lay waiting when she called us in to the table. A Current Past Katrina Gersie for Daddy What I want is to hold you here, or better yet to take you back, and relive a memory that is too much for my aching head to hold now, too bright, too brilliant, as heavy as What I felt on the river that day, like concrete, the current sluggish. I remember it, broken by the prow of a birch-bark canoe, and algae-insect river smell, and deep silence, like What I knew in my bones, that I would have a thousand other days like this, and that we were as continuous and unbroken as time. You and I could never bear to sleep, but it was easier on soil, and it was easier to ask What I asked when things got slow around the fire, logs crackling: who says time is linear? If it is, and things slip by and are drowned in the river, if you are forced to sleep, I will offer this, hold, feel, and know it: What I am is the first glass of wine, sweet, that I drank by the fire, the soil, rising from the ri ver, that cradles our bones, a prow slicing through the sti llness, and the good talk that kept me awake all night long. 78 79 �Conversation and Community: On the Phaedo John Verdi In real life we are likely to be disappointed by our own last words and those of other people. There is no good reason to expect that the imminence of death will focus our minds on something profound, or lend our tongues an eloquence they lacked while we flourished. Our attention at the end-should we even have attention-will probably be turned to something such as Emily Dickinson describes about her own moment of death: "l heard a Fly buzzwhen I died." From others the words we'd so much like to hear are, frankly, those that would be spoken just after death, impossible words, that might comfort or inform us. But these words we never hear, not in real life. In a work of art, however, endings must be revelatory, flush with meaning, because the artist has crafted his work to come to this. No chance buzzing fly can free the artist or us from their invitation. And so in the Phaedo, a work of art almost entirely about endings, the last words of a great talker compel us to investigation. We cannot slight their significance. The final words of Socrates are these: ~Q Kp_lTOV .. .TW AoKf]TTlc.;3 ocpEit-oµEv at-EKTpuova a/,/,a cXTTOOOTE Kat µ~ aµEt-~Of]TE. (I 18A) Here are a few translations I found. Drawing/or Freshman Laboratory Kristina Dimitrijevic Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? (Jowett) Crito, we owe a cock to Asklepios; pray do not forget to pay the debt. (Hackforth) 80 81 �Energeia Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget. (Grube) Crito , we owe a cock to Asclepius. So pay the debt and don't be careless. (Brann, Kalkavage, Salem) One attempt to understand the last words of Socrates can be found in Nietzsche's book, The Gay Science, in a section cal led The dying Socrates. Whether it was death or the poison or piety or malicesometh ing loosened his tongue at that moment and he said: "O Crito, l owe Asclepius a rooster." This ridiculous and terrible " last word" means for those who have ears: "O Crito, life is a disease." ls it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien while concealing all his life long his ultimate judgment, his inmost feeling. Socrates, Socrates suffered life! Among commentators on the Phaedo, Nietzsche does not stand alone in suggesting that Socrates's sacrifice to the god of healing means that he considers his death to be a restoration of his health. For instance Jacob Klein, in a lecture given here some decades ago, says that "Socrates's last words imply that he is recovering from the most disastrous disease, the one that imprisons his soul in his body. He is recovering from this disease because his soul is leaving its prison." (Published in The College, January, 1975.) . . There are some good reasons for accepting the N 1 etzsche-Klem take on Socrates's last words. Socrates attributes to Cebes the suggestion that life is a disease (950), and it is not clear that he ever explicitly denies this idea. His own characterization ~fthe philo~o­ pher as "devoting himself as much as possible to dying and being dead" (64A) and of philosophy as "the care of death," (in Greek, melete thanatou, 81 A) seem to support at least the interpretation that the philosopher would prefer to be separated from his body, if that could be accompli shed without impiety. Socrates's overall at- 82 V ERDI titude on this his last day also suggests that, if he is not confident that he is going to a better place, at least he has high hopes. Looking again at the translations, lefs leave aside for now the obvious and obviously troubling " problem of the plural." rl l come back later to the verb opheilomen, which is a second person plural rendered as singular by both Nietzsche and Jowett, and understood as singular by Klein and others. For now we' ll assume that Nietzsche, who knew quite a bit of Greek, at least got the translation right, or at least got it just the way he wanted it. I would like to raise fi rst the question of Asclepius and why his name should be o n Socrates's lips as the hemlock makes its way to his heart. Asclepius was considered to be a son of Apoll o and a god related to healing and recovery from sickness. People would offer sacrifices to him in at least three di fferent ways. First, those who were cured of sickness, either by some medication or simply by time, might offer thanks to Asclepius for the recovery of their health. " I was ill, now I am well. Thanks be to the god." This is what they might have said. Others who were ill would supplicate Asclepius with a sacrifice before going to sleep, hopeful that they would awaken cured. "I am ill. Please, god, make me well.'' This could have been their prayer. Still others would take themselves to a kind of temple called an askleipion, the most famous of which was in Epidaurus, in the eastern Peloponnese. Here they w_ ould sleep and dream, and upon waking, would have their dreams interpreted by a servant of Asclepius. The explication would usually contain some suggestion for remedy, whereupon the sick person would offer the sacrifice and go away. " I am ill. Thanks be to the god for the prescription." Now it may not be important in the end exactly how we imagine Socrates is imagining the purpose of his sacrifice to Asclepius. But the Phaedo is a work of art, and if Socrates 's very last thoughts are not merely taken up with the buzzing of some fly, then we ought to wonder which of the three prayers he means to make. If Socrates feels obligated to Asclepius for a cure already effected , or clearly about to be, then N ietzsche's interpretation makes some sense. Life in the body is sickness, death or release from the body is health, and because Socrates won't be able to offer the cock himself, he asks his friend to do it in his behalf. If death is a kind of 83 �Energeia sleep, the sacrifice might be of the second kind, made by Socrat~s with the hope that he will awaken on the other side cured. In this scenario Socrates still considers life a sickness, but he is not so sure that death will be its cure. The third perspective on what a sacrifice to Asclepius signifies requires that the patient have a dream and that this be interpreted to get at a prescription for a cure. Socrates does tell us (60E) about a dream he has repeatedly had, in which he is always told to .. make music and work at it!" He has until recently confidently understood this to mean that he is to pursue philosophy, though since his imprisonment some doubts have led him to set some of Aesop's fabl~s to poetry. In this scenario Socrates is both patient and interpreter; if life is the sickness, then philosophy, not death, is the prescribed cure. (I'll note in passing that immediately following this scene, before the. friends begin their discussion of death and immortality, Socrates puts his feet on the ground. lt is not until 117E,just before he speaks his last words, that he raises them up again. From a dramatic point of view, then, the dream discussion and the last words follow immediately upon one another.) These then are the three ways l 've come up with to think about why a sacrifice to Asclepius might be on Socrates's mind as he lay dying. They all suggest that Socrates thought life to be a sickness, and the body something best to be turned away from as much as possible. lfthis is true, however-and we would be in very good company if we accepted it as simply true-why then does Plato tell us ( 1168) that Socrates had three sons, one big and two small? Why do the friends find his wife, Xanthippe, already with him when they join him very early on that last morning? And why do his bodily feelings of pleasure and pain upon the removal of his chains serve as an introduction to a philosophical discussion of some of the most important things? Socrates has counseled his friends (67C) to separate "the soul from the body as much as possible and [habituate] her to gather and collect herself all by herself out of all the sites of the body," but he also caresses Phaedo's head and plays with his hair in one of the most purely sensuous scenes in Plato. Perhaps the offering to Asclepius is for a sickness, perhaps something is or becomes 84 VERDI sick in the course of the dialogue, but need the sickness be life itself? Lefs allow the grammar to open another door and turn to the problem of the plural. The verb opheilomen is a second person plural, of that there is no doubt, so it ought to be translated "we owe." Unlike " I," "we" is not unambiguous in its referent. Socrates might mean himself and Crito, or maybe all those present in the prison room. Plato might even intend "we'' to refer to all readers of the Phaedo for all time. If Socrates means only himself and Crito, then "we" effectively becomes " I,'' and something like the NietzscheKlein view of the last words becomes difficult to escape. What makes it unlikely, though, that by "we" Socrates means only himselfand Crito are the plurals that follow opheilomen. Both apodote and me amelesete (" pay the debt'' and ''don't be careless") are second person plurals, the first an imperative, the second a prohibitive subjunctive with the force of an imperative. Socrates cannot be using them to refer to himself and Crito because imperatives cannot refer to oneself. Socrates must mean something like " you all pay the debt," and so probably he meant something like "we all owe a cock to Asclepius." The grammar hints at something worthwhile: none of the three understandings of the sacrifice to Asclepius that I suggested earlier can be correct, because the only healing that has taken place, or about which there can be hope, must be a healing for all in that room, not only for Socrates. Neither of the first two interpretations would hold up if we take the grammar strictly, because only Socrates is about to die. The third would pose a problem because Socrates is the only one to have related a dream. The sickness can only be of the whole group, of all of them, as must be the cure. Our own second sailing is called for. Our first, propelled by the winds of Nietzsche, leaves us at sea. We do not yet know what Socrates's last words might mean, and so how can we have any idea what the Phaedo as a whole might mean? Yet can we confidently translate these final words without some sense of the dialogue in its entirety? We here confront in small form one of the paradoxes of translation: how to translate the part without knowing the whole. Yet how can we grasp the whole before translating all the parts? We 85 �Energeia would like to translate the entire work at once, the whole and parts mutually illuminating one another simultaneously. But we can't. So we take out the oars and row back to the beginning of the dialogue. (Why didn 't we start at the beginning?) Here we encounter the story of Theseus and his ship. In the time when Aegeus ruled Athens, the Athenians, due to some unpleasant business, were forced by Minos, king of Crete, to pay a tribute every nine years. They were to send seven boys and seven girls to be eaten by the Minotaur, the hybrid love-chi ld of Minos's wife and a beautiful bull. When the tribute came due the third time, Theseus, who was Aegeus's son, volunteered to go in place of one of the victims, hoping to slay the Minotaur in its labyrinth, return with the hostages, and free Athens from this odious tribute. The city of Athens vowed to Apollo that they would send a mission every year to Apollo's temple in Delos ifTheseus succeeded, which he did. (He also carried off Minos 's daughter, Ariadne, whom he later abandoned .) In response to Echecrates 's question as to why the delay between the trial and death of Socrates was so long, Phaedo tel Is him that the Athenians have a custom to perform no executions while the ship carl)·ing this tribute to Delos is out of port. This time winds kept the ship away from Athens longer than usual, hence the delay. The story ofTheseus and the Minotaur provides a backdrop for the dialogue, perhaps even a skeleton. Fourteen people present in the prison with Socrates are named by Phaedo. Socrates is surely Theseus. Perhaps one of them is meant to be Ariadne. Plato, by the way, was absent, and thought by Phaedo to have been ill. When we look to the center of the dialogue, where we might expect to find our Minotaur, two powerful hobgoblins confront us: fear of death and hatred of the logos, or misology, perhaps reflecting the monster's own dual nature. Simmias says (888) the confidence that characterizes anybody who's confident in the face of death is a mindless confidence so long as he can't demonstrate that the soul is altogether deathless and imperishable. And if he cannot, then it's necessary that a man about to die always fear for his to 86 VERDI soul, in case she should altogether perish in her imminent unyoking from the body. And just a few lines later (89D), Socrates tells his friend s that "it is not possible for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments." In the dia logue these two forces are linked. because the failure of the early arguments for immortality to withst~nd scrutiny is what leads the group to both a deepened anxiety over death and a heightened mistrust of discussion. If these constitute the sickness for which Socrates urges the sacrifice to Asclepius in his last moments, then perhaps we have come closer to understanding those words. Whether the sacrifice be in thanksgiving for a cure already performed or in supplication for one yet to be, we still would not know. I doubt, though, that Socrates-or anyone--<:ould, through his words free us once and for all of the fear of death, or mistrust of argument-logos. Socrates knows this is the work of a Iifetime. His most pressing concern, I think, on this his last day is to keep alive the conversation among his companions and help prevent the community of friends from perishing after his own death. The loss of just one man threatens both the ongoing conversation and the very life of this small group of thinkers. When I spoke of the grammar of Socrates's last words, I suggested that the plural verbs urge us to consider that the illness to which Socrates alludes is shared by all those with him. The grammar, however, cannot help us determine whether we are to understand the "we" as "all of us taken singly as individuals" or something like "all of us constituting a single community." Does Socrates focus on the confrontation with the death that each of us faces alone and our own private mistrust of arguments that purpo11 to point u~ toward the truth? Or is he concerned as much with the death of conversation in a community and how to keep both conversation and community alive? The Theseus story might once again be able to help a bit. Near the beginning of the dialogue, when Echecrates asks Phaedo what ship had been responsible for the delay in Socrates's execution, Phaedo says: "This, as the Athenians say, is the vessel in which Theseus once went off leading those twice seven 87 �Energeia C rete." (58B) Plutarch, in his Life ofTheseus, tells us more. He says that [t]he ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus [350 BC] , for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. (23 .1) The ship of Theseus, then, stands not only as a symbol of the success of Theseus 's battle with the Minotaur and as the signal for the death of Socrates. It also raises for us the question of how thingsships, people, conversations, communities-maintain their identity over time . Plato has in fact suggested that this might be an important theme in the dialogue by the word that begins the entire work, a utos, or self. The dialogue begins when Echecrates asks Phaed o : autos, o P haidon, paregenou Socratei, were you yourself with Socrates, Phaedo? (57 A) It is important that Phaedo himself have been there, that he remembers and can tell Echecrates what took place on Socrates's last day. But even ifthe immortality of the soul can squeak by, is there an argument in the dialogue for the identity of self and soul? Even if psyche, the soul as life-giver, remains alive forever, what happens to me, autos? Is not this the question we really want asked-and answered? Let's take seriously for a minute the puzzle about the continuing identity of the ship of Theseus. This ship has been replaced over the centuries, piecemeal. Tattered sails have been removed, worn-out rigging replaced, new lumber substituted for the very wood on which Theseus himself walked, until finally no physical part of the original ship can be said to remain . ls the ship that signals the death day of Socrates the same one that helped free Athe ns from the horror of the Minotaur? In what would we say the identity of the ship consisted? Certainly the shape and size are the same, the kinds 88 VERDI of materials are likely to be the same or very similar, it still floats and sails, and has over the years maintained all these qualities . But also, people have talked about it as the ship of Theseus, it has been used for a long time as a ship sent on a very specific mission , to offer sacrifice to Apollo. And it occupies a certain status in Athens, so exalted a position, that during its absence on this mission no public executions can take place. In other words it has maintained a unique place in the polis, regardless of what has happened to its parts. And work has been needed to preserve it in a condition to serve its purpose. It has not come by its immortality simply by its own nature. Now, if a ship had a soul, we might think that the soul of Theseus 's ship has lasted the many centuries since the time of Theseus, and that the work done to maintain the ship in usable condition has had something to do with keeping ship and soul together. Of course we can 't say that the ship 's soul is like a human soul , because a ship 's life is not at all like a human life, though bound up with human life. But whether or not the soul of the ship is equivalent to the identity of the ship, that is, whatever allows us to call this ship today the ship of Theseus, seems an odd question to put, for what could the soul of the ship be other than what makes the ship to be what it is? And what could this be, in the case of the ship, other than the configuration of its parts, its purpose, activity and the collective memory of those who witness all these? In the case of the ship, soul and self seem one and the same. People are different. In what does the identity of a person consist? What makes us the same over time, even though our own body is regenerating and may not be very different in some respects from Theseus 's ship? If there are physical parts of the body that never wear away, would we want to call these what we a re, what maintains us as individuals? I think not. We m ight say that the soul is what I am, and that is why its immortality concerns me. But ifthe soul is a principle that gives and sustains life, it need not as such also give and sustain identity. And so the question of my own survival , the survival of autos, may be different from that of the survival of my soul. Socrates cannot assure us that the individual soul is immortal , 89 �Energeia though he shows some ways in which we might think about it. In the myth of the true earth, he suggests that the soul and the self may be one, or closely connected, because my actions in this life affect the condition of my soul. This question of autos and psyche, perhaps the most important one not directly addressed in the dialogue, remains alive after Socrates is dead. If autos and psyche are one, if my immortality is equivalent to the immortality of my soul, then I shall remain genuinely interested in the immortality of my soul. But ifthe continuing identity of me as a person is not the same as the existence of the same soul in my body, then I at least become more interested in how to maintain my identity, and the importance of my soul's immortality fades . All these questions, however, will never be explored if the conversation dies. This conversation, which is a form the logos takes in community, requires work to keep it alive. Arguments that become worn must be jettisoned, replaced with new ones, in a neverending effort to keep the ship afloat, for without such caretaking, the logos in this form can die. Misology can kill it, if we come to think that replacements cannot be found for every defective argument. If we come to rely entirely on only certain ways of thinking and talking about a question, then when these ways are mortally challenged or shown to be-or become-corrupted, we'll find no escape but to abandon the sinking ship. Simmias says that to know anything about such matters in our life now is either impossible or something altogether hard, while again not to test in every way what's said about them and to back off before one is worn out with investigating them from every side, is the part of a really soft man .... He must learn or discover what's the case, or, if that's impossible, he must sail through life in the midst of danger, seizing on the best and least refutable of human accounts ... and let himself be carried upon it as on a raft. (85C) It is for the survival of the conversation that Socrates and his friends owe a cock to Asclepius. And if we return to the very last word of Socrates, me amelesete, do not be careless, we may come 90 VERDI to believe that his ultimate concern is not simply for the sacrifice to Asclepius. Crito, at I I SB, had asked Socrates what his last instructions were for those present. To this Socrates responds: By caring for yourselves, you'll be doing whatever you do as a favor to me and to mine and to yourselves, even if you don 't agree to anything now. But if you're careless (amelhte) of yourselves and aren't willing to live in the footsteps of the things said now and in the time before, no matter how many agreements you may make at present ...you won 't be doing much . Here Socrates uses the very same verb, amelein , as in his last word . Here the form is again a second person plural. He is not telling Crito not to neglect the sacrifice or not perform it careless ly. Rather, he is exhorting his friends not to abandon the care they have come to have both for one another and for philosophy. Now in closing I'll offer a few words about our community, St. John's College. We are known as the Great Books school , the college where the entire curriculum is core. We are lesser known for what is an equally important characteristic: we are the school in which the logos manifests itself primarily as conversation. The art of conversation as we practice it consists less in drawing conclusions and arriving at truths than in finding the maximum amount of common ground with others, and in discovering increasingly more fruitful ways of speaking with one another about books and ideas. Our goal we might say is not so much to reach shore, but to keep our ship sailing. Conversations possess this power, that when carried on well, when not merely the exchange of unshakeable or superficial opinions, but instead sincere and sympathetic efforts to adopt other perspectives and to see with other eyes, they can help us revision our world and ourselves. Coming to understand something through conversation is more like getting acquainted with a person than like following an argument. Coming to understand takes time, exposure and familiarity. It takes conversation in that old sense of the word, which means living and dealing with others. Philosophy, for both Socrates and us, is a common endeavor that requires both conversation and community. Our work in some sense is to be caretakers of the logos, and our community works at 91 �Energeia maintaining the life of the logos as conversation. The immortality, if such it may be called, that arises from this work obviously transcends any one argument or conversation or book or person. Perhaps it is the best version of immortality for which we can reasonably hope. I don't know. The Phaedo begins and ends with sacrifice. The city of Athens commemorates its liberation and renewed life by an offering to Apollo. Socrates and a small group of friends thank Apollo 's son for restoring their conversation and keeping their community going through its greatest crisis, the loss of its most important member. For us here the job is probably a little easier, but no less important. 92 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 92 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nemer, Alexis (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2006 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in 2006. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia 2006 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/eb4809926da3c901106eab9719f8869f.pdf e9a1224c8e338f0b1c2396c95e6aaf34 PDF Text Text SPRING 2001 �Energy. [ad. late L. energia. Gr. , ' EVEpyeta f. evepyfis, f. EV+ epyov work. Cf. Fr. energie. Sense 1 and 2 belong to evepyeta as used by Aristotle . .. .] 1. With reference to speech or writing: Force or vigor of expression. b. traruf. Impressiveness (of an event). 2. Exercise of power, actual working, operation, activity; freq. in philosophical language. concr: The product of activity, an effect. b. Effectual operation ; efficacy. t Formerly also -from The Oxford English Dictionary �Contents Energeia, Spring 2001 Editor: Ian Jungbacker Untitled; Rebekah Coleman . .. . .. . . . . . . .. ...... . ..... .... 1 Biblical Doppelganger; Moshe Marvit . . ... ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 2 Junior Editor: Peter Heyneman Editorial Board: Tessa Fallon Iva Ziza Julia Bell Stephen Palopoli Kristin Masser . ...... ... .. . 14 Smoking; Kristin Masser. . . .. . . Twelve Years, First Words; Alicia Potee. . .. .. . . .. ... .. . . . . .. 15 . .. 16 Untitled; Sara W ilson. Eating Human; Alan Rubenstein . .. ........ .. 17 Translations; Laura Strache, Anderson Tallent ..... .. ...... . 32 Design: Kristin Masser Front Cover: Reclining Nude; Caroline Picard Back Cover: Silhouettes; Sylvaine Ramekers No to 509; Peter Speer . . ... .. . ..... . .... . ........ . ... . . .. .. . . . 33 The Badlands; Caroline Picard ... . The Problem with Reason; A~Jin .. .. 34 Kim .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . .35 Tecumseh; Cara Gormally .. .. . .... .. .. . . . .. . . .. . .. . . ... . . .. .. 43 Untitled; Amelia Murchio ... .. . .... .. ... . ..· . .. .. . . .... . ..... .44 Brahms Requiem; Alek Chance ..... ... .. . ..... .. . .. . . . .... . . 4 5 Fire and Rain; Andrew Ferguson ·... . . . . .. . . . . . .. . .. . . . . . . . .. 46 Untitled; Rebekah Coleman..... . . . . . ... . . .. . . . ......... .... 49 Encomium:Translation of Ronsard; Ian Jungbacker. .50 Untitled; Sara Wilson . ... .. .. .. . ... .... ... .. ... . .. . .. . .. . ... . . 51 �The Energeia staff would like extend its thanks to Chris Colby and the St. John's College Print Shop, Bud Billups, Jon Cooper, James Gilmore, Alex Owen, Jack Roche, Lars Peterson, Laura Strache, and Sarah Consbruck. Energeia is a non,profit, studenHun magazine published annually and distributed to students, faculty, alumni and staff on both St. John's campuses. All essays, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, photographs, paintings, and the like by members of the community are welcome for the 2002 edition. Send all submissions to Peter Heyneman, c/o St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD, 21404. �1 Untitled Rebekah Coleman, A'04 ENERGEIA �2 MARVIT Biblical Doppelganger Moshe Marvit, ~02 Isaac is born to laughing old people. He falls into a waiting position that was tailored to fit his father and now must fit him. Isaac is incongruous with his position and quickly shows his inability to react to people and situations in the ways of his father. In his deviated pantomime and overzealous attachments Isaac appears as a pathetic and tragic character. This makes it possible to laugh at Isaac. From the moment the idea of Isaac is conceived, throughout his shadowy life, up until his death, Isaac fits awkwardly into the rank of forefather. As he lives his strange life, Isaac allows all those around him to laugh. Out of this laughter grows fraternal and marital love, and relationships become defined. Isaac's ineptness also allows Fear for God to finally be understood and put into practice. At the beginning, God makes a promise to Abram, "I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing" (Genesis, XII.2). For this promise to come true, Abram must necessarily have a son. Abram begets Ishmael with Hagar, but Ishmael is not the one to fulfill the prophecy. After Ishmael is born, Abraham pleads with God to make Ishmael the chosen son. "And Abraham said unto God: Oh that Ishmael might live in your presence!" (XVII.18). But it cannot be Ishmael, because he is the child of Hagar and does not fit the definition of the man "that shall come forth out of [Abraham's] own bowels" (XV.4). The bowels of Abraham are defined by the womb of Sarah; God replies to Abraham's plea with a resounding refusal. "And God said: Nay, but Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son; and thou shalt call his name Isaac; and I will establish My with him an everlasting covenant for his seed after him" (XVII.19). Isaac is born to define what relationships are. One of these relationships is the marriage between a man and woman; because of the provisions that accompany Isaac's birth, he shows that only husband or only wife can define the marriage. Until Isaac's birth, the children that are born hardly have a relationship with their respective mothers. It is written that they are children of their fathers and they act in relation to their fathers' houses, but there is not a serious mention of mothers. There is Eve who gives birth to Cain, "with help of God" (IV.l), and then to Abel soon after. After birthing, Eve is not mentioned again in relation to her children or otherwise until she gives birth to Seth, meaning 'appointed', saying, "for God hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, for Cain slew him" (IV.25). This formulaic approach towards the death of Abel and the banishment of Cain, where a new child can take the place of a dead one, is indicative of the lack of maternal affection towards Cain or Abel. Her statement here shows that she is aware of the incident, but there was never any talk of sadness when Cain killed Abel; nor was there any pleading with God on Cain's behalf. Instead, she seems content with the replacement child that God gives her, and names him as if it is a fair trade . This world of Adam and Eve decays and is flooded, leaving only a different sort of Adam and Eve. Noah and his wife, and his sons and their wives, and representatives from all the animals in the animal kingdom are saved. Noah is the new father in this third new world. In the Garden of Eden, man has a wife, but there are no children. East of Eden, children are born, but they are not described as children of their parents in any other way than that the parents begot the children. The parents follow the commandment of, "Be fruitful and multiply" (I.28) in the same way that the animals do, but they hesitate to take the commandment to a human level. Now, in this new world after the flood, Noah has children, but is missing a wife insofar as she remains nameless and never acts. "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and He said unto them: Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth" (IX.l), but there is hardly any mention of who Noah is to be fruitful with. Under this system, God makes a new covenant with Noah and all who are alive that "nei- ENERGEIA 3 ther shall all the flesh be cut off any more of the waters of the flood; and neither shall there be any more a flood to destroy the earth" (IX.11). Even without the threat of a flood, this new world quickly disintegrates. Noah plants a vineyard and waits the necessary time to get drunk and naked. In this instance of drunkenness, Noah falsely loses the sense of shame in his nudity that Adam and Eve picked up in the Garden. He is arrogantly opening himself up to the world and allowing the control that is natural of a man to escape him. While Noah is naked and unconscious, "Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside" (IX.22). There is an ambiguity here in what is implied in seeing Noah naked. Since when Noah awoke, "[He] knew what there had done unto him his youngest son" (IX.24), this "seeing" sounds more like an impressionable act, most probably sexual. Noah knows-with all of the Biblical connotations included in the word ' 'knowing' -what had been done to him. This is difficult to imagine if seeing only meant seeing. It must be remembered that Noah's sons are children of the pre-flood world, where the men "took themselves wives, from all that they chose" (VI.2). This description is not restricted to women, or even human beings, so that raping one's father while he is unconscious would not necessarily be beyond the realm of their imaginations. Ham shows here that he is confused in how to relate to his father and where to place his sexuality. Before the flood, man placed it anywhere, but that warranted the destruction of the earth; when Ham places his sexuality with his father, it warrants the destruction of the family. Ham's action is one that is abhorrent in the eyes of Noah and Noah shows the final mark that the family has disintegrated in his reply to his son, the father of Canaan. Noah curses Ham saying: "Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said: Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be their servant. God enlarged J apeth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be their servant" (IX.25-7). In Noah's impetuous over-severity, he shows that one cannot curse or remove one piece of the family without it having resounding effect on the family as a whole. Here, he means to curse only Ham, but inadvertently curses all of his children. Noah curses Ham to be the servant of servants, but these servants that Ham's descendents will serve are none other than Noah's other two children, Shem and J apheth. This new familial hierarchy that Noah sets up, where every member is a slave and one slave is a lower-level slave to the other two, cannot work. To be a member of a family one must periodically reaffirm the bonds that exist. In slavery there is no such reaffirmation. Service is a difficult thing to perform properly because in addition to these reaffirmations it involves knowledge of position in relation to the master, a trust of the master, and an acceptance by both parties of their respective positions. Both the servant and the master must be in his or her position voluntarily. Once one person becomes confused, the situation quickly shows its fragility. An instance of this on a much larger scale is what follows almost immediately after Noah's curse. The people in the famous city in Shinar, with its infamous tower, take their service to God to an extreme. They are a people, united under one language and a paranoiac fear, which may indeed be trying to serve God in their monumental endeavor. The people of Babel have no firm conception of their place in relation to their master's place and they wish to solidify it. This family of servants may be speaking honestly when they say, "Come let us build a city, and a tower, with its top in the heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth" (XI.4). After Babel the solitary people are spread out all over the earth and new families grow from them. In one of these lands, from one of these families, God chooses a man named Abram and tells him, "get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee" (XII.1). Abram is told that if he follows God and starts a family under Him, then this family will be a great people that will only have to be slaves for a short period (XII. 2, XV.13). Abram follows God, but the family does not form. Abram grows old and begets Ishmael, but this cannot be his chosen son because it does not involve Sarai. Abraham and Sarah follow God and a son is finally born to them whom they name Isaac. �4 MARVIT Thus far, every major character in the Bible is named a certain name because of something related to his birth and, generally, his life. Many of · them have lived up to their names in such a way that it was changed midlife to something more befitting their individual character. Adam means 'ground', which is in reference to where he came from and, because of his disobedience, where he must sweat; God says, "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life" (III.17). Adam's wife is named 'Woman', "because out of Man was this one taken" (II.23), and then Adam changes her name to Eve, mean· ing 'life', "because she was the mother of all living" (III.20). Cain means 'to get' or 'acquire' because, Eve says, "I have gotten a man with the help of God" (IV.l) and Abel means 'vanity' or, more literally, 'an exhalation of a breath', which fits Abel because he was the first to take his last exhalation of breath. Each of these characters' names meant something throughout his or her life, but each personified his or her name when each had reached his or her end. Abram and Sarai are the first to have their names changed at a pivotal moment in their lives so that the two names of each person mark different chapters in each life. Originally Abram meant 'father of Abram' and Sarai meant 'my princess'. Abram's name was changed to Abraham (XVII.5), meaning 'father of all' and Sarai's to Sarah (XVII.15), meaning 'the princess'. Abram's and Sarai's names were changed when they were both close to one hundred years old. The impossibility of them begetting children has been apparent for some time and as they get their names changed together there is a demand that they have children together. The act of naming in the Bible is never an empty event that haphazardly attaches any word to a thing; it is always a personal characteristic that determines the name and follows the person throughout his or her life. When the name is changed, the two names gain more significance because with two names there is a documented evolution in time of the change of that character. Then there was Isaac. Isaac is a shadow. He is born a child of necessity under the most auspicious of circumstances. He is the first sign of God's covenant, but the very thought of him induces laughter, a laugh- ter that is, in many of its manifestations, improper. The laughter takes form and Isaac is born to an· dent parents. He is the first to be born, have a life, and die in the Bible. All those before him, such as Abraham, Noah, Cain, and others are either chosen or they have no mention of either life or death. In a way, he is the first to be placed in the situa· tion that he is in. Abraham was chosen, and agreed, to be father of a great nation, but Isaac was born into the position. The position that Isaac found himself in was right for Abraham, a man who will argue with God about mortality, but is far too big for Isaac. Throughout his incongruous life, Isaac mimics his father in a seemingly unholy way. He repeats the actions with different intentions and a change in the details, so that they end up appear· ing shameful. Isaac is unable to understand the actions of Abraham because he hardly has a: relationship with him. It is of the utmost importance that Isaac be related to Sarah in a certain way, but almost at the expense of any relationship with Abraham. Even his relationship with Sarah is over· zealous. It is difficult for Isaac to find a mean con· cerning his mother and father because he is the first in his situation. His inability to place himself properly in relation to other people is further manifested throughout his life and then in his confused relationship with his sons and wife. Isaac is not necessarily blameworthy for these ways. Ever since he was born, Isaac was born to be a forefather, a forefather much like Abraham, but with further purposes. These further purposes are what require that Isaac be a pathetic and unable character. Isaac is only one in a string of characters not to personify his name such that it is changed. He does laugh and cause laughter several times, but God never changes his name to something bigger than laughter. For Isaac there is nothing larger than laughter. His ability to introduce it into the Bible allows for strong and defined relation· ships to exist that could not have existed before. Although Isaac's name never changes, the notion of laughter and how to laugh changes and redefines how those after him can relate to each other. Isaac is a product of laughter. Whenever anyone hears of the possibility or of the actuality of Isaac, he or she immediately laughs. When God makes his covenant with Abraham by changing 5 ENERGEIA Abram's name and promising him a kingdom in return for circumcision, Abraham does not reply in the expected God-fearing way. "Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed" (XVII.17). Abraham is very aware of his and Sarah's age and capabilities. The very possibility of a child being born to such an elderly couple, even with the aid of God, is ridiculous. God has already given Abraham wealth and helped him, with only three hundred and eighteen men, defeat four rampaging kings who have captured Lot (XIV); but these miracles are of a different quality. These events are miraculous, but they happen. The birth of a child to hundred-year-old parents is an inconceivable possibility, even with the aid of a God. It is so inconceivable that all Abraham can do is laugh in the face of G od. Laughter is generally not the beginning or cause of a th ing, but rather the end. It is induced when the u nexpected comes from the normal. An example of this is the punch line of a joke. The anecdote is told and instead of the natural and expected ending, an unanticipated ending grows from the story and causes laughter. This is easiest to see in the most banal forms of humor such as a "knock, knock" joke or simple pun 1 • Laughter is also induced when two or more things, none of them having to be necessarily funny alone, are juxtaposed in an absurd or comical fashion. These combined things will fit together awkwardly such that their original placement and their develop· ment will cause laughter. This is the reason why a "So a priest walks into a bar. . ." joke is invariably funny. When Sarah first hears the prophecy of her giving birth, she also can do nothing but laugh and point out the absurdity of the words. "And Sarah heard in the door of the tent, which was behind him ... And Sarah laughed within herself, saying: After I am waxed and old shall I have pleasure, my lord being so old?" (XVlll.10,1 2). Sarah knows what is pleasurable to her and is aware of her limitations so that laughing is all she can do. The possibility is indeed laughable of God practi· cally reversing time and bringing her a son, pleasure, and what "had ceased to be with Sarah after the regularity of women" (XVIII.11). Sarah is an old woman and she knows her body and its limits. She hoped that she was fertile when it was proper fot her to give birth and now that she is old, she knows with certainty that she is barren. It may be wholly within God's limits to rescue Sarah from the Pharaoh of Egypt (XII) and from Abimelech, king of Gerar (XX), not only without harm, but even with a reception of gifts. These things God has already done for Sarah, but still she laughs at God's ability to bless her with a child. This laughter contains the incongruity that made both of the earlier types of jokes funny. The former is funny because of the unexpected surprise at the end, while the latter began incongruously and developed that way. Isaac is the same. He is the unexpected child of ancient parents that causes laughter, but his birth is the beginning of laughing in his life'. In both these ways laughter manifests itself through Isaac, laughter that is the beginning of a solid definition of love, fear, and relationships. Isaac is a different sort of miracle than Abraham and Sarah are used to. He is an occurrence that does not, and cannot, happen. Abraham claiming a military victory over those that are far more powerful than him or putting fear in the hearts of kings is amazing, but it is a conquest over men. It is n o more miraculous than the Greeks defeating the Persians in the Persian War or the occlJrrence at the famous battle of Thermopylae. The possibility of an extremely old man and a woman who has not seen the signs of the poten· tial to conceive in years begetting a child is against nature. The thought of it is absurd and the possibility of it becoming real can produce only laughter. The thought oflsaac creates a laughter that produces fear and lies. When Sarah laughs about the possibility of both her and Abraham having a child, God lies to ·Abraham. God has not yet lied nor is He ever expected to lie, but here He is less than truthful to Abraham. "And the Lord said unto Abraham: Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying: Shall I of a surety bear a child, who am old" (XVIII.13)? These words were not Sarah's words nor were they paraphrasing Sarah's question. She said, ''After I am waxed and old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?" (XVIII.12). God lies to Abraham, saying that Sarah only doubted herself and not Abraham. In the way that Sarah actually phrases �6 MARVIT her laughter, she leaves an ambiguity as to whether she is referring to the pleasure of childbirth or to the act of sexual intercourse. In either case, this sort of laughter and doubting of Abraham would cause tension in the family. When God removes Abraham's name from the laughter, the statement shows that she only found it absurd that she, as an old barren woman, would have the pleasure of birthing. When God relays the laughter thus, there will be no conflict between Sarah and Abraham. There cannot be strife between them now when they are about to start a family, and God is willing to lie to make sure that this strife does not occur. After God lies, Sarah quickly denies that she ever laughed, "saying, 'I laughed not'; for she was afraid. And [God] said: No, but thou didst laugh" (XVIII.15). After lying, God quickly condemns Sarah for trying to lie, whatever her reason may be. God must lie because the tensions of the family have prematurely torn it apart three times in three different worlds, but with this family Isaac will be the one to pull the family apart. Isaac must tear it apart because through him come laughter, love, and fear; and it is only through these things that the family can come back together. The first time Isaac pulls the family apart is fairly early in his life. Soon after Isaac is weaned, "Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had born unto Abraham, making spor t" 2 (:XXI.9). The word that is translated as 'making sport' denotes something improper, but literally means 'laughing'. Sarah witnessed Ishmael improperly laughing or Isaacing, possibly with Isaac, and this laughter is en ough for her to send Ishmael off to a potential death in the wilderness of Beer· Sheba. Ishmael's laughing is enough to tear apart the family against Abraham's liking. But God tells Abraham to listen to Sarah and cast off his mistress and first-born son with the promise that "in Isaac shall seed be called to thee" (XXI.12). Soon after the loss of Ishmael, God said to Abraham, "Take now thy son, thine only son whom thou lovest, Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains that I will tell thee of'' (XXII.2). In spite of God having already told Abraham on several occasions that Isaac will be the one to carry on his seed, He tells Abraham here to offer Isaac as a sacrifice without any explanation as to how to reconcile God's earlier covenant with this commandment. How is Abraham to be the father of a great nation if he must die without children? It is more absurd and makes far less sense than Isaac being born at an impossible time; but Abraham does not object or laugh. Abraham rises early the next morning to take Isaac as a sacrifice on a mysterious mountain that God promised he would tell him of (XXII.2). When Abraham was Abram, God told him that He was planning to go down to Sodom and Gomorrah and see if they deserved to be destroyed, and Abram argued with Him (XVIII). Abram argued with God several times in this exchange, beginning with fifty and bargaining down with God, omniscience and all, until he reaches ten. At one point, Abram goes so far as to accuse God, "Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justly?" (XVIII.25). These are ambitious and demanding words fo r the sake of a nephew, whom he feels a primitive form of broth· erly affection towards (XIII.8), and two cities full of wicked people. Before Isaac there was no love and brotherly affection held little weight. In the same sentence where Abraham tells the Lord that they are as brothers, he also suggests that they separate due to the petty strife between their herdsmen. If Abraham is willing to argue with God for these people, then where are his pleadings for Isaac? When Sarah told Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away, Abraham became distressed at the very thought of doing such an action. "And the thing was very grievous in the sight of Abraham on account of his son" (:XXI.11). Due to this grief being in response to the sending away of his other son, who is generally not even referred to as Abraham's son, into the wilderness, the Bible is forcing the reader to ask, "Where is this show of emotions when Isaac must be sacrificed?" Isaac is the first person in the Bible who is mentioned in reference to love . In the beginning there was no love; with Adam and Eve there is no love, only a precedent for cleaving; throughout all generations until Isaac there is no mention oflove either directed at or originating from a wife or a child or even God. But when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, He refers to Isaac as, "thine only son whom thou lovest" (XXII.2). Since Abraham 7 ENERGEIA loves Isaac, there can be no pleading about justice or the fairness of Isaac having to die. A judge cannot judge fairly concerning one whom he loves and Abraham cannot judge the situation. Laughter and love are intimately related. Laughter requires a participation that is based on self-awareness. If the person observing the incongruity were so far removed from the situation that he was merely an observer and not a participant, then he would only be able to have an academic appreciation for the absurdity. Once the person develops the self-awareness that is required for laughter, love becomes possible. For love requires that the people involved have an understanding of themselves in relation to their surroundings. Love is an outgrowth of the self-awareness that is necessary for laughter. Now that love is present in the world, the scene of the sacrifice to God points to something that is indescribably greater than love. Abraham loves Isaac, but he does not plead with God to save Isaac. This lack of pleading is not missing to show that Abraham doesn't love Isaac, for his love is not only assuredly stated by God, but is also shown in the details of the scene that Abraham has control over. Abraham must bring certain materials to make this sacrifice and God has not specified the method by which He wants them brought. This detail is therefore up to Abraham, and Abraham divides the supplies in a loving and subtle way. Abraham carries the deadly objects such as the knife and the fire and gives Isaac the wood to carry (XXII.6). Even the act of giving Isaac something, rather than nothing, to carry is an act of love. For he is allowing Isaac an active role in a sacrifice to God, making him more than merely a passive sac· rificial lamb. Isaac is only able to ask the question that he asks his father on the mountain because previously his father included him in the rituals at such a young age. Although Abraham loves Isaac, there is still no mention of emotion on Abraham's behalf. Abraham travels three days with Isaac and there is no mention of him doubting the action he is about to commit or the mysterious reason behind it. Abraham approaches the mountain, the altar and Isaac's neck with the same unquestion· ing and undeviating devotion that would be ex- pected, when the sacrificial lamb does not poignantly ask, "Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" (:XXII. 7) Any traces of emotions are conspicuously missing from Abraham, except in the beginning where God makes the bold and revolutionary statement that Abraham loves Isaac. If Abraham truly loves Isaac, then this feeling that he has for God must be incommensurably greater for him to perform the sacrifice with such faithful and silent obedience. And the angel calls out to Abraham, saying, "Abraham, Abraham ... lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him; for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man" (XXII.11-2). Abraham has spoken of fear before. When he explained to Abimelech why he said that Sarah was not his wife, he said, "because I thought: surely there is no fear of God in this place" (XX.11). Abraham had a fear for God at that time but it was not yet formed until this scene, so that he could not recognize it in others. Through Isaac and the first instance of love that is directed through him, God knows that Abraham possesses the right sort of fear. This fear is not properly symbolized in the English word, 'fear." The fear thatAbraham has for God is a fear mixed with reverence and faith and trust and simi· lar feelings too numerous to list. By Abraham offering Isaac as a sacrifice to God, he is showing that his fear for God is something that cannot be stripped from him. It is even through this action that the previous promise and covenant has any meaning. For although God has already said that He will bless Abraham and give him a people through Him, it means little until this scene. This is shown in the second time that the angel calls down to Abraham on Mount Moriah saying, "By myself have sworn, saith the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that I will greatly bless thee, and I will greatly multiply thy seed as the stars in the heaven, and as the sand which is upon seashore . . . and in thy seed shall be blessed all the nations of the earth; because thou hast hearkened to my voice" (:XXII.16-8). These words are not new to Abraham; they were said several times before in chapters XII, XV, and XVII. But until this action these words and this promise are empty and un- �MARVIT formed. Until Abraham shows that his fear for God is so great and irremovable that he is willing to give up all that God promised him for God, the covenant is not complete. The covenant is actually erected at this moment, but at the same time Abraham's relationship with Isaac is destroyed. On the mountain, Abraham bound Isaac on an altar and stretched out a knife to cut Isaac's neck, while Isaac bore witness. At the time of his binding, Isaac finally knew that he had traveled three days with his father for the purpose of his father sacrificing him to God. After the sacrifice of the ram in lieu of Isaac, ''Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went together to Beer-Sheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beer-Sheba" (XXII.19). There is no mention of Isaac coming down the mountain or dwelling with Abraham because after the incident on Mount Moriah, Isaac does not go to Beer-Sheba with Abraham. Instead he goes to live in Beer-lahai-roi (XXIV.62), the same place that God found Hagar when she ran from Sarai (:XVI.14). Isaac and Abraham are never mentioned together again until Abraham is nearing death. Not long before Abraham died, ''Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. But unto the sons of the concubines, that Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts; and he sent them away from Isaac his son" (:XXV.5,6). Abraham spent seventy-five years concurrently with Isaac (XXI.5, :XXV. 7). Yet they are never together in the great time span between Isaac's weaning and Abraham's death. Isaac's relationship with his father is practically nonexistent, but his connection with his mother is stronger than has yet been seen. It was originally necessary that Isaac is born to Sarah, but his affinity to her does not end at birth. Throughout his childhood Sarah shelters Isaac and Isaac clings to his mother in a new way. When Isaac is born, Sarah is not only blessed with a child but also with something unexpected. She is given the gift of laughter through Isaac, she even expresses this in the statement she makes immediately after Isaac's birth, saying, "God hath made laughter for me" (XXI.6). Before, when she heard the prophecy of the conception of a son, Sarah laughed im· properly. After his birth she receives laughter from God and has an understanding of it that allows her to pass judgement on another's laughter. She 8 knows laughing is a gift and that there are specific ways not to accept it. She realized after laughing at the prophecy of Isaac that it was wrong to laugh by oneself. And just as it is wrong to laugh by oneself, it is wrong to laugh with a sibling because it is an action that must be performed with someone who is different. There is too much sameness that is present alone or with a sibling that is not proper for laughing. She shows her judgement of laughter when she tells Abraham to send Ishmael away because Ishmael is laughing. God's agreement with Sarah indicates that her judgement is founded. The act of sending Ishmael into the wilderness is also indicative of the way that she deals with Isaac. She shelters him from any harmful influence and, con· sequently, from his own brother. Isaac in turn clings to this sheltering, rather than to the one who took him up the mountain to offer him as a sacrifice. It is in reference to Sarah that the second instance of love is used in the Bible. ''And Isaac brought her [Rebekah] into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted by his mother" (XXIV.67). Until Sarah dies, men leave their mother and father and cling to their wives (II.24). Sarah leaves Isaac and because of the comfort that Rebekah offers, Isaac loves her. In this tent in the middle of the desert, it happened that a man loved his wife. He did not cleave to her or know her or go into her; Isaac loved Rebekah. Isaac and Sarah had a reciprocally caring relationship, but there was never a mention of love between them. They could not love each other because Sarah cannot offer Isaac comfort and Sarah cannot treat Isaac as anything more than .a weak baby that rid her of her shame and gave her laughter. When she dies, Isaac may love someone through her, but only as someone he clung to. After Sarah dies, a resolution occurs that did not happen in the woods with the other families. Ishmael and Isaac have not been together since Sarah witnessed Ishmael laughing and told Abraham to send him away. Abraham sent Ishmael away and separated the two brothers. Similar instances of familial tension have pulled families apart before, but they have never come back together. Cain and Abel fought and Cain killed Abel. Noah was wronged by his son and proceeded to 9 ENERGEIA condemn all his children to slavery. Abraham sepa· rates Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael is sent into the wilderness, while Isaac remains at home.There is no reason to believe that they will ever come back together again and it is extraordinary and unprecedented that they do. When Abraham dies, "Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah" (:XXV.9). These two brothers have been apart for over seventy years and are never mentioned together again. The reunion is unexpected and brief, but meaningful in that this is the first time brothers have ever really come back to· gether. The reason Ishmael and Isaac come back together is because of their father. Abraham loves Isaac. He also pleads with God that Ishmael is cho. sen. Nevertheless, Abraham offers to sacrifice both Isaac and Ishmael for the sake of his God. Abraham has severed himself permanently from both his children and placed them into situations where they have extreme and isolated relationships with the ir mothers. The Bible doesn:.t speak in exten· sive detail about these two relationships. It does, however, give the mothers' reactions to certain formative events. In these instances, one is privy to the strong bind between mother and son, which was conspicuously missing in every generation prior. The caring and protective manner in which Sarah deals with Isaac has already been shown in her reactions to his birth and young childhood, but Hagar also shows similar feelings for her son, Ishmael. When Ishmael was young and he was wan· dering in the wilderness of Beer-Sheba with his mother, he reached a point where he was very close to dying of thirst. Hagar had no water and there was nothing she could do for her son. Hagar had already been in a similar despairing situation in the desert when she was pregnant with Ishmael. She ran away from Sarai and God found her alone in the wilderness and blessed her and told her to return. So, "She went, and sat her down over against him, a good way off, as it were a bowshot; for she said: Let me not look upon the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lifted up her voice, and wept" (XXI.16) . Hagar knew that she was impotent in the situation, that she could do nothing to help the lad, so she set herself apart from him and wept loudly. All that Hagar could do is put Ishmael at a distance from her, because she could not let him die in her arms or even look at his death. If she could gaze at it as Eve coldly looked at the death of Abel and the expulsion of Cain, then she would be as unmotherly as Eve, "the mother of all living" (III.14). But in putting Ishmael only in God's view and crying loudly and setting herself apart from him twice, Hagar is plac· ing Ishmael in a place where he can either die or fulfill his name. Ishmael's name means, 'the Lord heard' or 'the Lord will hear' (:XVI.10). When Hagar cries for Ishmael, God's Angel says, "What aileth thee Hagar? Fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad as is there" (XXI.17). Hagar cries for Ishmael, but she is not heard. Hagar places Ishmael at a shot's distance from her and, as he is there, he is heard by God. This scene, in its en· tirety, shows the intense way that Hagar feels for her son Ishmael. This feeling and action may be taken for granted today in a world where parental relations have been defined, but it is extraordinary in Abraham's time. After God speaks to Hagar and opens her eyes to the quenching sight of a ·well, "She went and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink" (XXI.9). She has also had no water to drink and is alongside him, thirsty in the desert, yet the first thing she does is similar to the selfless and giving action that Eliezer looks for while searching for Isaac's wife (XXIV.14). Hagar and Rebekah both give to others without even giving thought to their own thirsts. Hagar has a bond with Ishmael; Ishmael has a bond with Hagar; Sarah has a bond with Isaac; Isaac has a close bond with Sarah. When Abraham dies, "I~aac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah" (X:XV.9). Abraham is not part of this equation except in the beginning, when he pushes them from himself and unto their mothers, and at the end when the brothers reunite. It is through these close unions with their mothers that Isaac and Ishmael are allowed to perform the first real act of fraternity. Though this act is unique and new, it is short-lived. After their brief reunion, the Bible separates Isaac and Ishmael again and begins describing their individual generations. Through this first confluence, brotherly love can exist and familial tension can have a proper resolution. Before that, however, Isaac must live his life as the �10 MARVIT awkward shadow of the Bible. Unlike his father, Isaac and Rebekah beget children relatively quickly. Sarah was barren for a long time, while Abraham prayed and begged to God repeatedly for children. After the course of many years, another wife, and a child by this other wife, Sarah finally gives birth to Isaac. For Isaac this long patient process leading up to the conception is not necessary. It is written, ''And Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah ... to be his wife. And Isaac entreated the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord let himself be entreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived" (:XXV.20-1). The wait was necessary for Abraham and Sarah to create the laughter and all the things that ensued from it. For Isaac the wait would be superfluous because this laughter is already present. As soon as Rebekah conceives a child, the problems begin. The problems begin because she does not give birth to one child, but rather to two children. With two children there is an inevitable conflict that has been present throughout the story of man. In a way, the story of Isaac and Ishmael is reoccurring. This time, however, the siblings are not half-brothers who are born at different times; they are twins. Their closeness calls for not only greater conflict, but also for a greater resolution. God says to Rebekah, "Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be a stronger people than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger" (:XXV.23). As soon as Esau and Jacob are born love is mention ed once again. "Now Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison; and Rebekah loved Jacob" (XXV.28). This love is, again not a uniting love-as love is generally depicted outside the Bible- it is one that divides. And so the pull begins, with different parents loving different children and the younger child buying the eider's birthright (:XXV.29-34). Soon after the birth of these twins, there is a famine similar to the one that Abraham experienced. Instead of going to Egypt as Abraham did in the first famine, Isaac goes to another land that Abraham had journeyed through. When Abraham went to Gerar, Abraham said that Sarah was his sister because he thought, "Surely there is no fear of God in this place" (:XX.11). Abimelech showed Abraham that this fear is not validated, by returning Sarah and giving him gifts and land. When Isaac goes to Gerar, he shouldn't have to lie as Abraham lied because Abimelech, the king who respected his father, still reigns. In addition, when Abraham said that Sarah was his sister, there is something more right about the lie. Firstly Abraham treats her more as an equal in asking her beforehand to perform this favor for him in order to save his life (XII.11-3). Secondly, what has been described as Abraham's lie to Abimelech may not be completely truthful, but it is also not a lie in that Sarah is the daughter of Abraham's father through a different mother (:XX.12). None of these things are true for Isaac. Isaac does not ask Rebekah beforehand if he may pm: her in this sort of danger and she is not in any way his sister. Isaac is repeating actions that his father performed and deviating only in the subtleties that made Abraham's actions appear right. His inability to perform actions is a result of his being a forefather who was born into the position. Just as many of the characters that are placed in the position of being a first, such as Eve, Cain, Ham, Saul, and many others, Isaac is either overzealous in his relationships with others or mindlessly repetitive in his actions. After Isaac spoke this unnecessary lie, "Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out the window and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife" (:XXVI.8). The verb this translates as "sporting" has a sexual connotation and is the same verb used to describe what Ishmael was doing with Isaac and literally means laughing. Again Isaac is caught laughing with another person. When Isaac was caught with Ishmael, the brothers were separated for over seventy years, but with Rebekah it is not wrong. For although Isaac unnaturally puts them as siblings in the eyes of others, they still are husband and wife . As siblings it is wrong to laugh together, but as husband and wife it is expected and even serves as a proof to Abimelech of their marriage (XXVI.9). Before this instance, every person laughed alone and that was not proper. The only time that someone laughed with another was when Ishmael laughed with Isaac. When Ishmael and Isaac laughed together it was 11 ENERGEIA wrong because laughter is right only in certain types of relationships. Isaac laughs with Rebekah here and Abimelech is sure that they are not sibli.ngs, that they must be husband and wife. After this quasi-imitated action of Isaac, Isaac proceeds to follow his father yet again. "And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham; and he called their names, after the names which his father had called them" (XXVI.18). Again, when Abraham went into the land of the Philistines and dug his wells and made a covenant (:XXI) there was a pioneering significance that accompanied the action. When Isaac goes back to the same land and re-digs the same wells, the spirit behind it is pointedly missing. This inability of Isaac's to understand actions and circumstances in relation to other people does not end with strangers. Isaac has a strange relationship to God, Rebekah, and his two sons. Through Isaac it has been shown that Abraham is able to be a God-fearing man, but Isaac possesses this fear naturally. When God speaks to Isaac, one of the first things he says is, "I am the God of Abraham thy father. Fear not ... " (XXVI.24). When God is described in reference to the forefathers, many times it is stated, "the God of Abraham and the fear of Isaac" (XXXI.42, XXXI.53). There is no test that Isaac must pass or sacrifice that he must offer to show that the way he feels for God is Fearful. This bizarre relationship to God is further manifested in Isaac's dealings with his wife and children because with them as he acts incorrectly, somehow he acts correctly. When Isaac was old, he was old and blind. Somewhere in the part of his life that is skipped, between marrying Rebekah and digging wells, or digging wells and becoming old, Isaac became blind. Being blind does not change Isaac's confused and misapplied relation to the world, but it does offer an excuse. In the scene where Isaac must bless his sons, his true confusion as a forefather is pathetically striking, but since this is the first time he is ever fleshed out, he becomes an individual human character. Every one of his senses that makes one human is deceived here to show that although Isaac is confused, he is the most human character in the Bible. Touch, Isaac's most basic sense, is tricked by means of alternate clothes and some goat skins (XXVII.16). Now Jacob, who is a smooth man, will feel just like Esau who is a hairy man. When Jacob speaks, Isaac recognizes that "the voice is the voice ofJacob . . ." (:XXVII.22), but he convinces himself otherwise, saying " ... but the hands are the hands of Esau" because he thinks touch to be truer. Isaac also smelled Jacob, "and said: See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed" (:XXVII.27). Not only is Isaac confused here on what he smells, but he also expresses a sort of synaesthesia in speaking of smells as something visible rather than strictly olfactory. Even if it were visible, Isaac would not be able to see it; he is blind and cannot see anything. Taste is the main deception that must be made because the whole story rests on food. The reason that Jacob is allowed to deceive his father about the blessing is because originally Esau sold Jacob the birthright for some "red, red pottage" (XXV.30). Then when Isaac is old and ready to give the blessing, the only time that the word love is used is in reference to the food that Isaac loves to eat (XXVII.4, 9, 14). Isaac loves venison and he loves Esau because of his love for venison (:XXVII.4, XXV.28). Even with his strong love for venison, Isaac still does not know how venison tastes. Rebekah replaces the venison that he is expecting with goat (XXVII.9, 17), but Isaac never mentions that he tastes the difference 3 • With Rebekah's help, Jacob attempts to deceive not only all five of Isaac's senses but also confuse his perception of time. Isaac knows that it takes a certain amount of time to kill and cook a deer and asks Jacob, "How is it that thou hast found [the deer] so quickly, my son? And Oacob] said: Because the Lord thy God sent good speed before me" (:XXVII.20). With all his senses misdirected and his askew feeling of time, this scene shows how human Isaac is and how confused Isaac's outlook on the world really is. When Jacob tricks his father into giving him the blessing, Esau becomes angry and hates Jacob, but Esau's hatred did not begin at that moment. Esau's hatred for Jacob began at birth, the first time that Jacob took hold of Esau's heel. After Esau marries Judith it is written, "they [Esau and Judith] were a bitterness of spirit unto Isaac �12 MARVIT and Rebekah" (XXVI.35). Esau has hated Jacob from birth for taking hold of his heel, he hated him throughout his young life, and he hates him more when he takes hold of his heel a second time during the blessing. Jacob's name means "to take hold of the heels" and Esau fully understands this name when his hatred is fullest, saying "Is not he rightly named Jacob? For he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing" (XXVII.36). This hatred, accompanied by a deep desire to murder pervades Esau as it did Cain, but because of a sense of duty to his father, God does not have to get involved as he did with Cain. Esau is willing to give Jacob a stay of execution until Isaac dies. This deferment allows Rebekah to have knowledge of Esau's plan and separate Jacob from Esau. Jacob goes to the house of Laban for many years waiting for Esau's anger to subside, but it does not. Jacob marries several women and has eleven children waiting for Esau to forgive him, but Esau remains angry. Finally, Jacob leaves Laban's house to meet Esau again, but he first sends before him waves of gifts to soften Esau's anger (XXXII). When Jacob sees Esau approaching, Esau has four hun.. dred men with him and is walking in such a way that Jacob expects war (XXXII.7 .. 13). Jacob expects a conflict because the previous events and threats demand a conflict, but still he does all he can to avoid violence between him and his brother. After the numerous gifts, Jacob "bowed himself to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother " (XXXIII.3). Instead of attacking Jacob, "Esau ran to meet him, and he embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept" (XXXIII.4). This is a serious event that cannot be overlooked. Esau has every reason under the sun to hate Jacob, but no reason to forgive him. Jacob has no rational reason to want or attempt to re .. unite with Esau and the more natural ending to this scene is the imminent war between Esau and Jacob. The reason Esau had for not killing Jacob when he had the chance was Isaac and the reason they hug and kiss is still Isaac. Before Isaac this could not have happened. But through the love that Isaac created, the tension that he produced, and the duty both brothers feel for their father, brotherly love is formed. When Ishmael and Isaac come together because of their father, they stay together for the length of one Biblical passage; when Jacob and Esau come together because of their father, they stay together long enough to talk. The conversa.. tion is a sincere version of the meeting of Jacob and Laban (XXIX.13 ), or the conversation that Abraham had with Ephron the Hittite after Sarah died, in reference to a tomb for her burial (XXIII. 7.. 18). With Ephron, the attempted gift of the cave was a sycophantic and insincere gesture that was abandoned with out argument. Laban's reason for the great show of affection was also insincere,·as is shown in his conniving mistreatment of Jacob. Between Jacob and Esau there is a mutually sin.. cere desire to show their individual affection to.wards the other through an overflow of emotions and gifts. Although they are sincere in their feel.. ings towards each other and in their exchange of gifts, they also know that they cannot live together as Abraham and Lot tried to do. The idea of Broth.. erly love is more of a formed reality now, but it is still not complete. After the exchange between Esau and Jacob, Jacob says to Esau, "My Lord knoweth, that the children are tender, and that the flocks will die. Let my lord, I pray thee, pass over before his servant; and I will journey on gently" (XXXIII.134 ). Esau does not plead that they should remain together because he knows that it cannot work yet. He still wants to give him, however, a piece of himself to take with him. Esau says, " Let me now, leave with thee, some of the folk that are with me" (XXXIII.15). Thus Jacob and Esau sepa.. rate and stay separated until the day Isaac dies. On that day, Esau broke the promise that he made in his heart. He said, "Let the days of mourning for my father be .at hand; then I will slay Jacob my brother" (XXVII.41). On the day that Isaac died, his sons did not fight; they came back together from bein g apart and "Esau and Jacob his sons buried him" (XXXV.29). Jacob and Esau were the greatest of enemies who formed a bond that outlived either of them. Through Isaac they defined what brotherhood was and how strong the pact between brothers really is, but only when it is affirmed and reaffirmed. This bond is again tested and strengthened in ENERGEIA Jacob's twelve children. They pull apart in a larger way than any before them did, but their reunion is also grander. Each of Jacob's children becomes a tribe of Israel and is separate from the others, but they always remain bound by the original relation.. ship that was defined by Isaac. Even the relation.. ship between Esau and Jacob that was conceived by Isaac lasts throughout the Bible. In Deuteronomy, when Israel is making its way into Canaan, the general way they are told to deal with the land and resources of other nations is to "take possession" (Deuteronomy, I.21, II.31, III.2..7). The way Israel must deal with Esau is different. As Is.. rael is traveling close to Esau's ancestors, God says, "You are about to pass through the territory of your kindred, the descendents of Esau . .. They will be afraid of you, so be careful not to engage in battle with them" (Deut., II.4..5). When Jacob and Esau reunited, the peace and affection that occurred between the brothers was unexpected because the definition of brotherhood was still dim. When Jacob's descendents meet Esau's descendents hun.. dreds of years after the story of Esau and Jacob, there are formed rules on how to relate to kindred that even apply to cousins many times removed. The laughter that formed through Isaac was not only responsible for the foundations of fraternal relations, but also marital relations. Before the conception of the idea of Isaac it was inconsequential whom men took as their wives. With the possibility of Isaac, Sarai comes out into the foreground and becomes essential. From her and the unique relationship that she has with Isaac th e first loving marriage is possible. In this marriage, boundaries of deception, responsi.. bility, and laughing are defined that evolve through the next few generations and ultimately allow for the marital laws that are later com.. manded (Deut. XXI, XXII, XXIV). These relationships could not have gained any meaning without Isaac. In the world of the Bible, it cannot be taken for granted that before Isaac awkwardly came into the world and caused laughter there was no serious relationship between people. The family meant little other than one generation begat the next one. When any tension or conflict pulled the family apart, the family re.. mained apart. That Isaac was born and the incon.. gruity that Isaac created produced laughter. This laughter created self..awareness, which was neces .. sary for love and a resolution to conflicts that were otherwise fatal. EPILOGUE "Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah ... " (2 Chronicles, Ill.1 ) There is an old legend that is based on a Midrash that grew out of the Psalm 133, verse 1. The legend has it that there was a man who had two sons and a plot of land with a hill dividing it. When he died, the land was split equally between the two brothers. It came to pass that one brother got married, had children, and became wealthy, while the other brother was poor and grew old alone. One day the brother who had no family began to think about his older brother. He thought that although he was poor and his brother rich, his brother needed more grain to support his fam .. ily. He resolved that he would give his brother all the grain that he could spare. He decided to act under the guise of night because he didn't want to shame his brother with an outright gift of charity. So the poor brother loaded up his wagon at night and surreptitiously made his way over to his brother's house and deposited the grain. In the morning the poor brother checked his grain and it was the same level as it was before he took any to his brother. The poor brother loaded up his wagon with grain every night and every night deposited it in his brother's store..house, but every morning he found there to be no grain missing. One night, the poor brother was making his way over the hill with a wagon..full of grain. The wealthy brother had noticed his poor brother and his wagon and they both dismounted kissed and wept. Every night, as the poor brother traveled over the to the rich brother's house, the rich brother was sneaking grain into the poor brother's house. The rich brother thought that he had chil.. dren and they would take care of him when he was old. But his brother was alone and would have no one to take care of him. �:tvfARVIT 14 -------------------------------------------------·-------------------When King Solomon heard this story he decided to build the temple on the hill where these brothers accidentally met that night. He said that the temple was most fit to be built on that hill because it witnessed the greatest manifestation of brotherly love. Endnotes 1 "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Boo." "Boo who?" "Oh, don't cry, it's only a 'Knock, knock' joke!" 2 In the Septuagunt it is added that Ishmael is " .. . ENERGEIA 15 TWELVE YEARS, FIRST WORDS for Mark Alicia Patee, ~02 making sport with his son Isaac" (XXI.9). 3 Based on a survey of 10 meat-eaters who have eaten, but do not necessarily love, both venison and goat; all 10 of them said that venison does not taste exceptionally similar to lamb. Most even went so far as to claim they could distinguish one from the other in a blind taste-test. You were a small thing, eyelashes curled like smoke rings, a heartbreak baby. I held you lightly, some origami bundle, thin enough to tear. Watching you sprout now, past the grass which you once seemed to meet, blade to brow, reminds me that time (clocks, breath) has beaten through me, stumbled onto you. Too old for blankets, you now sleep in knots, on sheets. Often, I watch you. Fetal, a seedling, you shift as if in the womb, swimming through darkness inside our mother, dreaming within the walls I too have known so well. Awake, I think of cradling you for the first time, marveling at how, in time, your hands would be large enough for grasping. I would teach you then. Unable to speak', now twelve years later, I see that my time has passed almost as quickly. I hear myself whispering those very first words I said to you, perched like Buddha on my lap: "Will you remember this?" Smoking Kristin Masser, ~01 �16 WILSON 17 ENERGEIA Eating H.uman Death and the Good Life in Homer's Iliad Alan Rubenstein, Prelude Untitled Sarah Wilson, ~03 Horner' s Iliad begins and ends with a feast. The opening feast occurs in the darkness of some unspecified time after all the action of the poem has ended. The warriors have left, the clamor of fighting has disappeared. Where all this was, there are now only dogs and birds and their meal. Be, fore ever entering into the narrative and beginning his journey through the events of the epic, Homer gives us this picture of the distant aftermath, where life has deserted what we come to know as the bustling shores of Troy. Where there were heroes there are now corpses and, perhaps, the wind left behind by souls hurled into Hades. In a story where anonymity never elsewhere accompanies death, our opening picture is a deserted battlefield full of men not assigned any identity other than their role as the spoil for division of animal scavengers. This vivid panorama is laid out for us in words that modify the first, and most essential, word of the poem-µf}Vt), the µf}Vt) of Achilles. There is a corpse, again, at the center of the closing feast, though now its flesh has been burned away and its bones lie beneath the earth in purple robes and a casket. This feast occurs at a very neatly specified moment in time-nine days of gathering timber from the time of recovering the body, one day devoted to its burning and then the day of burial and the feast. The men preparing the feast are keenly aware of their situation in time, living under the foreboding twelfth day when the safety assured by Achilles' promise will have run its course. That day, the next appearance of rosy, fingered dawn, will bring what the Trojans have accepted to be the beginning of their destruction. The hope they had of survival is burnt on the pyre. So, here is a meal taken out of time, as well-a meal taken not in men's expectation of nourishing them, selves for a life of stretching out after their goals, but one taken under the resignation to impend, ing death. The µflvt) of Achilles has created the context for this meal as well. Now, though, it is the ~00 whole poem, the action in all its detail, and this final meal as its last moment, that shows forth as a modification of this word. Eating is the activity that is common and essential to all life. The incorporation of the out, side world, of a nourishing other, into the sub, stance of an individual is the very heart of identity as it exists amongst living things. But surely the meals of men are as unlike the metabolizing activ, ity of plants and the devouring done by animals as they are like. We must imagine that the meal taken by Priam and the Trojans at the completion of the ceremonial burial of Hektor has all the traits of a distinctively human eating. Here is Homer's de, scription: 1 xevaVTES OE TO of)µa, m:xAlV KlOV m1Tap ETIEtTa They piled up the grave,barrow and went away, and thereafter EV avvayetp6µEVOl, oa(vvTa EplKVOEa oal'Ta, assembled a fair gathering and held a glorious feast owµamv EV n ptaµoto, OlOTpE<pEoS [3amAf)os. within the house of Priam, king under God's hand. (24.801-803) The word Cat) indicates no ordinary object of eating. It is reserved for the kind of eating that involves division, its related verbs all carrying this sense of partitioning. It is an eating that follows preparation-deliberate treatment of foodstuffs with consideration for who is to be fed. This is an eating that is put off while an activity like piling a grave barrow is accomplished and that requires its partakers to assemble and allows them to address one another (part of the connotation of aye(ps, related to ayopa ). It is a kind of eating to which can be applied such modifiers as 'fair' (eu) and 'gh rious' (eptKv8ea). It is an eating carried out in a man,made structure, even a palace whose visitors are convened by a king whom God cares for (fao- �18 RUBENSTEIN TpE<pw). Thus, the human delaying of satisfaction, the human powers of speech, building with tools, and political organization, as well as the human closeness to the divine are all a part of this kind of meal. The distinctive way in which his nourishment is carried out can be a doorway to discovering the uniqueness of man. Now turn back to the opening lines: µflvtv OELOE, 6Ea, nr1)H1·raoes 'AxtAflos Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achille us ovAoµEvfJV, fl µup(' 'Axmo"is aAyE' E6f)KE and its devastation, which put pains thou sandfold upon the Achaians TioAAas o' i<p6(µovs \YVXCxS "Alot npofo\Yev hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls i]pwc.uv, avTovs oE EAwpta TEvxe KVVEOOLV of heroes, but the men themselves it prepared as spoil for dogs oic.uvola( TE oaha, '1to) o' ETEAElETO '3ovAi) and as a feast for vultures, and the will of Zeus was accomplished Homer begins his epic with a series of engaging contradictions. Achilles, the greatest hero of the Achaians puts pains a thousandfold on those very Achaians. The intangible ~uxi], originally and still in Homer breath, 'breath' is qualified by icp6(µos , an adjective meaning 'sturdy,' 'stout,' a manner of being for massive bodies. Also, this breath of life is the object of TTporriµt, hurling, whose subject is µfjvts. Spears are hurled by the hands of men. Emotions, except in this extended metaphoric use, have no power to grip and propel, nor is wind something to be so handled. But of the utmost importance for our inquiry, we encounter the difficulty of what the men themselves - not their souls-are made into or prepared as (TEvxw). These corpses, as we find them in this dark aftermath, are eAwpta and 8a1s for the birds and dogs. We have already seen what is entailed in using the latter of these words. Much attention will be given in this paper to the importance of the 8a1s, but suffice it to say for now that the application of this word, with its distinctively human connotations, to the scavenging activity of animals both makes the opening panorama more horrific and sows the seeds for a question about mortality and the meaningfulness of human striving that will dominate the work. The same effect of startling his listeners by using language expressive of man's uniqueness to describe the non-human world is accomplished by choosing the word EAWpta. This word is derived from aipew and developed into the meaning of 'spoil,' 'booty,' that which is taken by men in their exalting moments of victory in battle. In no other place is this word used in conjunction with the activity of animals. Its most powerful use comes in Book Eighteen, in Achilles' plaint to his mother: ... since the spirit within me does not drive me to go on living and be among men, except on condition that Hektor first be beaten down under my spear, lose his life and pay the price for stripping (EAwpta) Patroklos, son of Menoitios .(18.9093) The stripping of Achilles' divine armor from Patroklos is a critical moment of the action on the battlefield, involving pinnacle acts of heroism on both sides. It is the moment of greatest triumph for Hektor and the act that, here in Book Eighteen, Achilles singles out as the most deserving of requital by himself. It is with this gran d importance to human affairs that EAWpta (or eAwpa) conveys in mind that we should read it in the opening lines of the poem. So, after all the struggle and drama of Achaians and Trojans has died down, it is dogs who triumphantly claim their war spoil and birds who engage in the kingly feast. The dogs and birds play an essential role in the Iliad, as a whole. This, in spite of the fact that we rarely see them at all and never (after these opening lines) see them engaging in the activity with which they are most predominantly associated-devouring the corpses of men. These scavengers play their role by looming forever in the background, just at the periphery of each man's field 19 ENERGEIA of vision. The threats that fighters issue at one another invariably involve the notion that defeat will mean becoming a meal to these animals. Such a fate is repeatedly pointed out by Homer himself when he wants to convey the tragedy of a man's death, whether he be a great man or a meager one. Then there are, of course, the great battles that are waged over the corpses of such men as Sarpedon and Patroklos, and the crucial chain of events that leads to the recovery of the corpse of Hektor. All of these pivotal movements of the story are driven by the looming presence of the dogs and birds and the horror that is represented by becoming food to them. The very awareness of death that characterizes humanity, we might say, is symbolized by this glimpse that is caught out of the corner of one's eye of the birds and dogs waiting to make all human striving for naught-to make men, who eat in 9rder to carry out the most developed goals, into nothing more than foodstuffs for another creature. Let us linger for a time on this death-awareness and its fundamental role in creating the very notion of meaningfulness in human life. All life is, in a manner of speaking, characterized by the effort to preserve itself. The act of metabolism is the distinguishing activity of the organic. Here is a helpful characterization of metabolism from Hans Jonas' The Phenomenology of Life: 2 In this remarkable mode of being the material parts of which the organism consists at a given instant are to the penetrating observer only temporary, passing contents whose joint material identity does not coincide with the identity of the whole which they enter and leave, and which sustains its own identity by the very act of foreign matter passing through its spatial system, the living form. It is never the same materially and yet persists as its same self, by not remaining the same matter. Once it really becomes the same with the sameness of its material contents ... it ceases to live; it dies. (7 5-76) Thus we can understand life as being in continual activity and, as such, sustaining its identity as an organism. Death is the cessation of this activity, with its shifting of material. The plant's act is de- scribable by an observer as a continuing effort to sustain itself, driven by what Jonas calls the 'lifeurge.' On the level of life beyond the vegetative, however, the life-urge is a subjective striving associated with the activity of metabolism. Food for an animal is not immediately contiguous with it in the way that it is for a plant. In fact, an animal's environment generally is characterized by being distant from the animal, so that the distinctive animal powers, motility, perception and emotion are meaningful and even determinative of what the 'world' is for it. Our interest, in particular, for this paper, is the last of these powers, emotion. Again, Jonas is helpful in tying emotion together with the basic life-principle of metabolism: 3 Fulfillment not yet at hand is the essential condition of desire, and deferred fulfillment is what desire in turn makes possible. Thus desire represents the time-aspect of the same situation of which perception represents the space-aspect. Distance in both respects is disclosed and bridged: perception presents the object "not here but over there"; desire presents the goal "not yet but to come": motility guided by perception and driven by desire turns there into here and not yet into now. (101) Animal eating always involves fulfillment not yet at hand since distance, both spatial and temporal, is an inescapable fact of the animal encounter with the world. Hunger is an entity inseparable from animal metabolism, though non-existent in that of plants. So, the constant flux that makes for the identity of an animal organism- for its form , beyond the ever-changing matter- is a life-urge tinged with the emotional quality· of desire. An animal maintains itself as what it is by not just being at work, but by wanting, striving to live. It should be clear that what we are doing in this progression is identifying the various stages of complexity of life and doing so, primarily, by noting the different powers that appear. For animals, these are motility, perception, and emotion, on top of and supporting vegetative metabolism. When, in this progression we reach the level of man, we encounter what seems to be an unspeakable tragedy. Whatever other powers may be identifiable as unique to man, one distinguishing trait �20 RUBENSTEIN is clear: he is aware of his mortality. This awareness is particularly tragic in light of the fact just described that life is what it is because it works to preserve itself and, for animal life-which includes man-this work has the character of desire. Man is unique among living things in that he sees that despite everything that the life-urge does to continue the process of living, death waits as the end for all living things. The encounter that men have with the corpses of those who have died is the crucial point. Jonas calls this encounter an eveMecurring particular fact that seems to deny the basic truth of the self-sustaining activity ofliving beings: to be is to live. 4 Homer does well to recall the most essential moment of human consciousness when he specifies, avTovs OE EAwpta TEVXE Kvvrnmv. Man sees the corpse and knows that this is him, himself. By some awareness of an invariable fate for a common category of being, be it man or animal or living thing, and by some power of anticipation of his own future, a man sees the cessation of life in that thing as a sign that all of his striving to live will end in the same way. Homer gives an added dimension to this distinguishing awareness that man possesses by presenting it as dominant in his consciousness not just that he will cease to live, but that he will become food for another organism. Here it is difficult to see if we describe tragedy or comedy: all the animal's effort to live by altering other living things into an element of its fluctuating metabolism ends by that animal being a helpless meal for the first scavenger who comes along. There is a basic irony here for the animal who lives without any intimation of this fate, believing, so long as it lives, that the world was made for its consumption. For man, however, above this irony are all the avenues of meaningfulness that he creates in response to the awareness that the urge to live is guaranteed to end badly. Knowing his life will be short he must find the means to make it good. Above all, this paper seeks some answer to the question, 'what is the good life?' Introduction The power of Homer's beginning lies in the way that it makes vivid for us the fundamental struggle of the self-conscious mortal being. What the rest of the poem-and really all story-telling-is about is the ways in which man finds meaning, goodness in life, both in spite of and because of his mortality. In addition, through its most reflective characters, the poem will consciously address the question of whether this meaning, whatever be its ways of manifesting itself, is real or illusory. Achilles, in particular, will take us back to the picture of the opening lines, to gaze upon it and ask whether it is the truest image of the end of the life of men. Of course, men must live as if they were more than carrion. Of the experiences that characterize the way that they do so, there are two categories that this paper will single out. We put these two under the headings of honor and love. To get a beginning into these themes, we can look to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: 5 Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged ... The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. (section 178) Honor and love are modes of recognition. They exist in the human realm because men are self-conscious- because, for them, being means being for themselves. Hegel brings immediately to the fore the essential duplication that is presumed by self...consciousness. There can not be only one man-the encounter of self-conscious beings is essential to the existence of such beings. Hegel's account of the most primordial of such encounters is the life and death struggle, the "trial by death." On the battlefield of Homer, we see many encounters to the death of self-conscious men. By applying Hegel's account of the emerging self-consciousness to these encounters and to the movements in the souls of the men who engage in them, we can shed light on the question of how men respond to their mortality. We must not, however, allow the literal staking of lives that occurs on the battlefield to mislead us into thinking that it is only there that Hegel's account and, generally, the conclusions that our inquiry will draw, are relevant. It is the very core of self-aware man, of you and me, to seek recognition. The life and death struggle of Hegel is at 21 ENERGEIA the center of every one of these endeavors, even when the staking of lives is not so easy to see. Even on Homer's battlefield we are far removed from the simple life and death struggle-the men are men, not the isolated self-consciousnesses that Hegel describes. This paper's project will be to justify these claims of the pervasiveness of recognition-seeking in the life of mortal man by distinguishing its elements in the story and characters of the Iliad. When we allude to the removal from the isolated encounter of self-consciousnesses that is implied when we speak of 'men,' we have in mind the more complex modes that human beings find to attain recognition. Hegel, himself, moves quickly from his account of the basic life and death struggle to the manifestation of the same (superceded in) the more complex master-slave dialectic. Our account will not make explicit use of this movement of Hegel's though there will be similar elements to be found. Rather, we will seek to discover how Homer would have us pick up from the primordial encounter and move to the next stage. Having said this, a word is in order about the structure of what follows. The first part of this paper will be an interpretation of a speech of Sarpedon that is found near the exact middle of the poem (Book Twelve). Our primary goal, here, will be to uncover the presence of the core life and death struggle in the more complex affair of the struggle on the battlefield. In this section we will develop an idea that will guide what follows, what we call the 'honor-metabolism.' It is in hopes of expanding upon this image that we will move into our close reading of the main story of the Iliad, through its most important character, Achilles. The second section ot' the paper will examine how the raw-materials of the honormetabolism can be made into substantive nutrition through the mediation of men not involved in the struggle to the death- men we call, primarily, friends or allies. The struggle between Agamemnon and Achilles, we will argue, is based on a disagreement over how this transfiguration of honor won on the battlefield (the, above-mentioned 'raw-materials') into honor that can sustain a man's being-for-self ought to be effected. Running through this exposition will be a side-long glance at the basic questions of economics, since the material of the honor-metabolism, we will argue, is the foundation of 'value' in a political community. Agamemnon's is the 'economic' side of this debate, his rule standing for the translation of value, which always bears the stamp of its source, into cost, which is, in its essence, transferable. On Achilles' side is the argument for value sustained by the reverence, or love, of one's fellow men. Honor and love, in his vision, must be put into an appropriate dynamic in order to make substance out of battlefield honor. We should not be misled by my philosophical characterization of Achilles' stance in opposition to Agamemnon; Achilles' holding of this opinion is manifested as a part (the moral part) of his rage, his µfivts. An interwoven, but somewhat distinct, project of this paper will be to explore anger, generally, by watching the movements of fury and self-realization that take place in Achilles. Between the first and second parts of this essay, there will be a transition that, using an illustrative simile, will bring anger on to the stage of man's struggle for recognition in the face of death. Through the second part of the essay I will trace what I identify as the three stages of Achilles anger, allowing this to structure my inquiry into honor, love and mortality. By the end of this part, I will be able to draw some general conclusions about anger. Among these, I will bring back Jonas' characterization of emotion as the bridging of some distance (my pg. 5) and ask the question of what distance it is that human anger bridges. Although love will make its appearance in my account as but one of two means to make nourishment out of the raw-materials of the honor-metabolism, I will have more to say about love's presence in the life of man independent of the life governed by the quest for honor in the final section of the essay. Where the second part ('Honor and Achilles') strives for completeness in its analysis particularly of Books One, Nine, Sixteen and Eighteen, the third part ('Love, Hate and Cannibalism') will be more speculative and brief. There my interpretation will be of four small pieces of text that convey much of the emotion of the last six books of the poem and fill out the account that has come before. �23 RUBENSTEIN ******** All is not well, however, for the hero, not even in this, his greatest moment of exultation. The piercing cries that men let out in the midst of their battle,fury, as an inseparable part of the vaunts over their fallen enemies, betray an emotion that, at first, seems to have no place in this scheme of satisfied desire. This emotion is anger. We have painted the picture of men who stand face to face with their mortality and find ways to respond that involve staking their lives for something that would prevent death from having the final word. The moment of triumph for the hero's subjective mode of being that has shown that it is not attached to life raises man to divine status insofar as he has tasted of the power to eliminate the selkonscious other. It is this that he was eager for, this that he has won. So why is he angry? For an answer to this we can return to the Hegelian scheme. We have already made note of how upon seeing the corpse of a fellow man, a selfoware hu, man being sees his own mortality. Hegel provides a nice image for this, since he describes the two selfconsciousnesses encountering one another as a single action with a double significance. Insofar as both live and both stake their lives, they are free equally from their mortality. The death of one, however, does not give to the first what he soughtthe recognition that he is, indeed, and is the true subject for whom the world exists. Rather, it sim, ply destroys him as well, by destroying the other, whose recognition was the basis of his existence. Now, of course, men in the Iliad do not encounter one another in the isolated way that Hegel describes as somehow primordial. A victory means much in the way of recognition- but onty from other men, al, lies in particular. If we try to look behind this kind of recognition we can see the Hegelian moment of self,destruction still present in the encounters of the various heroes. What a man responds to when he stands over his fallen adversary, then, is death, itself, as a real force in his own life. What he shouts his invectives at is his own corpse. All of the glorifying exaltation of divine origin aside, the victor is just as mortal as the man slain and now he faces this mortality more than ever. As the sick, ening weakness that sets in after sexual satisfaction attests, that which one seeks with all possible ea, gerness can, upon the satiation of the desire, turn out a unique kind of pain. The hero is enraged by his kill at the same moment as he is elated. At bot, tom of this rage is his recognition of the futility of his striving after what seemed like his best hope to combat his own mortality. We will see in what fol, lows the source and nature of this futility. It will be helpful to our inquiry to pause a moment on this idea of the satiation of a desire before proceeding. A satiation is a kind of end, though it has the peculiar nature of resetting the fo~ces at work at the same moment that it com, pletes them. Hunger for food is the simplest and most illustrative example. When we eat we stop our hunger pains, stop the dominion that seeking food holds over our attention. Our hunger does not reach any real end, here, however, as we set ourselves in motion to be hungry for out next meal. The truth, I would claim, is that in this world of becoming much of what we take for ends is of this kind. One way to understand this cycle of satia, tion and renewal of appetite is by labeling these as moments in the process of metabolism. As Jonas pointed out to us earlier, the only moment of real completion from the standpoint of a living body, when the form of an organism becomes the same as its matter, is death. Other than this, metabo, lism in an animal works by never reaching comple, tion, but by alternating between greater and lesser fedings of completion as the animal changes its re, lation to its environment. So we see that there is a very tight analogy between the organic metabolism of the animal and the waxing and waning of the appetite for glorifying honor of man. Man, seeing his own inevitable death, feels the same type of incompleteness as any animal feels when it is hun, gry. He, too, is urged on toward filling this lack and does so until he reaches a point of satiation. This point, however, much as it seems like the end of the road for his appetite is really just a moment of resetting, in which he realizes that he must go on exerting himself in whatever activity it is that will bring his next round of satiation. He must live forever from one meal of honor to the next, incor, porating the sustenance that his victories win him into his identity as a being, recognized by the world and, most especially, by himself. The second part ENERGEIA of this inquiry will look at how this incorporation can occur. First, though, we turn to a beginning exploration of anger, a theme that will weave tD' gether, through the person of Achilles, with our explication of honor,metabolism. ******** What we have put forth so far with regard to honor, life and death is a scope through which we can peek at the mystery of the signification of the word 8vµ6s. 8vµ6s is the most common word used by Homer for life and for what we would call the soul. We, however, through Plato especially, associate 8vµ6s in particular with the spirited part of the soul that takes the leading role in those who live the life of honor. I bring this word up not to make reference to any particular use of it in the .Iliad, but to point out the intimate connection be, tween having the appetite for honor-in fact, the system of 'honor,metabolism,' in general- and liv, ing. To face the impossible odds that death deals us-death, which is both the discouragement of all that men, as living beings, can hope for and the parent of all that men, as men, find meaningfulis to hunger for recognition. We are not merely animals. Our life,urge must find an outlet via dis, tinctly human powers and, as we have uncovered it, the value foundation of this outlet is the honor won on the battlefield. The good life, as we have seen, is measured in the currency of honor and the value of this currency is only its power to com, bat the necessity of death. What life is worth, and thus what life is for the animal aware of his mortal, ity, is decided at those places in the universe where honor is won or lost. Then, from the mouth of the central character of the poem, and the most thoughtful about the question of mortality, we hear these words: Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are held in a single honor (iij Tlµij) the brave with the weaklings. A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions in forever setting my life on the hazard of 0attle. (9.318,322) This comment should terrify us, even as it rings true. Achilles sees the same spirits of death around him as Sarpedon, but sees no reason to respond to this by striving to win honor. To strive to win honor, in the picture I just painted, is to live and so we find death-the true death of hopeless liv, ing-very close to Achilles when we hear these words. One can hear in the background the howl, ing of the dogs and the flapping of the vulture's wings from the opening lines. avTovs eAwpta TEVXE KVVEOOlV. Men, themselves, strive as they might, are but objects, food for scavengers. In fact we have already seen the grounds, on one level, for this critique of Achilles. The an, ger that is present in the vaunt of the hero betrays his recognition that not thus will he defeat death. We have noted that the man who vaunts over his slain foe sees in the corpse of the other his own death. But this overlooks one step in this critical moment. The vaunt is always spoken to the man immediately after the fatal wound is administered but before the fallen man's life has expired. This is the moment of the '+'VXTl· This word for life, breath, soul is almost exclusively reserved for the moment when one is just about to expire (or long after this has happened). It is the '+'VXTl that leaves the body, not that animates it. It has its foot al, ready in the underworld as soon as it is ever heard from. This is the entity to which the vaunt is ad, dressed. The heroes want the last thing that their enemies hear to be their boast- their name and the angry expression of their prowess. It is as if this were their means to carry themselves beyond the world where death has mastery. I have made the claim that this moment of exultation is, for the heroes, a moment of transcendence. Here for a vanishing instant they can bask in the KVOOS, the divine eminence, of victory and satiate their spiritual hunger. Now we can understand both the true and illusory nature of this transcendence even more clearly. By means of the '+'VXTl to which they address their vaunt they touch the world beyond mortality. We see, then, that the ordinary concep, tion of the soul and the afterlife needs to be re, versed. The 'f'VXTl is less the means by which the o �24 RUBENSTEIN hero who dies lives beyond his death, but the means by which he who lives does so. But that \VVXfJ is an insubstantial thing to touch. When a man reflects on this insubstantial quality he finds the food in his mouth to have taste but no nutrition. His hun, ger is a spiritual hunger, born of the knowledge of his mortality, but his meal is just as insubstantial to ward off death beyond this passing moment as the meal of the animal. Nourishment is sought in this moment, but in the fallen enemy, rushing to become a corpse, it is lacking; and its lack in the other is a lack in the self. It is this fact, in part, on which Achilles reflects when he refers to the 'single honor' in which death puts us all. It is this fact that the opening lines convey by telling us ever, if we reflect on the moment of decision that Achilles lives through in Book One as to whether he should kill Agamemnon on the spot or heed the injunction of Athena and restrain himself. As was the case with Agamemnon, Achilles has both a personal anger well up inside of him at the insult to his own honor and a more comprehensive an, ger. His own recognition as the best fighter is dam, aged by Agamemnon's actions. For this the rem, edy would, indeed, be to lTOAACxS 8ai<p8(µovs 1.JJVXCxS ,, A'i'ot But Achilles realizes, or is told by Athena, that Agamemnon is loved by the gods as Achilles is. This translates into saying that he is a power among men equal to Achilles, though certainly not by vir, tue of his spear. To kill Agamemnon would not serve the purposes of the overpowering anger that Achilles feels in response to the political order that the son of Atreus represents. This anger will ask something else of him. Thus we hear him say, npofo6ev fjpwc.vv, avTOVS 5 EAwpta TEVXE KVVEOOIV. The men themselves are food for birds and dogs, not for the 8vµ6s of other men. This is not the final word, however, on the \VVXfJ and the death,transcending glory that the address to it is meant to afford. The anger of see, ing the \VVXii flee just at the moment that it ap, pears as one's only means to escape mortality is so primordial that from its roots are grown all the re, lations that men develop with one another in or, der to live the good life. Men, as has been pointed out, never simply engage one another in the life and death struggle of the primordial selkonscious, ness. Off the battlefield, men are allies to one an, other, friends and fellow citizens, in addition to enemies. By finding the foundation of this friendly relationship in the efforts to capture the fleeing \VVXfi we can discern at least two different modes of life among allies, the life of political honor and the life of honor governed by love. The conflict between these two modes of life, between Agamemnon and Achilles, is the central story of the Iliad. ******** These objections to the imbalance between merit and wealth and the transience of material things are the most recognizable elements of Achilles' position. We can find a deeper objection, how, ... draw from beside his thigh the sharp sword, driving away all those who stood between and kill the son of Atreus. (1.191-192) onµo!J6pos !JaotAEVS, ETIEi OVTlOaVOlOlV avaooets King who feed on your people, since you rule nonentities ~yap av, 'ATE'i'OT}, vCiv VOTaTa Ac.v!Jfiomo. otherwise, son of Atreus this were your last outrage. (1.231-232) Achilles expresses just the order of things that we have adopted from Hegel. That which is fed on, insofar as it is considered the object of desire, is nothingness, has no intrinsic being. Agamemnon's rule, which is meant to make out of the nothing, ness of the fleeting \VVXfJ something substantial to feed the spiritual hunger of death,bound men, turns out to make nothingness out of those very men. Recognition is not real in the Achaian camp, Achilles would argue. The honor of material pos, sessions has been alienated from the personal honor won in meritorious action. These goods are what men see when they recognize each other in a political context and, so, men do not see the being 25 ENERGEIA that each one has but merely the having; and this having is the object of their own desire. Thus, what the men see in one another verges on mere objects of desire- most of all in the case of one's vision from the head of the table. Recognition, sought on the field of battle and carried back into the political arena, is capable of becoming a mere mask for the perception of other men as objects of desire. Beneath the stripped armor the enemy, in fact, the food, poses as the friend. ******** A brief restatement of where we have come is in order here: on the battlefield men put their lives at grave risk for the sake of recognition. The life-urge within them seeks to sustain the beingfor-self that is born with self-awareness and consciousness of mortality. Death, in the form of a world of other things that each make the claim to subjectivity as the selkonscious man does, must be fought against by making the world know that he is the subjective point of view. But the recognition sought in killing the enemy is not found there-the \VVXfi from whom it is most acutely asked flits away-and so the life-urge finds, in other self-conscious men, allies. These are the men who can give recognition for meritorious deeds done. Here the rupture between Agamemnon and Achilles begins to form. How are these men, allies, to regard one another? We have shown that the an~ swer to this question for which Agamemnon stands, the political answer, is regarded by Achilles as making of men ovT'iOavot-nonentities for the repast of their king and of each other. The alternative, we are now prepared to say, is for allied men to do just what Hegel says that animals do not do in the presence of sensuous things (which, of course, includes other animals)' stand idly in front of them as if they possessed · intrinsic being.' In other words, to regard other men as friends. We need to look hard into this cat, egory of relations among men, on its own account, and then turn to the question of how it works together with the all important winning of battlefield glory. Thus we will see how Achilles believes it provides a real alternative means of capturing the \VVXfi. We can go quite far in setting down the foundations of the friend relation between men by examining Aristotle's aAAos avT6S 6 cpiAos, 'the friend is an other self.' We may take this statement on one level to mean that the friend is another instantiation of one's own person-skills, dispositions, values are shared. We will find this reading quite helpful when we turn to Achilles' friendship with Patroklos. On another level, though, the statement means simply this: the friend is that other whom one views as possessing intrinsic being, as having a subjective point of view, rather than being a mere object. In this way, the friend would be the inverse to the ovT'iOavos or, generally, to food. We would then say that even the enemy whom one encounters on the battlefield is a friend, insofar as he is regarded as something be, sides an object to be sacrificed to the hero's hun, ger for recognition (as a 6vµ6s rather than a \VVXfi). Moreover, the political ally is a friend insofar as he is recognized for who he is rather than what he has. In truth, Achilles' perspective amounts to saying that only via friendship and its concomitant motion in the soul, love, can there be genyine recognition among men. The means of tra~s, figuring battlefield glory, the taste for which is born of knowing that one is to die, into nourishment must be to receive recognition from allies in the form of love. Recalling our earlier work with the speech of Sarpedon, we can say that this sort of mediation of the raw materials for the honor-metabolism still falls under the category of KAfos. Now it is the fundamental imaging power of men-sing, ing songs and making speeches-that does the work on this material rather than the secondary imag, ing power of making symbols, the currency of wealth, to stand for this honored status in the minds of men. Now let us return to Aias' speech in Book Nine and see how it is spoken according to Achilles' own mind. To begin with, we have already noted that it is spoken outside of the bounds of the official embassy. Achilles must sense immedi, ately that Aias speaks not from the position of a political counterpart but simply as a man, a guest under Achilles roof, as indeed he has the good sense to point out (9.640-642). In this context, Aias speaks. Most revealing for us are these words about �26 RUBENSTEIN ately that Aias speaks not from the position of a political counterpart but simply as a man, a guest under Achilles' roof, as indeed he has the good sense to point out (9 .640-64 2). In this context, Aias speaks. Most revealing for us are these words about Achilles, . He is hard, and does not remember that friend,'s affection (q>tAOTT)TOS· halpwv) wherein we honored him by the ships, far beyond all others (EXO'+'ov aAAc.uv) (9. 630-631). To neither Odysseus nor Phoinix, Agamemnon nor Nestor, did it occur to point out to Achilles the love- on top of the honor-that is shared between Achilles and his comrades. This, in spite of the fact that Achilles greets the ambassadors with Welcome. You are my friends (cplAot) who have come, and greatly I need you, who even to this my anger are dearest (cplATaTo{) of the Achaians. (9.197-198) He does not see the men approaching him as what they obviously are-officials on a mission from Agamemnon. He sees them as friends, whose company he needs in spite of his dispute with the sceptered king. Aias, alone, picks up on this and accuses Achilles in a way that is capable of having an effect. In his final remarks, we hear from Aias more emphasis placed on the love of the Achaians in addition to a repetition of the formulation esoxov aAAc.uv: Respect your own house; see, we are under the same roof with you, from the multitude of the Danaans, we, who desire beyond all others (esoxov aAAc.uv) to be to you the most cared for and beloved, out of all the Achaians. (9.640-642) To recognize another as a thing possessing intrinsic being is to hold it apart ( E~ + exc.u) from other things. For the being that sees the world only as food nothing is so held apart. Now let us bring honor back into the picture with respect to love. What it does seem relevant to the other ambassadors to remind Achilles of is that the Achaians will honor Achilles, even honor him as a god (cf. 9.302-303, 9.603). InAias' speech, on the other hand, honor comes up only in the first lines given above (626-627). Honor is indeed what the Achaians can offer Achilles if he gives over his anger, but honor inside of love: 'the friend's affections wherein (11) we honored him.' This is the essence of Achilles' alternative system of bringing glory off the battlefield and making it last in the community of men. Again Aristotle is of help: Life is desirable especially for good men, because existence is good and pleasant to them; they are pleased when they are conscious of the presence in them of what is in itself good. Also the attitude of a morally good man is the same toward himself as toward his friend, since a friend is another self. From all this it follows that just as one's own existence is desirable for each man, so, or nearly so, is his friend's existence also desirable for him. Now as we saw, his existence is desirable because he perceives his own goodness, and this kind of perception is itself pleasant. (Nicomachean Ethics 1170b3-l0)6 What we read in Aristotle as 'the morally good man' we can read in Homer as the courageous man, the man well suited to winning glory in the fighting. 7 A man who wins great glory ought to be honored by friends since his existence is desirable for them in its own right. As a man revels in his own glory at the moment he stands over his fallen enemy, he should be able to revel in another man's meritorious deeds and to recapture the '+'VXrl that has fled him by having his achievements so reveled in. Notice how well this complements the other fundamental encounter of self-consciousness. There, too, in Hegel's picture of the life and death struggle, the other, is in a sense, one self with the first self-consciousness- its recognition of you and your recognition of it are one movement. But, in that encounter, the other must be destroyed in order to strip from it any claim to intrinsic, i.e. subjective, being. In the friendly encounter of self. consciousnesses, on the other hand, the other's being-for-self is supported in the true mutual recognition of one another-'true' since each sees the 27 ENERGEIA other as something besides a means to satisfy its appetite, as something besides food. In the orientation of the world that Achilles would wish for, the appetitive glory of the Hegelian encounter would be substantified by the friendly recognition of the encounter, under the auspices of love. The political system of honors, which Achilles rejects, finds a mean between friend and enemy, as I have laid them out: the 'political ally.' This person is, to a certain degree, seen as food rather than something with intrinsic being (to a very large extent, Achilles would claim) but is still capable, through the mediacy of wealth, of offering recognition of a lasting kind. We have, then, uncovered two opposing means for the honor-metabolism to digest its raw materials: by recognition through wealth and by recognition, simply, from those whom one loves. We can understand these two opposing means better by pausing a moment to address, what I have called in my introduction, the 'economic' facet of the question. When, among political men, the glory won on the battlefield is made accessible to others for recognition by being transfigured into material goods with symbolic significance, a standard of value is created. As honor in the form of possessions is further translated into power, this standard must be measurable. For this to be possible, one can not rely merely on the value objects carry from the battlefield as signs that victories have been won. Rather, one must determine the worth or, more properly, the cost, of goods based on an independent criterion- independent, that is, of the value of the labor that produced them. For example, why is Chryseis more valuable as a prize than Briseis? It is not because it took more noble deeds to win her, but because of some independent criteria such as her birth or her beauty or her still at the loom. I specify 'cost' since what comes into being here is a value for goods that can be transferred from one man's hand to another, though, of course, the merit that won the reward can not be so transferred. Now we can understand better the significance of Achilles' words to Agamemnon in Book One: Always the greater part of the painful fight ing in the work of my hands; but when the time comes to dis tribute the booty yours is far the greater reward, and I with some small thing yet dear to me ( 6:\lyov TE cp(Aov T E) go back to my ships when I am weary with fighting. (1.165-168) Achilles knows that his reward is more meager than Agamemnon's according to the standard of worth that is set up when honor is transfigured into wealth. Nonetheless, what he takes from the fighting is loved, showing us that love measures value on a different scale than does the polltical organism. The object of love, in fact, is that which has value but no 'cost.' Briseis, insofar as she is a yepa s-, has a transferable worth that Agamemnon wishes for himself- a worth that is, of course, increased by the increase in demand on her brought about by the fight between him and Achilles. But Briseis, as 'some small thing' that Achilles loves can not be enjoyed by Agamemnon. ******** Whether one ought to respond to all of these deifying components of anger by calling them delusion or revelation of truth is the central question of our human condition as both god and animal. Though events often seem to expose Achilles as deluded (and he comes to think himself so, in certain respects) we can not allow this to be our final answer too easily. Achilles might have discovered a great truth in his designation of Agamemnon as a 0-1iµo[36pos- and the Achaians as OVTLOavol. He certainly seems to have perceived the dominion of death as deeply as Homer, himself, does in the opening lines of the poem. As regards his controvertial fasting in Book Nineteen, he does quite well in the fighting after denying his belly as Odysseus instructs him that it is madness to do. I make no effort to deliver a final judgment on the question of whether anger is a cloud of smoke that obscures our vision so that we see ourselves as gods or is the smoke that carries our natures up to heaven as the smoke of the sacrificial animal carries its savor. �28 RUBENSTEIN I would insist, however, that anger is the emotion present where our being as animals meets our being as gods. Earlier, we characterized anger as that emotion that we feel in response to seeing the futility of one effort or another on our part to escape mortality. We can now go one step further. Anger is a species of desire. Hans Jonas, in a passage that I quoted in my prelude, gives us an excellent description of this kind of emotion. It is worth revisiting it here: Fulfillment not yet at hand is the essential condition of desire, and deferred fulfillment is what desire in turn makes possible. Thus desire represents the time-aspect of the same situation of which perception represents the space-aspect. Distance in both respects is disclosed and bridged. (101) Emotions that are species of desire are, in essence, expression of some distance between the holder of the desire and the object of his desire. Jonas has in mind the desires that distinguish the animal soul from the plant's, for whom, there being no desire, there is no distance whatsoever. Anger, an emotion distinctive to man, however, also expresses a distance. The object of desire in this case is transcendence of mortality. The distance between the man experiencing anger and this object is neither spatial nor temporal but, for want of a better term, spiritual. Anger being tied to the futility of our efforts to transcend death corresponds to the pain of desire that is an inseparable accompaniment to distance. I leave it an open question, but one well worth exploring, what the nature is of this new dimension of distance that exists only for self-conscious animals. 8 I reiterate, though, the constant desire of men to conquer the recurring fact of death, in the form of the emotion of anger, is this distance. we allow it only to have this mediating role between our spiritual hunger and oyr spiritual nourishment. Love does not always manifest itself as a means of finding a role for honor in our lives. Love, itself, is the name for a sp\titual hunger that runs as deep as the hunger for recognition that we have identified as the parent of honor. In the last days of the Iliad, we find the story to have shifted focus and love, far more than honor, taking center stage. The center of the story becomes the trials of love gone through by the living Achilles, Priam and Hecuba as they react to the corpses of Patroklos and Hektor. Man faces the corpse and sees his mortality. Here is love's response. From Achilles, over the dying body of Hektor, whose windpipe has been spared the spear stroke that has fatally taken him through the neck, allowing him to beg for the return to his parents of his body: a'i yap Trc.us avT6v µe µevos Ka\ Svµos CxVElT') I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me Wµ' CxTTOTaµvoµEVOV Kpfo EOµEVat, Ota µ fopyas. to eat your flesh, raw and hacked away- such things have you done to me. (22.346347) And from Hecuba, to her husband, who informs her that he will go naked to the huts of Achilles to recover their son, ... TOO eyw µfoov T)Trap exo1µ1 .. .I would have it be that, eo6eµevm Trpoa<.pOoa TOT' aVTtTa epya yevo1To growing into the middle of his liver, I might eat it- That would be vengence Trat86s eµoO ... for my son ... (24.212-214) Conclusion: Love, Hate and Cannibalism Love has made its entry into our inquiry as one possible means, the other being political recognition, of making substance out of the transient glory that is won on the battlefield. We do not do full justice to love, as a presence in human life wrapped up with our awareness of mortality, if Love and anger, eating and death, all come together in these moments, which ask for an answer to this question: why would one, in their fiercest moment of vengeful anger, want to eat the body of the person they hate, the person who has taken the life of their loved one? And what does it signify that both - 29 ENERGEIA Achilles and Hecuba, at the very moment that they express this wish, realize the impossibility of it? We can begin to address these questions with this paradox: food, the object of our appetites is nothingness. The desire that both Achilles and Hecuba express clearly has its roots in the wish that their enemy could be merely this, merely a sensuous being to be negated. In fact, though, the person that one hates, as these two hate, is far closer to a friend than to food in the estimation of the one hating. Reflect for a moment on hatred. One person becomes your obsession, your world-the stock that you put in its intrinsic being is the stock that you put in your own. It must exist for you to exist, since what you are becomes an expression of feeling toward it. As much as the friend, defined as that other whom you are willing to acknowledge as a self, has intrinsic being enough to give you pause, so does the enemy. Faced with this other who, in their estimation is, if anything is, Hecuba and Achilles behave like they are encountering food, nothingness. Their frustration is an intimation of this fact. We must spell out these steps more slowly. What does Achilles see lying before him? He sees his renowned armor, with only the smallest bit of flesh showing through (cf. 22.322). He sees Patroklos, the last man to have been before his eyes looking exactly like the man before him. He sees himself.9 But he knows what hides underneath this shell. Within the friend is the enemy. This enemy has taken the place of his friend. His flesh lies inside the armor, his existence carries all of Achilles attention. When one hunts food, one does not specify a particular hare or deer to take down and make the satisfaction of the appetite. To do so would be to acknowledge the being of that animal apart from its role as food. Achilles sees being in what lies before him. The same be- . ing, even, as he allowed to leave his tent. Hecuba speaks, in the lines before what we have quoted, about giving birth to Hektor. This loved one who is now dead and far away from her was once inside of her, attached to her own source oflife. Now she would 'grow towards,' attach herself to ('rrpoocpvoa) the liver (T)nap) of Achilles. Later Greek poetry uses the expression finaTOS cpepetv, 'to carry under the liver,' to sig- vcp nify pregnant women. 10 At that part of the body where Hektor was attached to her at one time she would now attach herself to Achilles. He has become her world, thrust into that role by the departure of her son, just as Hektor has become so for Achilles. For all the same reasons, her remarks betray the real and true being that she ascribes to her hated enemy; to he whom she would have be mere nothingness. But why do these two wish for their enemy to be their food-food for the dogs and vultures ought to be enough. Let us look deeper into the nature of a friend. 11 A friend is that person with whom one seeks to share one consciousness. To grant to the other a sdf, to recognize it as partaking in subjectivity, to honor it with the thought that the world was made for it as well as you, all of this is to look at yourself as part of the same consciousness with it. This one consciousness looks out at the world of objects that lies apart from it. But we are bodies. avTovs 0 EAwpta TEVXE KVVEOOlV. As I have mentioned, our material selves are insolubly distinct. So, between one's self and one's friends there remains this impassible gulf. Impassible, though, with certain significant, though insufficient, exceptions. The lover becomes one flesh, in a manner of speaking, in sexual intercourse. The mother is one body with her child. Achilles, facing the ghost of Patroklos, wants to press himself to it. But the shade, like smoke (Kairvos, 23.100, but cf. 18.110), can't be grasped. Achilles has lost his companion whom he would take in his embrace; Hecuba has lost her son whom she carried in her womb. Each seek to fill the physicaL gap left by their friend with the physicaL substance of their enemy. The identity of the one loved is his body, not the memory of him, not the shade that might appear in the night. For one living body lost, Achilles and Hecuba turn all their attention to another living body, whose consumption alone seems to them the answer to this loss. For Achilles, the KVOOS that he will consume through his vaunt and the KAEoS he will receive from the Achaians are no nourishment. Achilles has died to the life run by his honor-metabolism. 12 He has no hopes of returning home or living to hear his name sung. His grave site is selected, his companion to the earth waits, in bones, within �30 RUBENSTEIN his tent (23.126,254). Achilles, as he told his mother, lives only for the death of Hektor. When he kills him, he kills himself. Thus there can not be the normal order of things around the slain opponent. The vaunt at the "l'VXTJ and the stripping of the armor that would allow this meal of honor to be carried off the battlefield have no nutrition for the man Achilles has become. The body of Patroklos has made Achilles vulnerable to a living . death, his source of life, his 0uµ6s, being unable to nourish itself. Achilles sees his suicide in the death-stroke that he delivers to Hektor. But he is by no means reconciled to death. He wants, in that corpse lying before him to reclaim the life of his friend and his own life as well. But he cannot eat Hektor; and Hecuba cannot eat Achilles. At the same time as all their furious desire impels them to this act, they are aware that it will not satisfy their loss. So, the Iliad reaches a point of dreadful stagnancy. Hecuba would have her husband remain in Troy, covered in the filth of his mourning while she pines only for Achilles' flesh. Achilles, who has the body of his loved one in his care, is not comforted in this. Instead, day after day, he attempts to mutilate the corpse, dragging it behind his chariot. No desecration occurs, however, the body even flourishing while it lies in the dust by his shelter. How long can this continue? It seems like there can be no end to the vengeful obsession set up in both these lovers' minds by their association of the body, the identity, of the one lost with the body of the one they hate. Into the midst of this endless misery, wise Priam finds the solution . In Achilles' tent, we hear from Priam what I will argue is the third in this series of expressions of hatred mixed with love, of the need to deal with the body of the dead loved one through the body of the living object of hate. Priam falls at the feet of Achilles, grasps his knees and kisses his hand. He begs him to remember his fathe r, considering Priam's own misery and he describes that misery: 6peyeo6m. I reached out my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my sons. (24.505-506) 629 11 Toi .6.apoavfons npfaµos 8avµa~ 'Ax1A.fia, and then Priam son of Dardanos gazed upon Achilleus and wondered 630 oooos Ef)V, oi6s TE 8eot0l yap avTa E~KEl. CxVOpOS lTatOOq>OVlO 1TOTt OTOµa XElp' ENERGEIA In turn upon Priam son of Dardanos gazed Achilleus and wondered 632 Eiooposv o6(v T aya8r)V, Kat µ06wv it the rite of fire . Death bears meaning. Death bears life. Life, in this act, takes death into its embrace. CxKOVUJV. Priam does what Achilles and Hecuba would do but can't-he puts the body of the man he hates to his mouth. For Hecuba -;nd Achilles, inside the friend they found the enemy. For Priam and Achilles, inside the enemy they find the friend; and their self. They weep together, though neither, in this weeping, sees the one whose company he is in. Achilles sees his father and Patroklos, Priam sees his son. Clearly, Priam makes the association of his son, for whom his love was a recognition of intrinsic being, with his enemy. But his focus remains the body of Hektor. Putting Achilles to his lips is a means to recover that body. He makes Achilles his food, insofar as he is this means. But he remains conscious of the being of this enemy that his hatred compels him to grant. Thus, in a moment when Priam, as hateful of the man he is with as are the two at whom we have looked, would be compelled to the same action as they, he kisses rather than bites. This ability to remain conscious of Achilles' being and, generally, to be aware that love and hate are expressions of the same motion in the soul, provides the two men with the opportunity for the pinnacle moment of recognition in the Iliad. The two men share a meal at Achilles' urging. Neither has truly eaten, having been living in the stagnancy of a living death, since these events began. Neither has sought sustenance and strength for their bodies to continue the effort of life. After this meal, the two men gaze at each other and wonder. Notice the striking parallel structure of lines 629 and 631: "ETAflV o' ,oi' OU 1TUJ TlS emx66v1os (3poTOS aAAos, I have gone through such things as no man on earth 31 so great was he and of such a kind, for he seemed like an outright vision of the gods 631 miTap 6 .6.apoavforiv CTp(aµov Savµa~ev 'Ax1A.A.evs as he saw the brave looks and listened to his words. Priam impresses Achilles and us by making possible this moment of truest recognition amongst hated enemies. Honor and love come together in that encounter of two men of which Hecuba (cf. 24.208) believe.s Achilles incapable-reverence. This mode of recognition, at this moment, is the removal of the stagnation of a life that lost love, lost hope ofliving in another despite death. Achilles will find other occupations than, in utter futility, dragging the corpse of Hektor. Hecuba will take the body of her own son into her arms and, we imagine, forget the obsession with the body of Achilles. Concretely, then, the fruit of Priam's success is the recovery of the body of the one he loves. Achilles specifies that he wants Hektor' s flesh raw (wµa). Whether he eats it or not, he has promised Patroklos that raw it will remain (23.22). Hecuba calls Achilles wµnoTtlS, 'raw-eating.' Priam's recovery of Hektor saves him from this status. He will be burned on the pyre as a part of his burial, the final act of the poem and the subject of the very last line. The question that has dominated this paper is 'how do living men respond to the ever-recurring fact of death?' We have seen the response shape the way that men live. Death makes life meaningful insofar as meaning is sought in honor, recognition, wealth, love of comrades, love of sons. All these things are man's way of beating death; and yet nothing beats death. Death and life are the greatest paradox imaginable. ltis tombs, Hans Jonas informs us, that "acknowledge and negate death at the same time." (8) To make the · death of the loved one a part oflife by the ritual of the corpse is, in concrete terms, the only response to death and the one that men in the Iliad always put their hopes in. To die is not to be food for dogs and birds if you are loved or honored enough to receive burial. Even Zeus, as he cries tears of blood over the loss of his son, ensures that his body finds its way into the hands of those who will give Endnotes 1 The text that I quote is predominantly taken from Lattimore's translation. Where it differs, the translation is mine. It is often at these points of difference that I give the Greek text as well but I refrain from diverging from the argument to explain my emendations explicitly. Otherwise, I give the Greek where I wish to make particular reference to the language in my argument. Also, I used both the Cunliffe Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect and the LSJ for my translations. 2 All references to Jonas are taken from essays in The Phenomenon of Life. Page numbers refer to the edition published by University of Chicago Press, 1966. This first quotation is found in the essay "Is God a Mathematician? The Meaning of Metabolism." 3 From "To Move and To Feel: On The Animal Soul." 4 See "Life, Death and the Body in the Theory of Being," especially pg. 9. 5 I use the Oxford University Press edition translated by AV. Miller for all references to Hegel, citing section numbers rather than page numbers. 6 I use the Library of Liberal Arts edition, translated by Martin Ostwald. 7 Both apETTJ and aya86s usually have this connotation. Consider also Homer's prototype of a man without moral qualities-and without friends-Paris. 8 We might begin to address this question, for example, by wondering if this dimension is analogous to a form of intuition, as Kant describes space and time. 9 If we doubt the rightness of this identification of Hektor with Patroklos, and thus with Achilles, we need only note the exact repetition of the words describing Patroklos' death in the words Homer uses to describe Hektor' s. These are the only two men to receive these words. Cf. 16.855-858, 361-364. 10 See LSJ pg. 599. 11 It is a very deep question why we apply the same term to our feelings for a child of ours and to a beloved peer. Without attempting to answer this question, I follow usage calling the feeling for both 'love' (q>(AOS) and even extend English usage a bit, calling both 'friend' ( cp 1AO)). 12 Although the embers of that life still burn and threaten at one moment (22.381-385), at least, to burst into flame. �J3 STRACHE and TALLENT Translation from Pindar's Olympians Laura Strache, A'02 8HPWNI AKPArANTINWI APMATI nrvoapov Antistrophe /3 Oines 28-34) AeyovTl o& EV Kat 8aAcXOO<;X µETCx Kopmm Nnpfios aA(ms (3toTOV aq>8tTOV alvol TETaxSm TOV OAOV aµq>t xpovov. TlTOl (3poTWV ye KEKptTm TIEtpas OU Tl eavaTOV, ova& i]ovxtµov aµepav OTIOTE Tiaili& CxEAlOV CxTElpEt ovv ayae~ TEAEVTaooµev· poat o& aAA OT a aAAm ev8vµu3:v TE µeTa Kat TIOVWV es &vopas e(3av. --- AN EXCERPT FROM PINDAR'S ODE: TO THERON OF AKRAGUS FOR CHARIOT (OLYMPIAN 1WO) They say, in the sea among the sea-daughters ofNerus, Ino was given imperishable life for all time. Truly for mortals, no boundary at all has been decided for death, nor the quiet day when we will complete the child of Helios with the help of untiring good. Different rivers at different times come to humans with kindness and with toil. Translation from the Greek Anthology Anderson Tallent, A'04 V.xiv Rufinus Evpw1TT}S TO q>lAT}µa , Kat flv axpt 'f'ElAEOs eA011, i]ov ye, KOV '+'aVOT} µoCivov aKpov oToµaTos '+'avet o' ov1< aKTipots Tol's xer:\emv, a:\:\' ep(oooa TO OToµa TTlV ~vxilv Es 6vvxcuv avayet. Europa's kiss, although she touches but the lips With her mouth is still voluptuous; For not the lips alone she touches the mouth closepressed, She charms the soul out of the fingertips. No to 509 Peter Speer, A'02 ENERGEIA �SPEER and PICARD 34 35 ENERGEIA Th.e Problem with Reason . 1n Kant's Critique of Pure Reason AJin Kim, ~01 We cannot help but think about the pains that Kant takes to define understanding, so as to make it clear what it is not by showing what it is properly. Then Kant takes upon himself the task of describing pure reason. The question this essay seeks to understand is why Kant makes such a clear separation between understanding and reason. Why is this distinction so important for him? This might answer the question of what happens when we do not distinguish between the two. Everything that Kant relates about the faculty of the understanding points exclusively to its employment in the realm of the empirical. Through a priori concepts the understanding conditions the unity of appearances. It specifies the mode in which our intuition receives objects, the presentations of which, of course, are determined a priori by the understanding with respect to pure intuition. Kant sets up the a priori relation of the understanding to intuition, but what comes out of this relation is that objects are only appearances for us. Only appearances hold objective reality for us. Thus when we talk about objects of our understanding, that is, any knowledge that is held by the understanding, we are speaking of appearances given by the intuition: Badlands Caroline Picard, ~02 The principles of pure understanding [... ] contain nothing but what may be called the pure schema of possible experience. For experience obtains its unity only from the synthetic unity which the understanding originally and of itself confers upon the synthesis of imagination in its relation to apperception; and the appearances, as data for a possible knowledge, must already stand a priori in relation to, and in agreement with, that synthetic unity [B 296]1 The understanding through its categories conditions the synthesis of the manifold given in intmtlon. The understanding through schematism, which contain the categories, directs the imagination in the synthesis that it performs on the manifold given in intuition. In this way, the synthesis of the imagination makes a unity out of the manifold of intuition after apprehending it. The synthetic unity of the imagination then yields material as knowledge for the understanding. The categories are rules for the synthesis of the manifold of our intuition, and this relation to intuition (or sensibility) is the only relation that understanding can determine. Because Kant sets up the understanding in relation to intuition in this mode, the only possible employment of the understanding is empirical. But we say that it is empirical because given the mode of intuition, namely as presenting manifolds of appearance that the imagination synthesizes to produce a unified appearance, the only objects that the understanding has are appearances. And if all that we have are appearances, then they contain the entirety of our experiences, i.e. appearances are our only experience. Given the mode of intuition which presents only a manifold of appearances to the imagination to be synthesized, appearances are the only things that are proper to our modes of knowledge. Our appearances are the extent of our experiences and, therefore, anything outside of our appearances are not objects for us, i.e. anything and everything that is not a reference to those objects that we have no concepts for, which is to say objects that are not able to come to us as appearances. But Kant does not want us to stop there at the mere separation of appearances from everything else and rule out anything that is not an appearance per se. He also wants to expressly point out the things that the employment of our understanding cannot apply to. Kant gives us a very clear distinction to work with. It is a distinction between transcen- �KIM dental and empirical employment: "The transcendental employment of a concept in any principle is its application to things in general and in themselves; the empirical employment is its application merely to appearances, that is, to objects of a possible experience" [B 298]. We are already acquainted with empirical employment as that which is applicable to appearances as objects. Transcendental employment, on the other hand, would pertain to things in themselves, that is, to the actual objects the appearances of which are all that we are able to experience. 2 The distinction is a reference to those objects from which appearances come to us. On the one hand we have the appearances and, on the other, the actual objects themselves that correspond to our appearances. Those objects themselves would be transcendental. The concepts in our understanding are not in any way applicable to the objects themselves but only to the appearances. This sets up boundaries for the understanding; the proper sphere of the understanding is the empirical and, most importantly, it is to the exclusion of transcendental employment. Now, the distinction is clear for us, but fascinatingly enough Kant attributes this distinction to the understanding itself. It, too, knows where its boundaries lie, and determines them for itself. Kant sets up noumena (intelligible entities) in opposition to phenomena (sensible entities). Phenomena are objects as appearances given to us in our sensibility, or mode of intuition. Noumena are the things themselves, considered in their own nature, or "other possible things, which are not objects of our sense but are thought as objects merely through the understanding" [B 306, middle]. The understanding discerns that its cat· egories cannot be applied to noumena since noumena are not given through sensibility, and only such objects can be known through its cat· egories. Consequently, the understanding admits of the existence of things it knows absolutely nothing about, though only in so far as they are unknown. Thus the understanding does not concern itself with noumena: 36 What our understanding acquires through this concept of a noumenon, is a negative extension; that is to say, understanding is not limited through sensibility; on the contrary, it itself limits sensibility by applying the term noumena to things in themselves (things not regarded as appearances). But in so doing it at the same time sets limits to itself, recognizing that it cannot know these noumena through any of the categories, and that it must therefore think them only under the title of an unknown something. [B 312] The understanding itself knows that it cannot employ any of its categories with respect to objects in themselves. In forming its judgments it does not pretend to do so with respect to objects in themselves, but rather appearances. Recognizing that without the material given through intuition it is devoid of any knowledge, it restricts itself to making judgments about appearances. It knows that it needs to rely on in· tuition, for it can have no concepts without intu· ition. This is the resting ground of the understanding. The understanding is assured of its own proper sphere and is secure in its territory. But this is not the extent of the land. In conjunction with the understanding is something called reason. There the understanding is with its various judgments, content with having made them and not seeking to go any further because it has clear sight of its own limits. This is until reason becomes it neighbour. Let us entitle the faculty of understanding the faculty of rules. It conditions the synthesis of unity of all our appearances into modes of knowledge which are expressed through the categories of judgment. It generates knowledge according to its various concepts which allow the appearances of our intuition to be apprehended under formal rules to yield that very knowledge. And the under· standing stops there. But the picture is incomplete. In the end we have a multitude of judgments, as many as the understanding has ever produced. 37 ENERGEIA There would be a danger. of a vast, expansive surplus of judgments if we did not have the faculty of reason to comprehend the particular knowledge of the understanding under universals, that is, to organize and manage those judgments. Reason's relation to the understanding is analogous to that of understanding to intuition. Reason takes the products of the understanding and brings it into a synthetic unity. The understanding is not able to do this for itself. It is only concerned with the synthesis of appearances for the purpose of making judgments and can go no further and do nothing more. Because it is working to make a unity out of objects of possible experience, another faculty apart from the understanding has to render a like service unto it. Since reason is to render such a service, Kant argues that the faculty of reason does so in a priori relation to the understanding, through its concepts. In other words, the modes of knowledge of the understanding must conform to the concepts of reason in the same way that the manifold of appearance (formally conditioned by time and space) must conform to the categories of the understanding. The concepts of pure reason condition the modes of knowledge of the understanding. Kant is very clear from the outset that reason has nothing to do with objects as appearances. Reason has no part in the conditioning of our experiences. The manner in which the manifold of appearances is connected is not determined in any manner by the concepts of reason. Reason only acts directly on the understanding and its judgments, and presupposes that all experience has already been synthesized. Reason enters the scene after all experience has been given. It has no empirical employment whatsoever and "leaves every· thing to the understanding-the understanding applying immediately to the objects of intuition, . or rather to their synthesis in the imagination" [B 383]. Reason has no interest in objects as appear· ances and does not profess to having anything to do with them, leaving phenomena solely to the understanding. Another restriction on reason is that it is utterly incapable of the determination of objects in themselves. Because reason has no say in the mode in which appearances of objects are given to us in experience, neither can it know anything about the objects themselves that are given to the understanding. This is very important in light of the fact that it is the understanding that has any interaction with objects in themselves. But, the understanding knows that it knows nothing about these transcendental objects, that is, objects considered in their nature and of themselves, and does not offer up any knowledge of this kind to reason. Here we have a sharp division between understanding and reason. The sphere of experience lies solely in the hands of the understanding and reason can have no part of it. Thus what reason is responsible for must lie outside the sphere of experience and the understanding is left behind when reason takes over. The division is made between reason and understanding and what hap· pens now is entirely in the province of reason. In the logical employment of reason, in· ferences are made through syllogisms. What Kant gives us in addition to this merely formal mode of making inferences is an a priori relation of the faculty of reason to the understanding. It is the nature of reason that it looks upon all knowledge of the understanding gained through experience as "being determined through an absolute totality of conditions." Reason is equipped with concepts that require this of knowledge given to us. The concepts of pure (taken a priori to the understanding) reason are concepts of the uncon· ditioned..:._that which has no prior member and is the cause of a thing. The unconditioned "con· ceived as containing a ground of the synthesis of the conditioned" [B 379] is the only thing that allows for the totality of conditions, that is, the series of conditioned knowledge as a totality. With these principles in hand, reason descends upon the understanding in order to syn· thesize the conditioned knowledge of the understanding and take it all the way back up to the unconditioned "in order to prescribe to the understanding its direction towards a certain unity of which it has itself no concept, and in such a manner as to unite all the acts of the understanding, in respect of every object, into an absolute whole" [B 383, middle]. Reason assumes that the unconditioned is given, which is as much to say �38 KIM that it thinks that the totality of conditions is also given. Thinking that the series of conditions has already been given a priori to the understanding through the concept of the unconditioned, reason has every right to believe that it can jump from the conditioned knowledge of the understanding, once there, all the way up to the unconditioned, for the unconditioned is what fashioned that very knowledge to begin with, as far as reason is concerned. It is clear that concepts of pure reason have no relation to experience whatsoever, being not all applicable to objects of possible experience. They are not at all concerned with the mode in which objects are received by sensibility and consequently given to the understanding. "[T]hey are transcendent and overstep the limits of all experience; no object adequate to the transcendental idea can ever be found within experience" [B 383, end]. The transcendental idea is outside experience because it itself conditions experience. This is the very demand of reason. Its nature is to require that there be an unconditioned for any series of conditions in which the conditioned of the understanding is given. If reason found an object in experience corresponding to the transcendental idea of it, it would be compelled to seek for a prior condition that was unconditioned. But this could never happen because reason only sets out assuming that the unconditioned is already given. This is uncharted territory: the field of reason is properly wholly outside the world of appearances. The abode of understanding within experience is utterly foreign to reason. In accordance with its nature, it is outside th e bounds of possible experience. The lines between reason and the understanding are ever so distinctly drawn. Each has its domain and what other intention can Kant have than for us to attribute to each its proper sphere of influence? If one should happen to encroach upon the other, we shall know who the aggressor is. Unfortunately for the understanding, reason does not have the same limiting function that noumena provide for the understanding. This we shall see is to the detriment of all concerned. Reason and the understanding are linked together very closely, but made very distinct. Kant emphatically draws the line between where reason ventures and where understanding makes its home. But these two entities touch at all times and it is, at least, apparent what danger there is if the two are not kept wholly distinct- we might easily mistake the one faculty for the other or, worse yet, overlook the distinction all together. We have established that reason is entirely outside the bounds of possible experience. It is the nature of reason to view all things given to the understanding as unconditioned according to the principle that "if the conditioned is given, the entire sum of conditions, and consequently the absolutely unconditioned (through which alone the conditioned has been possible) is also given" [B 436, end]. Reason must leave experience behind because it is concerned with making a complete unity of the empirical synthesis of the understanding by extending the unity of the understanding up to the transcendental idea of the unconditioned. In logic, reason makes inferences through syllogisms, seeking "to find for the conditioned knowledge obtained through the understanding the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion" [B 364, middle]. In doing this, reason endeavours to subsume a condition under a universal rule, thereby pronouncing a judgment as its conclusion when it is able to apply the universal rule to the conditioned. What is peculiar to pure reason, however, are a priori principles. They allow for the transcendental employment of reason beyond the mere logical function. In addition to the capacity for moving through syllogisms in making inferences, pure reason is equipped with principles that enable it to think that the unconditioned is given even before it m oves to any conditioned knowledge. Reason needs to believe that the unconditioned is already given in order to think that conditioned knowledge is even possible. It needs to assume that "if the conditioned is given, the whole series of conditions, subordinated to one another- a series which is therefore itself unconditioned- is likewise given " [B 364, end]. This endows reason with the certainty of thinking that all knowledge of the understanding necessarily comes about through this a priori determination. Since the unconditioned furnishes a totality of conditions, reason assumes that it is already given when it comes upon any conditioned knowledge. It then takes the conditioned knowledge and ENERGEIA aims to ascend to the unconditioned. Reason is only interested in the ascent from knowledge of the understanding to the transcendental idea of the unconditioned, and does not care about the descending series: ''Absolute totality is demanded by reason only in so far as the ascending series of conditions relates to a given conditioned" [B 437]. Reason is indifferent to what the understanding generates by way of conditioned 'knowledge and to how numerous that knowledge is because it is the province of the understanding to seek for and collect conditioned knowledge: Once we are given a complete (and unconditioned) condition, no concept of reason is required for the continuation of the series; for every step in the forward direction from the condition to the conditioned is carried through by the understanding itself. [B 393, end] The understanding is equipped with the categories that make a synthetic unity out of appearances. It aims to bring the conditioned to fruition. Reason simply thinks that the conditioned, already given in light of the unconditioned, is waiting to be discovered by the understanding, however it accomplishes this. Once the conditioned has been discovered by the understanding, reason can proceed in the synthesis of conditions up to the unconditioned, compelled as it is by its transcendental ideas. The understanding provides the "material" for such determinations as reason is fit t o make, for "through [the concepts of understanding] alone is knowledge and the determination of an object possible. They first provide the material required for making inferences, and they are not preceded . by any a priori concepts of objects from which they could be inferred'' [B 3 67] . Without the understanding, reason has nothing with which to proceed in moving to the unconditioned. The procedure of gathering knowledge and giving it the unity which it lacks in the understanding is merely formal and itself produces no object, appearance or otherwise. The formal process allows for a particular judgment to be comprehended under a uni:- versal condition, but does not enable reason to tliink anything about the knowledge itself. Reason's only object is to direct the act of synthetic unity of the understanding. As we already know, reason only has to think that all the material which the understanding furnishes is already determined as conditioned by the unconditioned. But since the idea of the unconditioned itself can have no empirical employment whatsoever, it makes no determination of appearances as objects of possible experience for us. Thus reason has no relation to any objects at all, save the appearances which the understanding determines through its categories and offers up for the synthesis of conditions. We have ascertained that the understanding makes no claim to know anything about objects themselves, in fact, on the contrary, it proclaims that all its knowledge is of phenomena only. It is the first to assert that its concepts make no determination of objects in and of themselves, but only of appearances. But, when reason endeavours to make a synthetic unity out of the knowledge of t he unde r standing the dist inction betwee n noumena and phenomena that was advocated by the understanding is lost. The problem rests with reason. We saw that the understanding limited itself through the concept of a noumenon; reason has no concept performing such a function. The understanding makes a clear separation between phenomena and noumena. Reason makes no such separation. It is supposed to seek for synthetic unity under the concept of the unconditioned. Now, this procedure cannot take place at the level of possible experience and is wholly outside of it. Reason starts out with concepts of the unconditioned- which are noumena because they are beyond the reach of possible experience and, therefore, are not objects of sense, and in this way reason begins outside all experience. It then h as to go down to th e appearances of the understanding and immediately transcend the empirical realm in synthesizing the totality of conditions. But, in bridging the divide between phenomena and noumena, reason commits a gross indiscretion. Reason blinds itself to the fact that it is moving between the two distinct regions of noumena and phenomena. �40_ KIM Reason overlooks the distinction between appearances and objects in themselves that the understanding sets up. Reason is compelled by its very nature to seek out the conditioned that is to be brought under the synthesis of conditions, but it pays no attention to the true nature of what it perceives. It simply neglects the fact that it has appearances as conditioned objects and makes the presumption that it is taking possession of objects in themselves in moving away from the understanding. From the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant rigorously establishes the transcendefr tal ideality of appearances, i.e. "that appearances in general are nothing outside our representations, 11 [B 535] which is as much to say that all we have are appearances. We then see why the discovery of the "true constitution of things, as objects of our senses" [ibid.] is so important for him. It shows that what reason is doing is tricking us into thinking that we are dealing with objects in themselves. We cannot possibly know things outside our appearances. Reason falls into a trap and unwittingly causes a trouble for itself that it cannot reason its way out of: [T]here are fundamental rules and maxims for the employment of our reason (subjectively regarded as a faculty of human knowledge), and that these have all the appearance of being objective principles. We therefore take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts, which is to the advantage of the understanding, for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. [B 353, end] Reason takes its "rules and maxims" as relating to actual objects and applies these concepts, which are only fitted for appearances, to objects in · themselves. The pure concepts of reason condition our appearances but, without ever even recognizing that they are appearances, reason takes the conditioned appearances for the things themselves. This misapprehension breeds the following problematic situation: naturally, reason is lead to think that alL possible objects (in themselves) taken as a whole are subject to the conditions of the unconditioned, that is, determined by the unconditioned, for it wrongly views the sum of all appearances (or world-whole) as the sum of all possible objects in general. Firstly, reason makes the mistake of thinking that it is dealing with objects in themselves; it thinks it is making judgments about things in themselves as opposed to appearances of things. What reason does is breach the divide between appearances and objects in themselves. It refuses to accept appearances for what they are and, secondly, is lead to a false conception of the world-whole as consisting of all possible objects in ·general. Thus, in moving from the world-whole (which, in actuality, is the sum of appearances), it does not think that it is moving from phenomena to noumena, but rather that it is the entire time moving from one noumenon to another. We have arrived at the head of a large complication. Whereas the understanding sees the sharp divide between appearances and their transcendental counterparts, reason is blind to it. Though the domain proper to reason is indeed outside experience, it forgets that it is at the same time connected to it. Granted, reason in the synthesis of conditions has to operate outside the bounds of possible e.xperience, inasmuch as the unconditioned which governs the synthesis is not given in intuition. But, in accomplishing this task, reason does so with the material of the understanding in hand. We observed that reason does not set limits to itself in the way th at understanding does. This is to say that reason does not distinguish between objects as such and appearances-no difference exists for reason. We saw that the understanding, once it had differentiated between objects in themselves and appearances, set its own parameters. In contrast, reason knows no such boundary. This amounts to saying that reason does not even distinguish between the two "worlds", so to speak, of what we can and cannot know, if we define the world of what we can know as the world of appearances. Now, because reason refuses to distinguish between appearances and objects in themselves, it falls into the unavoidable conflict of contemplat- 41 ENERGEIA ing the nature of the world-whole. The world-whole is the sum of all appearances as given in experience. But because reason fails to comprehend it strictly as such, it thinks of them as objects in themselves. And in this way we see how appropriate it is to view the problem of reason, as we did just above, as its failure to recognize that there are indeed two worlds-one which we can know and one which we absolutely cannot, simply because it is beyond what is defined as experience. Reason thinks there is only one, and that it can know everything in it. For reason there is no discriminating between noumena and phenomena-it takes everything as noumena. The problem which arises is the consideration of the condition of objects in themselves; reason thinks it must reconcile their nature in general. In other words, reason struggles with how it is to view these objects in relation to the unconditioned. It is a struggle that has no bearing on the true material with which it is dealing. The root of the problem is found in the very nature of reason which, "in the continuous advance of empirical synthesis, is necessarily led up to [the dialectic play of cosmological ideas] whenever it endeavours to free from all conditions and apprehend in its unconditioned totality that which according to the rules of experience can never be determined save as conditioned" [B 490, middle]. Reason is so used to operating completely out of the bounds of all possible experience that it gets carried away. Reason only succeeds in inducing dialectical conflict when, as a result of thinking that it can know noumena, it tries to make sense of them in light of the unconditioned and comprehend objects in their totality. It has a difficult time reasoning through it. Because reason fails to take as the worldwhole as the sum of appearances, the resulting play between the ideas it has about it is called dialectic, by Kant, because it pretends to deal with knowledge that it does not have in any respect, that is, knowledge of the objects themselves . Reason attempts, in vain, to make assertions about objects in themselves, through what are only "formal conditions of agreement with the understanding" [B 86, middle]. The pure concepts of reasons by no means provide a mode of generating knowledge since the content of knowledge can only be given through our mode of intuition, on which reason has no grasp. And, consequently, reason is in no way equipped to make any judgments regarding what are, for us, objects-it cannot possibly be in any position to judge of their nature. Kant gives us the battle of reason that ensues, painting a hopeless picture. Hopeless because "the side that is permitted to open the attack is invariably victorious, and the side constrained to act on the defensive is always defeated" [B 450, middle]. This is hardly a fair fight-the upper hand is gained by whosoever should provoke the onslaught. This is how Kant describes the antinomy of pure reason, which is consequently ceaseless and inconclusive, and which forces reason to vacillate. This is a problem that will never find a solution, and it is dangerous, for reason might give itself up to despair. But, in spite of this obstacle, Kant shows us that the problem of reason is not entirely irremediable. The antinomy can be done away with if reason is corrected with the reminder that the proper view of objects is only as appearances: Thus the antinomy of pure reason in its cosmological ideas vanishes when it is shown that it is merely dialectical, and that it is a conflict due to an illusion which arises from our applying to appearances that exist only in our representations, and therefore, so far as they form a series, not otherwise than in a successive regress, that idea of absolute totality which holds only as a condition of things in themselves. [B 534] Superficially, the antinomy vanishes because reason is made to realize that it is making baseless assertions-baseless because they are about things it knows nothing about. The world-whole is not the sum of all possible objects in themselves, but of all possible objects of appearances. Once reason accepts this, it must give up seeking to reason about the world-whole, and be content with the single assertion that the unconditioned determines �42 KIM our appearances. Kant leaves us only a slight problem with reason where the antinomy never really all together disappears for, in Kant's words, "even after it has ceased to beguile still continues to delude though not to deceive us, and which though thus capable of being rendered harmless can never be eradicated 11 [B 450). It will always persisrand rear its head now and again because reason will fall back into its former practice of mistaking appearances for ob; jects in themselves. Despite the fact that reason can be shown how it errs in being plagued by the antinomy, it will time and again fall into the same error. Just as soon as reason is corrected, it will suffer relapse because it is in its nature to cause itself problems while it romps beyond the thresh; old of experience. If only reason could be forever disabused of its imperious position. Then it would not be caught in the distress of contemplating two worlds, unable to make an abiding choice. Reason pre; sents these two worlds to us, unwittingly assuming there to be something more than what is, for us, the only possible experience, that is, a world of appearances. The assiduous attention to detail paid by the understanding is debased by reason's blind refusal to accept appearances as appearances. The understanding cannot exercise its in; fluence on reason because once reason takes over, the understanding has no hold over it. Reason runs away with the distinction between noumena and phenomena, and it is lost to us. Reason is in no position to help us keep the distinction in mind and we do ourselves a disservice if we do not hold onto to it with all our might. Kant wants us to see that the distinction between understanding and reason is imperative. The understanding plants its foot firmly on em; pirical ground and it is reason that rips that root out of the soil. The difference between actual o~ jects and their appearances is very important to the understanding-reason neglects the difference entirely. We can no longer be confused about when the line between actual objects and appearances begins to bleed away. Our contention is not with the understanding, but with reason. If we do not make this distinction between the two faculties, hearing only the arguments proffered by reason, 43 we too might forget that there are such things as appearances. It is, at last, sufficient for us to acknowl; edge this difference, in order to have clear sight of where problems really begin. The distinction be; tween reason and understanding should be just as important for us as it is for Kant. Endnotes 1 All quotations are cited from the Norman Kemp Smith translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . Unless otherwise noted, references (given in square brackets) to the text are to where the passages cited begin. 2 Kant seems to use two working definitions of the word transcendental. In the first part of the "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements", he says: "I understand by transcendental exposition the explanation of a concept, .as a principle from which the possibil!ty of other a priori synthetic knowledge can be understood" [B 40, middle]. Here, Kant uses transcendental to signify a concept that is related a priori to knowledge and, hence, conditions it. Taken in this sense, transcendental employment would refer to the a priori application of a concept. For the Tecumseh Cara Gormally, A'02 ENERGEIA �MURCHIO 44 45 ENERGEIA BRAHM'S REQUIEM Alek Chance, ~02 For all this flesh is as the grass we're told, But only deafened creatures weep About our gone-tomorrowness, Resigning grass away as wretchedness. For nothing is more beautiful to him Than swimming in the softly swimming grass, When thinking that its heaven-reaching spurt Is only ever brief escape from dust. In grave Germanic requiem we hear Again: denn alles fleish es ist wie gras. Some try to sulk this substance from the air, But life but grows by singing in its chains. Not only now is sickly flower flesh Substantialized in its few throes through time, But music brings the sullen void to move, Defying stillness in strong-dying life. Inside the pounding temples of a tune That marches through apparent emptiness, The tremble of a grassy plight resounds With glory no immortal can possess. Untitled Amelia Murchio, ~04 �47 FERGUSON Fire and Rain Andrew Ferguson, f.:.01 The epic expedition of the Commedia begins with Dante spewed forth from the deep onto a desolate, thickly wooded shore. In his newborn state, he is helpless, unable to explain his presence in the world yet expected to undertake the arduous trek up the hill. The harsh reality of nature bears down on him; ultimately, no man survives the passage from the womb. However, he has left his dreamlike existence in the churning maw of nature and must become acquainted with both himself and the solid ground on which he walks. After his initial burst of self-consciousness, he remembers that he was at some point on the true path-his current state is not the beginning of his existence. (Indeed, a transcendent poetic personality must be assumed from the beginning because we as readers share in the experience of the pilgrim.) Thus, his birth is a renaissance. But how can a man enter a second time into the womb and be born? His birth is necessarily dichotomous: first physical, then spiritual- first water, then the Spirit. 1 Yet the spiritual and physical are intertwined from creation; the remaking of the one necessarily involves the renewal of the other. Common to both is emergence from the chaotic deep-the first metaphor, not only in the Commedia, but also in the Bible, and thus possibly of recorded history. In creation, light is o from the formless void, and then the firmament is belched out of deep waters. Spiritual decay eventually leads to divine intervention in the form of a cataclysmic deluge. The world is cleansed, and only Noah and his family are brought out of the torrent. The destruction of everything they have known is a type of death; their plight reflects the earth as a whole-a renewal of life out of the grasp of death. However, their harsh salvation is calamitous damnation for the rest of the world. This pattern is absorbed in the New Testament by the sacrament of baptism, of which the deluge is an antetype. 2 John baptizes with water unto repentance, preparing the way for the One to come, baptizing with the Holy Spirit and fire. He will clean out his threshing floor, 3 gathering the wheat into His barn but burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire. 4 Yet this One must undergo the first baptism in order to bring the second, as He had to be born of the flesh to bring the birth from above. At the baptism of the promised Christ, the redemptive cycle is presented in a microcosm. The Spirit descends and hovers over the waters of the Jordan, as it presided over the deep in creation. Jesus is buried in the water, but rises up again, foreshadowing his death and resurrection. The Christian is buried with Christ through baptism into death, so that as He is raised, so the Christian walks in newness of life.5 In this mysterious union is the source of every element of salvation. In the Commedia, the initial situation of both poet and pilgrim is tangled indeed. He has seemingly experienced death within life in escaping into the forest, yet he is not allowed to proceed up the sunlit hill. His birth is complete, but his baptism lacks the element of purifying fire. Oddly, his path first leads him through the unclean, unquenchable fire of Hell, the resting place of those who do not survive the deluge. Baptism is introduced as a thematic h ead early in the Inferno. The first group of souls mentioned in Inferno proper are the virtuous pagans-those who lived nobly, but were blocked off, by time or culture, from the salvific ritual of baptism. To reach them, the stagnant river Acheron must be traversed. Rivers flowing through Hell form several of the boundaries Dante encounters. Each denies the baptismal ideal with its own characteristics. Passage of Acheron is by boat; neither Dante nor the damned find their destiny beneath its murky current. The Styx is also crossed by boat, but submerged within the melancholy stream are the wrathful and sullen, trapped for eternity beneath the shadowed waves. In bloody Phlegethon boil ENERGEIA the souls of tyrants and murderers; in this torrent, water does not cleanse and fire does not purify. 6 All the rivers run off into the frozen waste of Cocytus, where the sinners are denied both the fluidity of the water and the heat of the fire. Within the pestilential pits of Malebolge reside several particularly striking images. In the second pouch is the foremost mockery of ritual catharsis; the souls are immersed not beneath a cleansing flood but in excrement, the filth left in the wake of physical existence. The barrators in pouch five are forced to lie beneath boiling pitch, punished severely for any attempts to rise up from the viscous mass. Also included is Dante's enigmatic personal experience introduced in pouch three, of having been forced to break one of the baptismal fonts in Florence to prevent someone from drowning. 7 Can a sinner slipping under the waves be rescued, or is the attempt a losing fight against the divine will? Either way, the sacrament is shattered and ineffectual, deprived of its ability to save. The deconstruction of baptism culminates in the appearance of Ulysses in Canto 26. Appropriately, he is eternally consumed by fire, indicative of the second and final death. He speaks as with a tongue of flame, evoking images from the Day of Pentecost, when the people of God were born anew through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. 8 The journey of Ulysses is a falsified pilgrimage, running parallel to the true path. His insatiable thirst for knowledge compels him onward, not in search of the Deity, but for the fulfillment of his own desires. Reaching beyond the established limits of human knowledge, Ulysses ascends to the very pinnacle of his corporeal capacity before being swept away by the divine whirlwind. 9 Denied access to the fountain that would sate his craving 10 , he sinks to a watery grave. Death, therefore, reflects . the dual nature of baptism just as birth, and Ulysses is its emblem. He dies first by the water, and then by eternal fire. Even in death, Ulysses remains a false counselor. Dante seems inordinately drawn to him, peeking over a ledge precariously, even empathetically bending towards him, as might a flame. Virgil takes pains that the pilgrim not be led astray, interposing himself between the two. Dante clings to his union with God by the slimmest of threads; as the waves close over Ulysses, he nearly drags Dante down with him. The deliverance of the pilgrim is miraculous and ineffable-a literal resurrection, as his sense of direction must be reoriented. The pathway out of hell is carved out by the runoff of the river Lethe; its flow allows Dante to undertake the journey that Ulysses failed. His spirit is not entirely exorcised, though, remaining in the shadows of the text of Purgatorio. Purification is attained gradually, through an odyssey of ascetic torments. This realm is the only portion of the afterlife that is temporally governed, as it will pass away at the Final Judgment. The passing of time is strictly observed, and hesitation is a dangerous wavering of commitment in the journey towards the Empyrean goal. As Ulysses is largely emblematic of the lost soul perishing beneath the deluge, the ephemeral transition between the damned and the blessed is most fully symbolized in the person ofStatius. His conversion is surprising, given that his poetry is well within the epic pagan tradition. The shift from pagan to Christian faith comes upon him extremely slowly, especially striking when viewed against the single flash of remorse that saved some of those now in Ante-purgatory. His willingness to accept another year of purgation in exchange for having lived in the time of Virgil is a remarkable vacillation that characterizes the uncompleted salvation in Purgatorio. After his conversion, he continued writing in the mythological vein, but his Greeks halt at the Theban streams while he himself has taken the baptismal plunge. Although blind itself, the Virgilian poetic legacy can lead to the caves of Parnassus 11 , where divine illumination displays the pure distillation of the draught of truth. Dante is led blindly through the winding passage from hell to the mountain of Purgatory, arriving on a lonely shore. To prepare for his ascent, the sooty filth of Hell must be cleansed from his face. After washing, he sees a boat approaching across the hemisphere of water, filled with souls newly arrived. The exuberant psalm they sing links them with Israel being led out of Egypt, and the spiritual progression of the Exodus will be a constant theme. The boat itself is quick and light, so �48 FERGUSON that the water does not swallow it. 12 An angelic presence, like to the glory-cloud which led the Israelites, ensures both that the redeemed are brought safely clear of the watery depths and that the uninvited and unguided sink into the abyss. As the Israelites sought Sinai after being borne across the Jordan, under the gaze of the patriarch Cato the souls proceed towards the illuminated mountain of God, of which Sinai (and Parnassus) is but an antetype. Climbing the mountain is, in a way, seeking to reverse the flow of time, moving against the current. The journey of man after sin was away from Eden; the journey back to the earthly paradise necessitates wiping away the perversions that have accumulated. To ascend higher is to grow younger and lighter, eventually reaching the garden-temple, the womb that produced mankind. Entry is gained by passing the wall of fire 13 , completing the purgative baptism begun on the bark below. Yet in a sense, the baptism begins anew here; the rebirth into Eden allows souls to be prepared for the ascent to the Empyrean. The rise of the soul into the presence of God is the ultimate fulfillment of the prophesied Promised Land. This is the culmination of the Exodus, the return from physical and spiritual exile. A particularly elegant statement is found in Isaiah 4:4,5- the twin actions of washing and purging result in a perpetually present glory-cloud. As such, the preparation of the soul for its blessed state proceeds through water and fire as before. This time, the baptism of water is dual: the first erases memory of sin and punishment, the second serves as a constant memorial to the good accomplished in life. This sequence follows the pattern of the Exodus; while the crossing of the Red Sea provides an opportunity to submerge all transgressions and rejoice in merciful deliverance, the passage of the Jordan is marked by the placement of stones forever remin ding the children of Israel of their benevolent Lord. 14 The distinction between the two rivers is not a pure dichotomy, as the experience of Dante proves. His first submersion cannot be final, for such would be contrary to the progressive nature of Purgatory. Dante collapses, overwhelmed by guilt and repentance, and wakes to find himself im- mersed in the waters of Lethe. He rises with the firmament as creation begins anew around him, and a complex, microcosmic history plays out. This forward progression of time runs counter to the backwards redemptive motion seen before, yet it too contains a hope of salvation 15 • The pilgrim closes off both loops by being washed in Eunoe, for both find their end in baptismal birth. Even at the end of Purgatorio, the purification ritual remains incomplete, for Dante still must be cleansed by the spirit of fire so he can rise through the heavenly spheres. This incompleteness within completion is the usual state of Purgatory, and the intricate web the poet weaves is a reflection of this nebulous uncertainty. In Paradiso, the poet aims himself toward contemplation of the divine, not through his own efforts, for then he would be lost at sea. 16 He has been brought safely through the baptism of water, and invokes the aid of the nine new muses and Apollo (with his parallels to Christ) in surviving the second. The elements of baptism, falsified in Hell and used incompletely in Purgatory, are seen in their full and or iginal forms in Paradise. Upon reaching the Empyrean, Dante views an amazing synthesis of fire and water- the river of sparks 17 , overflowing not with the miserable torment of the damned, but the effulgent joy of the redeemed. This is. a picture of the sacrament that needs no restorative purgation, because it has never been broken. Even the personal exper ience of the poet has been transformed; the shattered Florentine baptismal font has been remade into the scene for Dante's triumphant return from exile. 18 Throughout the Commedia, baptism is seen, in statements and in metaphors, intertwined with b irth and death in a complex tapestry. In each of the canticles, the sacrament is used as an evaluation of those who dwell in the realm. The damned in Inferno are baptized into the fiery lake of the second death; the pilgrims in Purgatorio un dergo a series of interlocking baptismal cycles, each in succession closing off a parenthetical set; the blessed in Paradiso are baptized into new birth and eternal life. Baptism is not only the sign in each case, but also the seal of each soul's fate. Having survived Hell, crossed the ocean, and climbed Parnassus, Dante ultimately becomes the emblem of the fi- J9 ENERGEIA nal, synthesized baptism,. subtly weaving themes and patterns into a tapestry every bit as beautiful as the glorious river of fire. 1 John 3:4,5 1 Peter 3:20,21 3 Paradiso 22.151, 27.86- used of the earth in both of Dante's earthward gazes 4 Matthew 3:10-12 5 Romans 6:3,4 6 Revelation 19:20, 21:8 7 Inferno 19.16-21 8 Acts 2:1-4 2 Untitled Rebekah Coleman, A'04 9 Proverbs 10:25 John 4:13,14 11 Purgatorio 22.64-69 12 Purgatorio 2.40-42 13 Genesis 3:24 14 Joshua 4: 1-7 15 Perhaps this is the reason why the usual order of baptism is reversed within the Earthly Paradise: fire, then water. The two appear to be parts of different loops of ritual, but the reversal is a subtle reminder of the unorthodox workings of redemption. 16 Paradiso 2.1-7 17 Paradiso 30.61-69 18 Paradiso 25.8-9 10 �50 JUNGBACKER jl ENERGEIA Encomium:Translation of Pierre Ronsard Ian Jungbacker, ~01 This past winter the college community marked the passing of one of its foremost promoters of letters. Leo Raditsa, who was the author of numerous books and articles on a host of subjects, founded the St. John's Review, among other journals, and served as its editor during the publication's first years. For a brief period of time I had the opportunity to call myself one of Mr. Raditsa' s students. Few will disagree that he was a demanding tutor who required a reason to respect some one before conferring his approval. There was, of course, no science to this method, which often left one with an aggravating feeling of frustration. My experience with him seemed no different. Our views never seemed to run concurrent with each other. For the longest time I was generally under the impression that I could do no right in his eyes, despite my best efforts. On the last day of the semester he returned to me a translation of a poem that had been assigned several weeks prior and was submitted several weeks late. He passed the paper across the table, lightly tossing it so that it could reach me. I quickly slid it into my notebook, having no desire to read what I anticipated to be disparaging comments about my work. But before I could complete the task Mr. Raditsa asked me if I would read my translation out loud to the class. I did so, in a slightly selkonscious panic, praying that I would not be the subject of a critical exercise in which the class occasionally engaged. Much to my relief this did not turn out to be the case. Mr. Raditsa simply enjoyed the translation and wanted share it with the rest of the class. Before the reader is my translation of Pierre Ronsard's eighth poem of his Sonnets pour Helene, complete with the corrections made by Mr. Raditsa. It is a humble tribute from one editor to another and from a student to a teacher. The translation is perhaps void of any accuracy, poetic value, or social signifi, cance (in truth, I am quite ignorant of such things). I only offer it to the reader because it pleased a man who was so difficult to please and who wanted others to hear it. Tu ne do is en ton cceur superbe devenir, Ny braver mon malheur, accident de fortune: La misere amoureuse a chacun est commune; Tel eschappe souvent, qu' on pense bien tenir. Tousjours de Nemesis il te faut souvenir, Qui fait nostre avanture ore blanche ore brune. Aux superbes T yrans appartient la rancune, Comme ton serf conquis tu me dois maintenir. Les Guerres et l'Amour se semblent d'une chose: Le veinqueur bien souvent du veincu est batu, Qui paravant fuyoit de honte abouche close. r amant desespre souvent reprend vertu; Pource un nouveau trophee a mon mal je propose, In your great heart you do not need to defy my Unhappiness, nor become an accident of fortune: The loving misery is common to each; That cuts often, such as you thought you had. Every day you must remember the Nemesis That makes our journey now white, and now dark. You have maintained me like a conquered slave, Like the malice of stately tyrants. Wars and love resemble each other in one thing: The conqueror, who appears to have a closed mouth From shame, is often beaten by the conquered. The lover despairs often taking back virtue; I suggest a new trophy for my evil, For having fought so long against your eyes. D' avoir contre tes yeux si long temps combatu. Untitled Sara Wilson, A'03 �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. iii, 51 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jungbacker, Ian (editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 2001 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2001 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 2001. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 2001 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/60ed2a03aef4aa313211dc47cddb3adb.pdf 7dd2e0ebf11e6517ac55851f88ec1fad PDF Text Text SPRING2000 �A v ERY SHORT ESSAY ON ENERGEL.\ Anne C. McShane, Ed. Traditionally. the Energeia has had, on its first page, a quotation from Aristotle's.\ fetaph:vsics regarding the definition of cvipy8ta. (Aristotle invented the word). That quotation takes very different forms depending on its translator. r give Hippocrates G. Apostle's and Joe Sachs' here: Apostle's: For performance is an end, and actuality fcvcpycmj is performance. And so even the name ''actua!izv·· is derived from the name "work" [spyovj and points to actuality [EV'tEl-CXEtaJ. (lOSOa 22-24) 1 Sachs': For the end is work, and the work is a being-at-work [cvc{-iysw.l, and this is wh~· the phrase being-at-work is meant by reference to work Idpyov I and c:-..1cnds to being-at-work-staving-complete Ic\.·-rt.AEX.Cte< j. (1 OSOa 22-24 )2 Neither quotation serves well as a definition. Apostle's acluali ry, even combined with perfonnance and end, leaves one unenlightened. But, if one closes one 's eyes to actuality and latches onto Apostle's translation of cpyov, ''performance," it is possible to construe some idea of why a magazine filled with prize essays and art would be called Energeia. Closing the eyes to actuality, however, is hardly satisfying: actuality is f!vcpycia! Sachs' translation, though at first more daunting, tells us more about what tvipyt:ia really is. For it to do so, however, we must read a little more: Since of the actions \vhich have a limi1 none is an end but each is for the sake of an end, as in the process of losing weight, vvhose end is thinness , and since that which loses weight while in motion does not have that for which the sake of the motion exists, such an action is not an action , or else it is not complete, for it is not an end. But the end and action belong to that other kind. For example, we are seeing and at the same time we have seen .... we live well and at the same time have lived well , and \1v'e are happy and have been happy. . .. Of these, the former should be called " motions," the latter "actualities [read, being-at-works]. '' (Apostle, 1048b J 8-~8) It becomes more clear why Sachs chooses lo translate l:?w~pyEta as being-al-work. The being-at-work is a kind of work, the end of which is the doing ofthe work- there is no product. other than the work itself. One does not sec in order to see in the future: one secs now, in order to see now. From here the step to cvn-:/cEX~~ta is easily taken : just as the £v8ryEta of an eye is to see, the cvt:pywx of a human is the being-at-work of the whole self As Sachs says, . . . the human being that can experience rsight, knowledge, happiness J is similarly a heing-at-work, constituted by metabolism. Since the end and completion of any genuine being is its being-at-work, the meaning of the word converges with .. cntclcchcia. (244-245 )3 The word SVLEAEXE:ta is composed of three parts: tv'tEAE:~ (from 't8A.oc;), meaning complete or full-g own. ~xf-:t v. meaning to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding onto that condition. and a pun on the word tvoEA.cx.i::m. meaning persistence (Sachs' Physics, 245). 8v8pyi;ta extended is tv'tE:/\,t:X,wx.. Through the persistence of a meaningful work, 8vipy8t<.x., humans fulfill themseJvcs. Unfortunately. there cannot be a magazine consisting of 8v8pyE:ta. cvipy8ta, as an activity, a motion, extends through time and cannot be put on paper. The activity of painting a picture, like the activity of being happy, is not transferable (that is, without one taking part in the activity itsel{). What we can do, however, is give evidence that tvepyi;ta. has taken place on our campus. That evidence can also serve as an opportunity for the reader to engage in knowlege; that is, in another kind of ~vi;pyt:ia. That is what this magazine has tried to do. As one can tell from my poor attempt to elucidate it, as well as from the apparent difficulty in its translation, the meaning of£v8pyi:;ta is difficult to get across. Indeed, Aristotle says this himself in reference to tvspyr.ta.: "What we mean is clear by induction from individual cases, and we should not seek a definition of everything but should also perceive an object by means of an analogy" (Apostle, 1048a 36-1048b 7). Let us then take his suggestion and, rather than trying to define hipyE:ta, look at examples. Please tum the page. IAristotle'sMetaphysics. Trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle. Peripatetic press, Grinnell, lA; 1979. 2 Aristotle'sMetapf1ysics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Green Lion Press, Santa Fe, NM: 1999. 3 Sachs, Joe .A ristotle;, Phyoics: A Guided Sh111y. Ma.terworks of l)i•coveiy: Guiden Studies of Great Tex I ~ in Science. Hll!Vey F1n11menh•tl, e<l. R11tgero llniversity Pre•s. New Rnms\\frk , NJ: 199.i . ' �Contents Sketch (man) ... ...... ......... .... .... ... ... ..... ... ............ .......... ........... .. ................ ..... I Melina Hoggard, A '00 Editor Anne C McShane Junior Editor Jan Jungbacker Assistant Editors Julia Bell Maro Casimattis Jonathan Culp Melina Hoggard Matthew Holtzman Peter H eyneman Casey Moore Sarah Whitesel Photography Acquisitions Vada Mossavat Photographers Jonathan Lawless Peter Speer Design Matthew Holtzman Faculty Advisor Chaninah Masch/er Front Cover 37 .......................... ....... .............................................. Highway 4 New Mexico Peter Heyneman, 'OJ 38 .. ........ ........ .. ... ... ........... ......................................... ................... ... 3 Sketches Melina Hoggard, A '00 Seeking by Means of Speech Freshman Essay Prize, 1998-99 ......................................................................... 2 Blakely Phillips, '02 39 ... ...................... .... .. ...... ... ......................... .The Legacy of Claudius Ptolemy Cordell D.K. Yee, Tutor Warwick Castle ..... ...... ...... ...... .... .... .. ..... ... ....... .............. ... .. ..... .. ... ..... ... ....... 6 Isabel Clark, '02 Lucy ... ....... ..... .......... .... ....................... ......... ......... ........ ........ ....... .... ..... ..... ....... .... ... 7 Caroline Picard, '02 Basement Door. ..... .................. ............. ............... .............. ......... ............. ....... .... 8 Isabel Clark, '02 46 ................... ..... ........ ..... ........ ............................................ ........... .... Untitled Sara Wilson, '02 4 7 ....................... ......... ... ...... ... ..... ..... ...... ....... .. ....... ..... ..... ........ .. Paris, France Rizo Popovic, A '00 Selection from On the Sublime : Longinus 48 ..... ..... ............. ...................................... .... Greek Translation Prize, 1998-99 Samuel Garcia, A '99 Confessions Involving Balance and Equilibrium: Lab Experiments Laboratory Prize, 1998-99 ................. ...... ............ ..... .. ....... ............. .... .. .... .. ........ 9 B1yan Thorpe, 'OJ Le Promenade d'Automne: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 49 ....... ....... ................................................. French Translation Prize, 1998-99 Robert Dickson, A '00 Sailboats ..... .... ........... ... .. ........... .... ...................... ... ..................................... 16 Karin Ekholm, A '00 50 .. ... ...... ........ ......... ...... .... .. .. ....... ............ .. ................ ... .. Aidan Dreaming-Elk Karina Hean, A '00 Backlit. ... .............. ....... .......... .... ... ...................... .............. .. ................ .... ..... 17 Karina Hean, A '00 51 ....... .. ..... ..... ......... ........ ... ........................ ........ Vrbnica, Kosovo; June, 1999 Vada Mossavat, A '00 Profit of Wisdom: Ecclesiastes, Solomon, and the Loathing of Life Senior Essay Prize for Literature ..... .. ............. ........... ...... ...... .. .. .... .. ............ 18 Derek Alexander, A '99 52 ........... ......... .............. .:............ ........ ......................... ..... Guardians, 1998-99 Anne McShane, A '00 Scenic Overlook (secret spy picture) ............... ... .......................................... 28 Isabel Clark, '02 Cain and Saul: The Men God Rejected 53 .......................... ........................................ Sophomore Essay Prize, 1998-99 Sarah Whitesel, 'O I SQUATTING FIGURES Caroline Picard, 102 Tiffany Joly ................................ .. ........... .......... .. ..... .... .................. .............. 29 Andrew Baisch, A '00 Back Cover KELSEY, NEW MEXICO Kristin Masser, 'OJ A Decent Burial. .. ....... ...... ..... ... ..... ....... ................ ... ...................... ..... ........ 30 Christopher Colby, SJC Community Untitled ............................... .. ............ ..................... ...... ............. .. .. ............... 32 Caroline Picard, '02 Waterwitch ..... ............. ................................................................................. 33 Cara Gormally, '02 Seven-Year-Old Poets ............... .... ... ........... .............. ... ... ................. ........... ... .34 Matthew Holtzman, A '00 Aswan ....... .... .. .......... ..... ....... .......... ........................ ... ......... .. ..... ....... ........... 36 Karin Ekholm, A ·oo 5 8 ........ ..... ... ........ ....... ... .... ...... ....... .. ........ .... ... ................ ... Elephantine Island Karin Ekholm, A '00 59 ... ...... .. .... ...... .... ... ....... .. ...... .............. ... .... .. ...... Gjinovce, Kosovo; July, 1999 Vada Mossavat, A '00 The Importance, for Consciousness, of the Discovery of Self 60 ...... ...... ........ ........ .... .... ...... ........ Senior Essay Prize for Philosophy, 1998-99 Piroska Kopar, A '99 70 ................ ... .......... ... .... .. .................. ............. ............... .......... ..... Part of Me Karina Hean, A '00 71 ..... ..................... ... ........... ...... ........ ... .. .................. ........ ...... Sketch (woman) Melina Hoggard, A '00 72 ........... ..... ....... .... .... ........ ...... ................................. ... ... ......... .... Liberty Tree Cara Gormally, '02 The Energeia staff would like to extend its gratitude to Christopher Colby, Cordell Yee, William Pastille, Pamela Kraus, the St. John's College Print Shop, and the Gadfly. Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine published annually and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of both St. John's College campuses. The 2000 issue contains a sampling of student work from the previous year which the prize committees have selected for public recognition and submissions from members of the community. Energeia welcomes essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, paintings, photography, and the like for the 2001 issue . �Sketch (man) Melina Hoggard, A '00 �3 E NERGElA Seeking by Means of Speech Blakely Phillips, '02 One of Meno's sarcastic remarks, imperfectly under- hands. He possesses them, and, only possessing, he may stood as it may be by Meno himself, strikes at the heart of even forget them. Seeking to know something, in this case, the philosophic enterprise: How can we seek what we do is seeking to have what one in some way possesses. not already know? Answering this question means no less What does it mean, though, to possess knowledge that than discovering what "knowing" means for Socrates. Thus, one yet does not have? Possession is the capacity for using; Meno 's question reverberates in the background of the possessing knowledge, then, means retaining a thought in Th eaetetus, in which the title character and Socrates seek one's mind unconsciously, whereas having knowledge means the nature of knowledge itself. The various images given in holding that thought in one's mind consciously. It is posthe Thea etetus imply that speech is the key to seeking what sible, then, for something known to be in one' s mi~d yet one does not know : knowledge, it seems, involves more than not at the front of it; to be stored unconsciously, not "ready one level, and speech is the connection that allows us to at hand for thought" (198d). We possess notions that give move between those levels. By examining the images of us direction in the search for wisdom; having some acquainknowledge and speech, then, disregarding their initial hasty tance with "virtue," we can seek the nature of virtue . Alrejections in the course of the dialogue, we may discern a though the original notion of virtue is very different from coherent picture of what knowledge is and how speech en- any definition one might contrive for its nature, it is on ables us to seek it. This examination, in tum, also reveals account of the former idea that the latter is possible. Socrates, Meno 's slave and the rest of us can seek what we do not some implications of the nature of knowledge.' How is knowledge sought? We can say that if we are know if we somehow possess the knowledge of it already able to seek knowledge, we need two things: an idea of that and only seek to have it more explicitly. for which we are searching and a way of attaining it. ConIn order for knowledge to be seekable, though, we must cerning the first, if Meno's slave does indeed discover that somehow be able to move from possessing knowledge to the line on which the eight foot square is based is neither having it, from a partly-conscious notion of a thing, to full two nor three feet, if Socrates can seek the elusive forms of awareness of its details . Thus, seeking is the movement things, both must already possess a general notion of what from one level of knowledge to another, the relation bethey seek to know more explicitly . If seeking is to be suc- tween possessing and having. How , then, do we seek? Ho w cessful, it must also be possible to move from vague knowl- do we come to possess knowledge-birds in the first place, edge of something to clear knowledge of it. Partial knowl- and how do we grab them again later? Socrates hints that edge allows us to look up words we do not quite know how the first and the second are different manners of "hunting": to spell, or to attempt to recall an image of someone or some- "we . .. will say that the hunting was twofold, one before place which has undergone the contortions of memory . It the possession for the sake of possession, ana one by the must be possible, then, to know enough about X to ask the possessor for the sake of seizing and having in his hands question "What is X?" without knowing precisely what it is what he has possessed for some time" ( 198d 1-5). The first hunting, since it is for the sake of possession, about X that is sought. In other words, if we are able to seek knowledge, we need multiple levels of knowledge and is akin to the acquisition of an art, the second to its practice. a way of relating them- a theory that is significantly elabo- Precisely how we are able to seek an art before we know what we are looking for, however, is confusing and unclear . rated in the Theaetetus with the image of the dovecote . Socrates and T~eaetetus, indeed, distinguish between Acquiring any art, does not the apprentice always have a two levels of knowledge, possessing and having-a distinc- sense of the skill he is after? For most arts, from mathemattion Socrates explains thus : "if someone buys a cloak and ics (a science) to chaim1aking (a practical art), the one trybecomes its owner but does not wear it, we would deny he ing to learn the art already has a notion of the knowledge has it but he still possesses it" ( l 97b ). The soul, Socrates encompassed by it. It seems, too, that this will be the case continues, is a dovecote that "when we 're children is empty" so long as one seeks an art consciously, with intention. Seek(197 e2 ), but which one fills with various sciences, birds of ing, by definition, is looking/or something, after all. Thus, knowledge, catching them and stowing them away . Once even if acquisition of an art is what enables us to seek furthese birds are caught, however, the hunter/keeper does not ther knowledge, we need knowledge in order to acquire most actually have them unless he holds them up again in his arts. The trail of the knowledge needed for seeking does not end here. There may, perhaps, be "a.i1s" that one learns inadvertently, however, which enable one to seek not only all other arts, but also the active knowledge yielded by those arts when seized in the hand of the mind. (Language may be just such an unconscious art.) The other half of the analogy, that between practicing an art and seeking to have what one already possesses, is more completely accurate: "it is precisely by lthe aritfoneticalJ art ," that is, practicing the art, "that lthe arithmetician] has the knowledges of the numbers" (198all-bl). Therefore, practicing something already known is the path from possessing to having knowledge. Practicing the arithmetical art involves applying what the arithmetician possesses knowledge of-numbers, which he possesses from his original acquisition of the art- to the world through numbering things, asking always "How many?" The path from possessing to having, then, involves looking at the world, asking about it, and applying to it the knowledge one possesses: practicing an art. The pursuit of philosophical knowledge, in the same manner, involves looking at things that affect us a.i1d inquiring about their natures. Whatever the philosophical art is, one has knowledge through it by practicing it, applying it to the things in the world. Thus, seeking knowledge, generally, for any art , means practice of an art one already knows: one has chainnaking knowledge through actually making chairs out of materials from the world. Of course, the way one applies previous knowledge to the world, in order to keep having that knowledge, does depend both upon the sort of knowledge one begins with and the sort one ultimately seeks. Although one must always have a prior notion of what one is looking for, both the prior notion and the method of getting more elaborate knowledge differ in different situations. Philosophical knowledge, for i nstancc-that is, knowledge of the natures of thingswill be sought diJferently than mathematical knowledge or chairmaking knowledge. For chairmaking knowledge, one applies the plan for a chair (prior notion) to the world by actually making chairs. For mathematical and philosophical knowledge, on the other hand, the knowledges one starts from are number and what tilings are. These knowledges are applied by asking questions, comparing the world with what one knows, asking "How many?" or " What is this?" Since philosophical knowledge, knowledge about the natures of tilings, is what we are concerned with (as tl1is is what Socrates and Theaetetus are concerned with), we will ask: what prior knowledge or art is necessary to seek the natures of things, to ask what something is? First, the philosopher must have some acquaintance with that something. To ask of virtue "What is virtue?" the philosopher needs only know the word "virtue," the name of what he wants to know better. Thus, the philosopher needs words, language. Does the philosopher train in language, with a view to the natures of things, as if it were an art and he an apprentice who knew what he was after? Surely not, if the philosopher claims with Socrates not to know the natures of things .. . . He knows only words, and we all learn our first language without much thought about precisely what we are doing. Thus, language seems not to be an art but it is, at Least for philosophical knowledge, the root of what allm; s us to seek. v From language we have all the knowledge required to seek the natures of the things we name. How does the philosopher, then, use words to seek what things are? How does he apply what he knows to the world a.i·ound him? He asks questions of the form "what is XT and attempts to a ~wer them . This much is evidenced by the method of Socrates in the Theaetetus , asking "What ever is knowledge? Can we really say itT (146a3) . The answer will be an account p,oyoc;). Asking what things arc and giving accounts of t11em, then, is how the philosopher seeks, starting always from words and the meanings they imply. The way knowledge must work if we are able to seek it , then, has been shown : the philosopher needs words, questions and accounts-words to give an idea of what he is looking for, questions and accounts to convey him from that hazy understanding to a clearer, more articulated one. It remains to be considered, however, why philosophical knowledge is sought this way, why words, questions and accounts are necessary, and how they work. L ANGUAGE Theodorus says in the Theaetetus, following Socrates, that the difference between philosophers and lawyers is that philosophers "are not subservient to speeches , but the speeches are as it were our domestics," whereas lawyers are slaves to speeches (173c3-4) . Mastering speech is crucial to practicing philosophy, and thereby to seeking what we do not know about the natures of things. We have said already that language provides both the prior knowledge of things (names) needed to seek them, and the way to seek them, to move from unconsciously possessed knowledge to clear knowledge (questions and accounts) . What about language makes this possible, and what makes language necessary for philosophic knowledge? How does language provide both the basic notions necessary to seeking what we do not know and the means of attaining it? The words philosophers must possess if they are to formulate questions have a peculiar faculty: they name things, physical or intangible, and at the same time reach beyond those things. The words we use, while pointing to indi vidual things, do so by putting those things into classes. (Every single tree, for instance, does not have its own name, Bob or Martha, as people do: each tree is one in the class "tree.") The word tree, then, signifies both an individual tree to which one might point, and the entire class "tree," the mysterious qualities of the category that cause one to call that particular object a tree. Language points to things �4 PHILLIPS in the world and beyond, to the commonness that, though words, and arise when one thinks of what one word means not explicitly stated, guides and iies behind the grouping of in comparison to another. One might say, simply, a tree is various objects together under one name. Words serve as not a bird or a bush. Introducing other terms, other words, names for what many different things have in common. one could say, more specifically, a tree is a larger plant than What many different things have in common, in turn, a bush. Including ratio, then, the peculiarity of /,oyoc; is, gives us insights into what those things are. These elusive starting with words, to state relationships between their srnndards, by which we give names, are the forms, since it meanings. is precisely the guiding principle of namjng that Socrates is Implicit in the use and knowledge of words is the abilafter when he seeks what knowledge or virtue is, wanting to ity to relate those words to one another in speech, since know what it means to call anything ''knowledge" or "vir- words themselves signify relationships between the things tue .. , Phaedo, too, says that Socrates and company "agreed they name by grouping each object into a category (which that .... Forms existed, and that other things acquired will include some objects and exclude others). Thus, the their names by having a share in them" (Phaedo 102b). philosopher, in possessing words, possesses the ability to The same principles are what we try to state when defining draw from those words the categories they imply by calling words, as in a dictionary. Thus, speech links the each (indi- a name into question ("Whatever is knowledge?") and tryvidual object) and the all (category), as the Stranger of the ing to give accounts of what it names (that by which we call Sophist warns: "To detach each from all is the final and various things "knowledge") in terms of other ~ords, other utter eclipse of all speech., (259e3 ). When we possess words, names of things. Starting with words as his prior knowlthen, we imp1icitly possess knowledge of why things are edge, the philosopher seeks an account that will explain grouped under certain names, and this is the knowledge what it means to call something what we call it. sought by the philosopher. Words, it seems, are very helpIf we are able to seek what we do not know through ful things for the philosopher to know, since, as categories accounts, what kind of account will yield success? Socrates into which we group particular things, they imply truths and Theaetetus consider the same question. Having decided about what things are to us. that the knowledge sought by a philosopher must be some How, then, does the philosopher use the words he pos- sort of account ("true opinion with speech [is] knowledge, sesses to seek knowledge of what things are? How do ac- but true opimon without speech [is] outside of knowledge, counts use words to arrive at what one did not know before? and of whatever there is not a speech, these things are not The philosopher begins by asking "What is X?" and call- knowable ... and whatever admit of speech are knowable"), ing the identity of the thing he names, X, into question. He they continue to give accounts of speech (202dl-5) . These then uses other words to rename X. This renaming consti- accounts they give in order to determine how the "knowtutes the account. Having called the name of the thing into able," (speakable) and "unknowable" (unspeakable) things question, the philosopher seeks to discover what that name are divided-to determine what is knowable and thereby means by thinking about the thing itself and its relation- what kind of account will succeed. Discovering what sort ships to other things. (Whether he is seeking the thing of account is successful will clarify how language, as acitself, as separate from its name, or just what is meant by counts, enables the philosopher to seek what he does not the name, or whether a difference even exists between the know. two, is unclear. It is possible that the philosopher thinks he In the first account given by Socrates and Theaetetus, is seeking the thing itself while only toying with names.) a syllable is explained and accounted for by the list of its He seeks to give a definition of a word, and therefore can letters, in order. The other terms used to define what the only use other words to define it. The object of the syllable is, then, are its parts, letters. The letter, not conphilosopher 's quest-what something is-becomes an ar- sisting of multiple parts, cannot be expressed through a simiticulation of how that thing compares with others. lar account. What syllables are, though, does not consist That accounts articulate the relationships between only in thei r letters, Socrates points out, and philosophical things is reinforced by thinking of accounts (via A.~yos) as accounts must express the natures of things. Defining a ratios. Just as Euclid's ratio shows the relations between wagon in terms of its parts is likewise rejected, since such magnitudes, an account does the same with what things are. an account, though a faithful and accurate list, does not Further, just as the mathematical ratio requires at least two state, for instance, the use and purpose of the wagon. Foreterms, an account does also . An account of anything needs most, however, is the objection that anyone can correctly both a subject to describe and terms in which to describe it. list the parts of something, through guessing or mindless Therefore, with at least two things named, the philosopher recitation, without necessarily understanding and knowing can make a ratio between them that, hopefully, reveals some- that of which he is listing parts (208b4-6). Accounts-asthing about the one in question. With tree: bird or tree:bush parts, then, do not approach the knowledge of the natures one discovers the difference between what is meant by tree of things sought by philosophers, and therefore are of no and bird or bush. These differences are embedded in the use in seeking such knowledge. 5 ENERGEIA The last account given of language is more accurate. The sort of account necessary for the philosopher's seeking is, Socrates discloses, "some sign to say by means of which that which is asked about differs from all things" (208c 11 ). The example Socrates gives is that the sun is "the most brilliant of the things that go around the earth across the sky" (208d3). This sort of account will reveal precisely what is sought: the peculiar nature of something-that is, that by which we call it what it is-through showing its relation to other things. While all accounts define a term by means of its relationships to other terms, the account-as-difference gives specifically how the thing sought is different from (and similar to) other things. What is striking about speeches of difference is that they are also accounts of similarity. We think first of how the object is similar to those things and secondarily how, in relation to what all have in common, the object nevertheless stands out and refuses to be fully commensurable with them. Words already imply these relationships in the two aspects of naming, mentioned earlier: specifying a particular thing and, at the same time, classifying it among other things. Thus, the account-as-difference is the way to have the knowledge only implied in the words we know. Too, if words themselves hold any weight in determining the na, ture of language, the definition of Xcysw as given on page 37 ofMollin and Williamson's An Introduction to Ancient Greek ("to gather things together into a whole within which the gathered parts retain their distinct identities") confirms the importance of accounts-as-difference. That is very well, one might say, but-how does the philosopher seeking knowledge go about giving such an account? What enables him to give it? Socrates makes this objection, fearing that, in order to properly articulate the distinctive nature of something, one nevertheless needs to somehow already possess an understanding of that which one seeks, the distinctiveness of that thing. How do we come to know the distinct natures of things (for example: that it is part of a coat to be worn)? How else than through our possession of language, of names for things? We saw above that words both point to individual .things, physical or not, and reach beyond them by classifying them among other things, according to an invisible principle (the relation between it and other things) that is articulated in a word's definition. All this is embedded in ordinary use of words. If, then, the philosopher listens to the way words .are used and masters speech instead of letting shifty usages master him, he will be able to discover the knowledge he seeks. Language, then, provides the basis and means of seeking philosophic knowledge. Possession of words is capable of abstracting our thought from things in the world that words name to the mysterious source of those names. In words, we possess implicitly what we seek because words contain, in their uses and definitions, the manifold ways they compare with other words; the relationships between things that lie in words are the natures of things the philosopher seeks. The accounts the philosopher gives, then, only make explicit what he already has in his use of language. The probing questions of Socrates are attempts to bring people to that decisive point at which they realize the elusive categories behind words, hoping that they will recognize then the nature of what they do not know and accordingly seek to know it by means of speech. It is only through mastering the usage of words, however, that the hopeful philosopher will be able to give a true account. IMPLICATIONS What, though, does it mean that philosophic knowledge is tied up in language? Several possible implications fall out of these considerations: What does mastery of the usages of words entail? What is the standard for true knowledge, and should philosophers agree? First, if philosophic knowledge begins with what is implicit in words as we use them and explicates this, the forms (excuse the severity of the phrase) are not eternal. Uses of words change over time, after all. Although there will always be hidden definitions behind the words we use showing why we call things what we call them, these will be at least somewhat modified along with the words' uses in speech. "Nice" once meant "stupid and harmless," but now means "kind and friendly," with no derogatory undertones; the form of the "nice" has changed. The knowledge the philosopher seeks, being knowledge of what words mean, is subject to the same alterations and erosions. The standard by which the philosopher's accounts are judged, then, is that of contemporary linguistic usage, and it is this the philosopher must master to attain knowledge. It is possible, of course, that the standard could be the philosopher's own ideas about what words mean, that meanings are subjective- in which case no one philosopher could ever be called incorrect. If words are used for communication, though, no one 's definitions will be terribly different from another's. If that is so and there is a standard for truth in the practical use of words, why do not all philosophers agree? Simply, some are more aware of their language and more skilled at articulating accounts than others. Thus, the dependency of philosophic knowledge on language ties it to the language of the time-and possibly also to the particular language in question, though this is an immense question for which no clear suggestion comes from the previous arguments. In any case, possessing one level of knowledge about things in words, the philosopher seeks to have the knowledge words imply by articulating their meanings, catching and holding account-birds. Language enables philosophers to seek knowledge by providing them with words that reach �6 beyond individual things to the relationships of those things to all other things, as named by words. Because these relationships are the know ledge philosophers seek, they ask questions and give accounts, hoping to articulate the peculiar nature of one thing, like knowledge, by showing how it differs from others. To master speeches is to become aware of what words mean, and articulating those meanings is to find knowledge of what things are to us. Leaming to master speeches, if it is possible, seems to involve listening to and using one's native words, the words one was endowed with. Simply, though, language allows the philosopher to seek because what he seeks is part of language. PHILLIPS ENDNOTES 'References are to the Theaetetus unless otherwise indicated. TRANSLATIONS CITED Plato, Phaedo. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Classics of Western Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995 . Sophist. Trans. Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage and Eric Salem. Newburyport, MA: Focus Philosophical Library, 1996. Th eaetetus. Trans. Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Warwick Castle Lucy Isabel Clark, '02 Caroline Picard, '02 �Confessions Involving Balance and Equilibrium Lab Experiments Bryan Thorpe, 'OJ I'm presenting two experiments. The first experiment became the impetus for the second experiment-the two are closely related. Bear with me and I'll make myself clear. First, consider the following diagram: c A B Let us suppose that this is a fulcrum point with a meter stick resting on it in a state of equilibrium. Consider how the meter stick is balanced: for every point on side AC there is a corresponding point on side CB having the same weight and distance from point C. The meter stick balances because each side-representing a sum of points-exerts the same amount of stress as the other side. It might be more clearly put this way: side AC is a lever pressing down, having as much lifting power as side CB, which is also pressing down. Their combined forces cancel so that each side is lifted with as much force as it presses down. The result is what we call equilibrium-a balance of forces, of stresses. These stresses do not have to be uniform and exactly symmetrical for equilibrium to exist: A D c B To compensate for the block added to side AC in the above diagram, I must add an equal stress to the other side. As Archimedes well demonstrates, that equal stress can take any number of forms involving widely disparate combinations of mass and distance . The meter stick by itself is a particularly unifo1m example of a system in equilibrium, but otherwise no different from a similar system having objects resting upon it. My point is this: no matter what the system, we intuitively recognize the fulcrum point as the determining agent of equilibrium. Put another way, we might say that the fulcrnm point is the unity that gives rise to the possibility of equilibrium. But what happens if the meter stick is resting on two or more fulcrnm points, as in this diagram: A Basement Door Isab el Clark '02 B �10 THORPE We must say that, yes, this system too is resting in a kind of equilibrium- not a useful kind, for ce1tain, but a kind nonetheless. What are the stresses in this system? What forces are exerted on each fulcrum point? This is what my first experiment examines: the stresses created by a system with two fulcrum points. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT A. Setup Equipment needed: two scales, two balls of putty, two razor blades, one meter stick, one baros circular weight (32g.) To determine ~hat stresses were being felt on which fulcrum point, I put a scale under each fulcrum point. The fulcrum point itself is a razor blade held in place by a ball of putty, which in turn is resting on a tray attached to a scale. The scales were set to zero after the putty and razorblade were placed on them. I won't be able to draw this exactly, but the following diagram should illustrate the general setup: EN ERG EIA 11 There are no conflicting stresses in this setup: line AB, as a lever, is only exerting force on line BC, and line CD is only exe1ting force on line DC. Thus, for every point we pick, there is only one other point on the meter stick that is exerting an equal force across a common fulcrnm point. Also note that an object placed on the meter stick at the 30cm mark doesn 't have any effect on the weight felt at the 80cm mark, and vice versa. Of course, I could achieve the same results with any number of setups- e.g. fulcrnm points at the 1Ocm mark and the 60cm mark, etc.-so long as the fulcrum points divide the meter stick into balanced sections that don't overlap. Case Two Next, I arranged the fulcrnm points beneath the meter stick so that fulcrum point A was at the 40cm mark, and fulcrum point B was at (remained at) the 80cm mark: C. 80 B. Case One To begin, I arranged the fulcrum points so that fulcrum point A was at the 30cm mark of the meter stick, and fulcrum point B was at the 80cm mark: 30 With this setup, scale A registered 7 5 percent of the total weight of the meter stick, and scale B registered 25 percent. Now the question is why is the weight of the meter stick divided between the two fulcrum points in this way? What forces are at play here? After much experimentation I discovered a h. rd mle for answering this question, not just with this setup, but with any a setup having conflicting stresses: dete1mine which sections of the meter stick are in equilibrium and which are in conflict. I' ll try to illustrate. In this case we find that only one portion of the whole system is in equilibrium. In the following diagram that section is line BD: 80 Scale A registered 60 percent of the total weight of the meter stick, and scale B registered 40 percent. This makes sense . The 30cm mark on the meter stick is the equilibrium point for the first 60cm of the meter stick, and 80cm mark is the equilibrium point of the last 40cm of the meter stick. Thus, the whole system rests in equilibrium, and the stresses on each fulcrum point are also in equilibrium. The following diagram, I hope, makes this clearer. Line BD is in equilibrium becausP. its two component parts, lines BC and CD , exert equal stress on each other. In contrast, line AB is in conflict because the section that would normally counter its force , line DE, must also counter the force of line EF. In other words, lines AB and EF are competing to lift the same section. And, at first, it looks as if they are exerting an equal lifting force-after all, both lines are 20cm in length. However, line AB has substantially more lifting power because it ' s farther from its fulcrum point than line EF, which is butted up against its fulcrum point. There is a difficulty here in calculating the lifting force of these lines . The problem is that we're not talking about weights placed on the line, as if the line were in equilibrium, but the line itself. Each point of the line is a different distance from its fulcrum point, so we need a measurement of force that equals the sum of the forces exerted by all the points individually . Taking a hint from Archimedes, I've found that this collective force is perfectly expressed by multiplying the length of the line (which represents the line's total weight) by the distance from the fulcrum point to its center of weight. (The center of weight of a line is found by bisecting it.) In the above diagram, the length of line AB is 20cm, and its center of weight is 30cm from fulcrum point C. The length of line EF is 20cm, and its center of weight is 1Ocm from fulcrum point E. Line AB has 600 units of lifting force . Line EF has 200 units of lifting force. The line on top represents the meter stick, the globular shape is the putty, and the two labeled trapezoids are scales. �12 THORPE We can better express this by saying that line AB will exert three times as much lifting force as line EF. Thus, in the common section DE, which both lines are competing to lift, line AB lifts 15cm-three times as much as line EF, which is lifting only Scm. And from this it follows why one scale is registering 75 percent of the weight of meter stick, and the other scale 25 percent: Weight on first scale: Weight on second scale : 20 (line AB) + 40 (line BD) + 15 (the lifted portion of line DE) = 75 20 (line EF) + 5 (the lifted portion of line DE) = 25 Similar calculations can be made for any combination of fulcrnm point positions. No matter where the fulcrum points are located, the system as a whole can be broken down into sections resting in equilibrium-and thus constant-and conflicting sections that are exerting unrequited lifting force . These sections can then be used to predict how much stress is being felt at each fulcrum point. Is this an accurate representation of real life physics, or just a useful mathematical trea trnent of such phenomena? I don't know-but I lean heavily toward the latter. This first experiment, working with two fulcrum points, inspired me to think about plane figures in similar manner. That is, I wondered if a plane figure, balanced on a single point, could also be conceptualized as a collection of balanced sections . I was amazed at what I discovered. ENERGEIA 13 How does a plane figure, resting on a pin, balance? And why does it only balance on the center of weight? I performed the following experiments hoping to answer these questions . A couple of notes ~efore I begin: for the sake of precision and ease, I've worked largely with triangles . Their areas can be exactly calculated, and their center of weight is easily found (using Archimedes' method) . I have performed the exact same experiments on completely irregular plane figures , and the results are the same, though with a larger degree of error. Also, from here forward the.diagrams will be from a bird's eye perspective. To begin, I divided a triangle into different sections. The first section, and the largest, was the section most clearly resting in equilibrium. In the following diagram I've shaded this section gray: THE SECOND EXPERIMENT Equipment Needed: cardboard to cut into plane figures, scissors, one ball of putty, one ruler, one needle In the freshman lab manual, we learn that a cardboard cutout plane figure, no matter how hung, will always orient itself with its center of weight directly underneath the hanging point. After doing this a few times, we conclude that, somehow, the center of weight appears to be heavier than all the other points . But the center of weight has another characteristic, equally interesting, that is not presented in the manual: the center of weight is also the only point upon which the plane figure can be balanced. By balanced, I mean that the cardboard plane figure, oriented parallel to (coplanar with) the earth, can be rested upon a single point (a needlepoint, for example). Figure 1 is the experiment described in the lab manual. Figure 2 is the same cardboard cutout balanced on a needlepoint: This section is in equilibrium because for any point taken on it, there is another point, directly opposite it, on the other side of the center, that counteracts its downward force. Points outside of this section have no corresponding point to balance them. I'll elaborate. Consider points A and D in the following diagrams: Point A is balanced by its correlative, point B. Point D, on the other hand, should be balanced by point E-but point E doesn't exist. In fact, none of the points in the remaining sections-the tluee triangles outside the gray shaded polygon-have correlative balance points. How do these sections keep each other in check? How are they in equilibrium? To answer this question I simplified the problem. In the diagrams above, the triangles are balanced on infinite axes passing through the center, point C. In my experiments I worked with a single axis of balance. I took a metal ruler and mounted it in putty so that the edge of the ruler was perpendicular to my desk. The putty was stuck to the desk itself. I then balanced my cardboard cutout triangle on this single axis . (Note that this axis, and every axis that allows the triangle to balance, passes through point C, the center of weight.) Line AB represents the rnler: Figure 1: cardboard cutout triangle hung so that point C (center of weight I rests directly beneath the hanging point. Figure 2: the same triangle being balanced on a needle at the center of its weight �14 EN ERG EI A THORPE 15 B A A B Next, I found the centers of weight for the sections in question (I've labeled these D, E, and F in the following diagram). Then I weighed the sections, which, in plane figures, is a matter of° determining the area of. each section. Following this, I measured the distance of the sections, from their respective centers of weight, to the axis of balance. This measurement supposes that the force exerted by the sections is perpendicular to the axis of balance. The lines with arrows represent the distances between these centers and the axis of balance: B A Let the weight of the top section, with center of weight D = Figure 1: (Wvx DG) + (W£x El)=(WFx FH) Figure 2: (WEx El)=(WFx FH) Note that the center of weight for section W 0 is on the fulcrum point, and, therefore, the whole section W 0 is already in equilibrium. This seems to be a reasonable explanation of how a plane figure balances on a single point: equal forces balance every possible axis, and, therefore, the whole figure balances. I might have guessed this . If the figure were unbalanced on any one axis, then it would fall to the side of that axis having the lesser force . But this theory is not complete. There's a complication. I've divided my plane figures in a very particular way-I'm referring to the gray and non-gray sections. It turns out (after many experiments!) that this particular division of sections is not necessary . Plane figures can be divided into any number of randomly shaped sections, and the rules of balance, as I've been using them, still apply. Consider the figure below: WD. Let the weight of the first bottom section, with center of weight F = WF. Let the weight of the second bottom section, with center of weight E = WE. Here ' s what I discovered: WD x Distance DG = (WF x Distance FH) + (WE x Distance El) It is better rendered in prose: the force exerted by the top section is equal to the combined forces exerted by the bottom sections. By this account, the whole system, with respect to fulcrum AB, is in equilibrium. But that's just the beginning. No matter how you orient the fulcrum line, the forces on one side, by this means of calculation, always equal the forces on the other side. For example: G Figure 3: There are six sections. Each section exerts a force equal to its weight multiplied by the perpendicular distance from the section's center of weight to the axis of balance. Let the force of section E be expressed as FE' Let the forces exerted by the other sections be expressed in a similar manner. We find this: (FE +FF+ FB +FA)= (FD+ FG) �16 THORPE This complication, the infinite number of ways in which a plane figure's balance can be mathematically portrayed, at first, clouded my understanding of what was really, physically happening in the figure-but I've had time to ponder it. I think the following two axioms generally explain what's happening : First, as I've already stated, a plane figure is balanced on a given axis because the collective force of the points on one side of the axis balance out the collective force of the points on the other side of the axis. Second, a single point can collectively represent any set of adjacent points on the plane figure-if that single point is their center of weight. This works because the center of weight is really just a fulcrum point and nothing else. With lines, the center of weight is a fulcrum point having only one axis of balance. With plane figures, it's a fulcrum point having infinite axes. Thus, in dividing Figure 3, above, into six different sections, I've reconceptualized the whole triangle into six different, unconnected systems, each resting in equilibrium on top of a single fulcrum point. To restate that: if the whole triangle can be thought of as balance beam with a single fulcrum point, then I've just divided it into six smaller balance beams and measured their respective forces across the original, now meta-level, fulcrum point. Either as a whole, or subdivided, I'm still weighing the same triangle having the same number of points. Without these axioms I don't know how to describe the physical reality of a plane figure balancing. I'm convinced that the problem is one of points. But the only way I can account for every point is to compound them into sections: the sections make the infinite points of plane figures finite and manageable. This works, in a way, but it leaves me with more questions than it answers. For example, does a point exert force only on those points it is in direct contact with-or does every point exert force on every other point? In one case the points form an infinite collection of mutually cancelling levers, and in the other case the points f01m a web of energy waves .. . a web of gravity? My experiments only take into account leveraging force . I ignore the force that makes this force possible-gravity-because I wouldn ' t know where to begin. I can only examine its byproducts, ideas like balance and equilibrium. I look forward to Junior year and resolving some of these questions. Sailboats Karin Ekholm, A 'oo Backlit Karina Hean, A 'oo �19 ENERGEIA Profit of Wisdom Ecclesiastes, Solomon, and the Loathing of Life Derek Alexander, A '99 In our thickest moments we feel our uselessness and know the world is bent. We know the futility of our work; we see the world stand fixed beneath our actions. We afflict the innocent or, innocent, are afflicted. We crave unmerited praise, or flippantly praise others. At moments we are happy and look on our works. But look away! For if you stare, a word will tum to letters, and a life will tum to dust. Fixity and time eat vigor, and death will pierce through any profit a man has made . When Ecclesiastes cries all is vanity! it is both a beginning and an end. And when we read those words we feel our relationship to them swell and recede with the choler in our hea11s. We sometimes cry 'but life is good! '-and sometimes cry for the absurdity of it all. The crookedness of our lives now hides, now reveals the futility, the vanity, the absurdity of our toil. And enjoyment gives relief, but flees. Solomon-so we will call our guide and writer in this wrenching book-is a searcher. And while he can give us only words-and while that is all we will give-he can use those words to point to life and living . And we live. It is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house offeasting; for that is the end of eve1y man, and a living one should take it to heart. (7 :2) 1 Is it so? Let us go instead to Ecclesiastes itself, and take it to heart. Let us try its bitterness , and see if it stays on the tongue of consideration. What is behind its loathing of life? We will look for the nature of wisdom, and the value of wisdom, both in Solomon's life (I Kings 1-11 or II Chronicles 1-9) and in the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon's life is inconsistent, and Ecclesiastes is a wandering book; yet one who follow s both will glimpse behind the despair a dark and splendid queen-wisdom. SOLOMON THE KING It is not to our point to consider whether Solomon penned Ecclesiastes: the book claims to be his, and it draws on his unique place in our minds. At 1: 16, Ecclesiastes reads , "Here I have grown richer and wiser than any that ruled before me over Jerusalem, and my mind has zealously absorbed wisdom and learning." Here and throughout, no question of origin will exempt the reader from considering Solomon. Either Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon, and draws on his life, or it was not written by Solomon, and draws on his life. This paper, like the book, is interested in him. No one is less afflicted from without than he-Solomon controls himself and those about him. His God gives, indeed asks to give. Found at the beginnings ofl Kings and II Chronicles is a famous story : Solomon, having just married the daughter of Pharaoh , and before building the great Temple, sacrifices magnificently to the Lord. Then, in divine munificence, the Lord comes to Solomon (II Chronicles 1:7-13): That night, the Lord appeared to Solomon and said to him, "Ask, what shall I grant you?" Solomon said to God, "You dealt most graciously with my father David , and now You have made me king in his stead. Now, 0 Lord God, let Your promise to my father David be fulfilled; for You have made me king over a people as numerous as the dust of the earth. Grant me then the wisdom and the knowledge to lead this people, for who can govern Your great people?" God said to Solomon, "Because you want this, and have not asked for wealth, property, and glory, nor have you asked for the life of your enemy, or long life for yourself, but you have asked for the wisdom and knowledge to be able to govern My people over whom I have made you king, wisdom and knowledge are granted to you, and I grant you also wealth , property, and glory, the like of which no king before you has had , nor shall any after you have." From the shrine at Gibeon, from the Tent of Meeting, Solomon went to Jerusalem and reigned over Israel. And true to this singular grant, Solomon's reign over Israel was blessed. He built the Temple. He judged aright. He administered with genius. He prospered like no other before him. But he would splinter Israel by dividing his heart between the Lord of David and the gods of his many forbidden wives (I Kings 11). In all external matters- adminis tration, diplomacy, exhortation-Solomon was excellent and severe. His dedication prayer for the Temple was magnificent. It was his heart that wandered . This was fatal, for it was Solomon's heart that God wanted, and He had conditioned Israel's unity on the singleness of Solomon's devotion. He is, indeed, a jealous God. The account makes it wholly clear that Solomon is without excuse in his polytheism, for the Lord visits again, and warns him precisely, vividly (I Kings 9:2-9): The Lord appeared a second time, as He had appeared to him at Gibeon. The Lord said to him, "I have heard the prayer and the supplication which you have offered Me. I consecrate this House which you have built and I set My name there forever. My eyes and My heart shall ever be there. As for you, if you walk before Me as your father David walked before Me, wholeheartedly and with uprig~tness, doing all that I have commanded you and keeping My laws and My rules, then I will establish your throne of kingship over Israel forever, as I promised your father David, saying, 'Your line on the throne of Israel shall never end.' But if you and your descendants turn away from Me and do not keep the commandments and the laws which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worshjp them, then I will sweep Israel off the land which I gave them; I will reject the House which I have consecrated to My name; and Israel shall become a proverb and a byword among all peoples. And as for this House, once so exalted, everyone passing by it shall be appalled and shall hiss. And when they ask 'Why did the Lord do thus to the land and to this House?' They shall be told, 'lt is because they forsook the Lord their God who freed them from the land of Egypt, and they embraced other gods and worshipped them and served them; therefore the Lord has brought all this calamity upon them. ' " These words are thorough, stark, clear, and from the mouth of God; Solomon must have understood their seriousness. They present so clear a reward for devotion, so stark a punishment for sin, that they could not be mistaken by Solomon. The fate of Israel rode on the wholehearted obedience of people and king. King Solomon, who in the first visitation of the Lord sought the good of his kingdom in asking for wisdom, must feel the weight of th e state upon his fealty towards God . Yet he turns away. Just as God had forbidden, Solomon lets his heart wander to the gods of his foreign wives. The God ofisrael finds the builder of His temple building again, not for Him, but for Malech, for Chemosh and for other gods (I Kings 11 :6-8). This jealous Lord loved David, peculiarly, especiallybut in breaking loyalty with the Lord, Solomon makes the transition from being good David ' s son to b eing evil Rehoboam' s father. It is only the tenacity of the Lord's love for David that allows Solomon to cling to his control of united Israel: "but for the sake of your father David, I will not [tear away your kingdom] in your lifetime." (I Kings 11: 12) Even Solomon's son Rehoboam is blessed by the Lord's love for his grandfather- he will be pe1mitted to rule a solitary but mighty tribe of Israel: Judah. To Solomon the Lord gave, and from Israel the Lord took away. Solomon, for all his wealth and wisdom, though a king of peace, lost Israel with his heart. Solomon ' s life and words recounted in Kings and Chronicles will not untangle Ecclesiastes, nor will that knot unfold his life. But they fill one another. In the accounts of Solomon's life we learn of his deeds and words, not of his thoughts. Thoughtful Ecclesiastes, however, is introverted, ruminative. Though said in public, being a book, Ecclesiastes remains in feeling private-but is about things done and said in the world. Bold and strongly felt, it expresses much that sits deep in a great man's heart. It is a dark book- and yet there is some hope . It befits Solomon's unified Israel: lost, but with promise of restoration.2 Ecclesiastes is the heart of gain and loss-economic and ultimate. MAN: ENGULFED BY NATURE The opening exclamation of Ecclesiastes is famous and the opening question is key. Here are both (1:2-3; Seow translation): Vanity of vanities, says Qohelet, vanity of vanities! Al l is vanity! What advantage does one have in all the toil , at which one toils under the sun? This question is the heart of the book; it sparks the inquiry into human toil, and its finding of emptiness is expressed as the verdict Vanity! What advantage? One does best to ask in return 'Advantage with respect to what?' Solomon sets the criterion high. The lines which follow this question are no diversion: When Solomon turns to the stability of nature, he sees a context into which a human or two simply disappearand all their advantages with them (1 :3-5, 7) : What real value is there for a man In all the gains he makes beneath the sun? One generation goes, another comes, But the earth remains the same forever. The sun rises, and the sun sets - And glides back to where it rises ... All streams flow into the sea, Yet the sea is never full .. . It can seem unfair-the bar is set high. Ecclesiastes asks what advantage a single man has, and gives not just a global context, but a global natural context. It is what a solitary hiker finds awesome about the earth- its stately stability and seeming indifference toward man. But Solomon is not a hiker, and Ecclesiastes is not a hymn to nature- in the context of man and his toil, the stability of nature is not so much awesome as overwhelming. It is hard to feel at ease, to be at home in the world. Nature ' s stability does not, alas, extend to predictability. Crops may flourish or fail, and the farmer must plant in the face of this uncertainty. This is asking much of the farmer: overwhelming, indifferent, fickle nature is intimidating to toil. It is fearsome, paralyzing. And while Ecclesiastes will spend relatively little time observing this face of nature, it will fight the paralysis its observation can �20 ALEXANDER induce. Near the end of the book, roughly opposite the passage above, we find this ( 11 :4-6): If one watches the wind, he will never sow; and if one observes the clouds, he will never reap. Just as you do not know how the lifebreath passes into the limbs within the womb of the pregnant woman, so you cannot foresee the actions of God, who causes all things to happen. Sow your seed in the morning, and don't hold back your hand in the evening, since you don't know which is going to succeed, the one or the other, or if both are equally good. It is characteristic and central to Ecclesiastes to make this compound movement. First, the fearsome and unmovable face of the way of things (in this case, of nature) is seen, and profit of toil (wealth or fortune) collapses as uncertain against it. The overweening and self-assured search for advantage fails. Second, however, there emerges for the innocent and persistent a strand of hope, not for the profit of the man, but for the good of his toil or work. What that good is must be seen. Solomon can demolish hopes for advantage because he can manipulate the scale of comparison; as has been noted, one may wonder if it is fair to assess the value of a man's labor against the immensity of the earth's stability. Wisdom will lead one to see how many shapes toil, for example, can take in the face of nature, children, enjoyment, death. To wonder about the fairness of thinking about a man's toil up against nature's stability is to see much of the point already: that the juxtaposition is possible and dangerous. These comparisons must either be warned against, or be done wisely-and even then with the real danger of despair and loathing. So the wise will ask: where does the danger lie-in the nature of nature, or in the nature of advantage? This question is well answered by placing advantage in contexts other than nature (for example, time), and observing whether the danger persists. There are many other contexts available- some parochial and some grand. Solomon will combine the two in considering human forgetfulness over divine eternity. MAN: SWALLOWED BY ETERNITY Time outstretched-One generation goes, another comes-and the sameness of the earth swallows streaming hoards of men: the small with their wretchedness, the great with their advantages. Time is the context of the assertion of recurrence (1 :9): "Only that shall happen which has happened, only that occur which has occurred; there is nothing new under the sun!" Ecclesiastes would thus deny men the consolation of thinking that if, indeed, no one person can find real advantage, then many people over time might accumulate some profit. The wise will call recurrence to mind in the context of the sameness of the earth and expect to see motion- inplace-even cycles . This recurrence of sameness contributes much to the worth of wisdom. Obvious as it is, proverbs and wisdom would be impossible in a world ever-new or amorphous . On the other hand, wisdom would be cheap in a world where these patterns were always seen and heeded-what use for a proverb were the world's ways clear? But the assertion of recurrence, in the context of people, is sister to forgetfulness. Ecclesiastes says that men do not remember who or what came before, that they do not even remember their deeds, and so it will continue ( 1: 11 ). This is a difficult assertion to accept, especially coming from an old and remembered book. But forgetfulness is the human complement to a world made bent, a world whose people need wisdom. Forgetfulness gives wisdom part of its worth by robbing simple observation of its completeness. But then forgetfulness turns around and empties wisdom of its advantage over foolishness in death: neither the wise nor the fool are necessarily remembered (2: 16). The wise man may become embittered at this turn. Human forgetfulness adds much to that scarcity of understanding which makes a proverb valuable, a wise man needful. But the proverb and the wise man are themselves forgotten. Here, as elsewhere in Ecclesiastes, the valuable and needful are unprofitable . Here, as elsewhere, value and vanity share a common root. (In this case, wisdom both gained value from and was emptied by forgetfulness.) The wise find no lasting remembrance, no sure fame . For a wise man fixed on making a profit, like Solomon, this is bitter (2:15-16 Seow): So I said in my heart: "If the fate of the fool befalls even me, why then have I been acting excessively wise?" I said in my heart that this too is vanity, for there is no remembrance of the wise forever- as is the case with th e fool-becaus e all too soon everything is forgotten . 0 how the wise dies just like the fool! We saw the farmer deprived of the profit of his toil by the very ea1th which made the work possible and good . And now the human forgetfulness that gives the wise their use and place denies them any lasting profit or advanta ge. Wisdom, insofar as it is work, is not more lasting than the work of the hands . Time swallows wisdom. That statement, like Ecclesiastes , will appear too dark and too universal- for it is itself wisdom. W ISDOM : EVERYTHING HIDDEN Wisdom here and throughout does not mean that which philosophy loves. We here search for the nature of the wis- ENERGEIA dom Solomon receives, the wisdom Ecclesiastes finds vain, the wisdom Proverbs express. Solomon gives us a vivid demonstration of wisdom while sitting in judgment over two women. Found in I Kings (3: 16-28), the story is this: a baby, born to a prostitute, is also claimed by a second prostitute of the same house, whose baby is dead. The two women come to Solomon for justice. He hears the case and says, "Cut the live child in two, and give half to one and half to the other." The true mother, hearing this, seeks to save her son and cries, "give her [the other] the live child, only don't kill it!" But the mother of the dead baby envies the life of the other and says, "It shall be neither yours nor mine; cut it in two !" King Solomon gives the child to the life-loving mother, sure that the child is hers. Israel was awed by their new king, the account tells us, "for they saw that he possessed divine wisdom to execute justice." (3:28) The ruthless resourcefulness of the trick Solomon played is indeed a marvel. It is cruel and, happily, effective. He clearly sees the situation; he knows the opposing testimony gives insufficient ground for judgment. Indeed, just before ordering the child halved, he acutely summarizes the testimony, and implies the need for a test: he says, "One says 'This is my son, the live one, and the dead one is yours'; and the other says, 'No, the dead boy is yours; mine is the live one. ' " Interestingly, Solomon does not seek to question the account the women gave further-yet since one gave an account of how the other baby died (3 :19), he might have tried to catch a contradiction in the account of the lying woman. Solomon instead takes a risk. The reader does not know whether the child is actually in danger of being halved, but knows that Solomon cannot know how the prostitutes will react. He cannot be sure that his trick will uncov er the truth. Nonetheless, he brutally simplifies the discovery of the h-uth, in the effort to gain it. In the realm of an active wise man, risks abound (and this alone accounts for part of the connection of wisdom and wealth) . Wisdom has no assurance of finding the truth or success it seeks, but resourcefully acts, having perceived clearly . A good specimen of wise statement, like Solomon's, will not recount what is seen clearly, but simplify it, usually drastically . A wise action, whether it be a severe test, like Solomon's above, or the giving of a proverb, is not so much factual as acute. It is essential to the safe use of proverbial or Solomonic wisdom to understand that it will not be true in the same way that honest testimony is true. The (very common) error is to turn an acute proverb into a false universal, or a trivial conditional. Proverbs 11.16 says, for example, "A graceful woman obtains honor; ruthless men obtain wealth." This statement becomes false when universalized: "All graceful women obtain honor; all ruthless men obtain wealth." A similar problem occurs with the insertion of only. To insert some turns wisdom into timid conditional testimony, 0 21 and dulls the hortatory prick of the proverb ( 12: 11 ). The wise proverb points and directs by its acuity; the universalized distortion obscures and falsifies by its narrowness. Wisdom is exemplified in map-making- a most useful and acute labor of simplification. The vivid revelation of political boundaries will on a map generally obscure the presentation of environmental features, or preempt them altogether. It is unwise to try to represent everything on one map. It is foolish, and certain to fail. To make maps is to distort, yes, but with an eye toward the truth of the matter. To insist 'on the complete and undistorted fidelity of a map to the land is to lose the truths revealed by cutting away other truths. The land does not bare itself to the mere observer. One cannot see that a plot of land lies in the center of an island; nonetheless it does, and a map will reveal that fact. But this map, in order to porh·ay the island, has ignored innumerable distinctions, introduced the distortion of scale, and , importantly, made certain facts more obvious than they are when encountered directly. A wise map-maker will know the distortions of maps, and will not be led astray. He will know that the loftiest aim of the map maker-absolute fidelity- is a useful and worthy ideal, but unattainable . At moments he may even be frustrated that the desire for fidelity cannot be satisfied but instead results at best in a high degree of fidelity-which is so much as to say, an excellent distortion. How much greater is the frustration of one who seeks to represent, not land, but humankind and God! The stakes are higher for one who exercises wisdom in the service of his nation and his Lord . Both King Solomon's capacity and his responsibility to inquire with wisdom into cases of justice are Godgiven. His specifically divine grant of wisdom encouraged, no doubt, the boldness of Solomon ' s manipulation of the prostitutes' case. The Solomon of Ecclesiastes also considers as Godgiven the burdensome work of inquiring with wisdomespecially when inquiring with wisdom into wisdom itself. And while he is bold ih his search, he is vexed in his heart ( 1: 16-18): I said to myself: "Here I hav e grown richer and wiser than any that ru led before me over Jerusalem, and my mind has zealously absorbed wisdom and learning. " And so I set my mind to appraise wisdom and to appraise madness and folly. And I learned that this too was pursuit of wind: For as wisdom grows, vexation grows; To increase learning is to increase heartache. Wisdom, one would think, is a good thing and brings happiness. It often does. Ecclesiastes will say as much in places yet to be discussed. But throughout, Ecclesiastes refuses to �22 ALEXANDER make a wand out of wisdom-it does not turn good everything it touches. Wisdom is not its own reward, nor is wisdom necessarily virtuous . It is generally rewarding, and it is the prime accomplice of virtue. 3 Wisdom is clear seeing of what is to be done, or of what underlies. It gives no surety; it does not change the world whole: it does not replace truth itself. Wisdom, that is, must be interpreted: a good proverb will indeed lay flat some bend of the world, but in turn requires the reader to stretch his mind to see the flattening. Again, wise sayings are like maps-one must learn to see them. This, of course, is the focus of Proverbs itself, whi ch opens with great and teaching purpose (1: 1-1.6): The proverbs of Solomon son of David , king oflsrael: For learning wisdom and discipline; For understanding words of discernment; For acquiring the discipline for success, Righteousness, justice, and equity; For endowing the simple with shrewdness, The young with knowledge and foresight. - The wise man, hearing them, will gain more wisdom ; The discerning man will learn to be adroit; For understanding proverb and epigram, The words of th e wise and their riddles . The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; Fools despise wisdom and discipline. To make the simple shrewd, the discerning adroit-learning, understanding, acquiring-the work of wisdom is noble, finding its root in fear of the Lord. Its opposite is foolishness, over which it surely triumphs . Or does it? Ecclesiastes, being afflicted with the task of searching out wisdom, says that though wisdom can see clearly, giving it advantage over folly (1:13), there is nonetheless a problem with wisdom's superiority. That problem is death. Solomon muses aloud (2: 15-16): "lf the fa te of the foo l befall s even me, w hy th en have I been acting excessive ly wise?" I said in my heart that this, too, is vanity, for there is no remembrance of the wise forever-as is the case with the fool-because all too soon everythin g is forgotten. 0 how the wise dies just like the fool! Ecclesiastes here places wisdom as it placed toil-in the context of advantage. Again, the bar is set high. Recall that toil was found useless in the context of the stability of nature (Chapter 2: Man Engulfed by Nature). Here, wisdom is found vain in the context of mortality- specifically, wisdom does not preserve one from death. In this context, the distinction collapses between wisdorti. and its opposite, foolishness-for foolishness, too, of course, does not preserve one from death. This sort of observation, a sort of productive flattening, is a core work of wisdom. One might well ask, incredulous, "Productive-what was produced?" A partial appraisal of wisdom and folly was producedspecifically that they make no difference in the face of death. Nothing prevents death-not even wisdom herself. Solomon despairs (2: 17) : "So I loathed life. For I was distressed by all that goes on under the sun, because everything is futile and pursuit of wind." One hopes in vain that wisdom, if it will not save life, will at least perpetuate memory (2:16, 4:16). One hopes in vain even that wisdom will persist in a single wise man during the short span of his life (7:7, Seow translation), "for oppression turn s the wise into fools, and a payment perverts the mind. " The wise are mortal , their wisdom , eradicable. They are not worse than the foolish, but neither are the wise in every respect better. Nor can wisdom see completely. In Ecclesiastes, as has been said, wisdom is a gift of God. But it is the same God who has made the world bent, like a road curving out of sight before and behind the traveler. The God-given gift meets the God-given limitations, and gives way. Or, as Solomon will recount it (7:23-24 Seow) : "I said, ' I will be wise,' but that is beyond me. All that happens is inaccessible and utterly unfathomable; who can discover it?" And while one might try to search out a wiser man to try to discover what Solomon could not find, one will more likely despair of finding anyone better qualified. Who, we ask with Ecclesiastes in 7: 13, will be able to unravel what God has knotted? Wisdom is not a project, and gives no sense of completion in its examination of the ways of the world. It must strain, always. It is indeed productive, but gives no sure advantage. Like toil, it is good without being ce11ain. There is much reason to want wisdom; after all, Ecclesiastes 2:26 reads (Seow translation): "For to the one who is favored, [God) has given wisdom, knowledge, and pleasure." But, importantly, this casts wisdom as a reward, not a means, to Godliness. Ecclesiastes understands the distinction between searching by wisdom and effusive piety. And it will, in the end, see Godliness in the face of the Lord 's judgment, not wisdom, as the heart of the matter. I Kings 3 suggests that Solomon received his wisdom as a result of his love of the Lord and his magnificent sacrifices. Proverbs in turn has memorably said that the fear of the Lord is the starting-point of wisdom. Ecclesiastes, too, sees God as the source not only of wisdom, but of its righteous opposite: simplicity, or uprightness (7:29) .4 For to the one who is f avored, God has given wisdom, knowledge, and pleasure. Solomon is upper-class in the extreme: favored, privileged, born to the house of David, chosen. Having found wealth-like his toil, like his wisdom, like his life-to be vain, Solomon is..speaking of pleasure, but a'1so of his superiority, when he says (2:24-26): There is nothing worthwhile for a man but to eat and drink and afford himself enjoyment with his means. And 23 ENERGEIA even that, I noted, comes from God. For who eats and who enjoys but myself? To the man, namely, who pleases him he has given the wisdom and shrewdness to enjoy himself; and to him who displeases, He has given the urge to gather and amass only for handing on to one who is pleasing to God. That too is futile and a pursuit of wind . This God-given pleasure, in all its futility, is an important. companion to wisdom, knowledge, and toil-and should be examined. MAN : DROWNED I N P LEASURE Ecclesiastes finds human toil and wisdom to be empty of advantage when considered against the stability of nature and the sameness of death. And when, immediately after the first discussion of the vanity of wisdom, Solomon approaches pleasure or mirth, one feels sure that it, too, will fall. Indeed (2:1-2): l said to myself, "Come, I will treat you to merriment. Taste mirth!" That too, I found, was futile. Of revelry I said, "It's mad'" Of merriment, "What good is that?" What good is that? This question eats merriment by appraising that quality by the degree to which it is its opposite. That is, the rhetorical force of the question What good is that? comes from taking what good to mean what use . Since that refers to merriment, we have What use is merriment? This is tellingly close to asking What work does not working do? The futility of merriment is established on the grounds of its not being something it never meant to be-useful. This maneuver is often what makes it so easy for Ecclesiastes to depreciate a subject like wisdom, toil, or pleasure: it need only find something the subject is not and ask why not. Uncareful defenders of the attacked subject (in this case, pleasure) will often find themselves bamboozled into defending it against the charge of not being what it never was (in this case, useful). Even if pleasure is in cases useful, insisting that it always be useful is absurd, and a path to despair. To resist someone who says pleasure is not practical by denying such an obvious statement is just such a path. So, when Solomon finds mirth futile, one wonders why he expected more. The answer lies in the problem of recompense within wisdom. There are many paths that lead to an understanding of enjoyment and pleasure in Ecclesiastes-a consideration of toil or a consideration of mortality among them. But the present excursion-a consideration of recompense-is best, for it will remove a consideration of pleasure from the slippery and onerous context of advantage, and defend it on more solid ground. To receive proportionate good for good, proportionate evil for evil-this is recompense. Especially when medi- ated by God, recompense may be considered a matter of cause and effect, or as a special kind of recurrence: recurrence in the service of justice. It is characteristic of wisdom, in fact, to express itself in causal or judicial terms: for example (7: 12, JPS emendation), "For the possessor of wisdom becomes a possessor of money." This is an acute and useful proverb. The distinction between wisdom and true testimony is indispensable here-one who confuses the two will choke on the juxtaposition of that and this proverb (9: 16): "A poor man's wisdom is scorned, and his words are not heeded ." As proverbs, they are not contradictory (one is about wisdom, the other about poverty), but if universalized and considered testimony, the two will contradict. One must understand that when compounding proverbs, a world-view, and not a world, is being produced. In any case, both proverbs above suggest that the appropriate recompense of wisdom includes wealth. But the world is not always compensatory; there are problems with cause and effect when thus imagined. Innocent men are afflicted. And Solomon, despite his sins, was not himself afflicted. His nation and son were. The wise look around, and see recompense achieved, and recompense frustrated. Wisdom must hold on to both. Justice is real. Injustice is real. In the world they are not negations but enemies. The defeat of one by the other is not annihilation, but victory. Wisdom shows her worth when she discerns one in the thicket of the other. Even dark Ecclesiastes, full of bewilde1ment and despair, frustration and injustice, draws out from the depths of its own confusion a surprising certainty in its conclusion (12:13-14 Seow): End of the matter; everything has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for every human it is to be so. Surely God will bring every deed to judgment for everything hidden , whether good or evil. For everything hidden-God will give justice. Wisdom sees final justice beneath all the injustice and delay, some of which was itself found hidden-where there should have been human justice in the first place (3: 16): And, indeed, I have observed under the sun: Alongside justice there is wickedness, Alongside righteousness there is wickedness . Matters are dark, thick, deep; even if there is ultimate recompense and comfort (if but fo r the righteous), one will yearn for comfort at the place and time where the frustration occurs (8:14-15): Here is a frustration that occurs in the world: sometimes an upright man is requited according to the conduct of the scoundrel; and sometimes the scoundrel is requited according to the conduct of the upright. l say all that is frustration. I therefore praised enjoyment. For the only �24 ALEXANDER good a man can have under the sun is to eat and drink and enjoy himself. That much can accompany him, in exchange for his wealth, through the days of life that God has granted him under the sun. Here, enjoyment returns again, and this time, with the expectation of immediate recompense removed, it can be differently approached. No vain attempt to evaluate the advantageousness of enjoyment is found here . Instead, enjoyment becomes the comfort of the frustrated seeker of justice. Wealth is unsure, toil is transient, wisdom is limitedonly after this is seen does pleasure seem to be a proper member of that group. For pleasure, assuredly, is unsure, is transient, is limited- but it is also good. Moreover, simple pleasures-eating, drinking, sleeping, and such-may be seen as enough, seeking no further advantage, seeking no special variety of uncharted stimulation. Pleasure, without strain, is good . The alternative- not seeing simple pleasures as enough- leads to self-defeat in appetitive seeking, which is not enjoyment, but toil. Worse, straining or working for enjoyment inflames the inner impression that the special pleasure, having been sought out with toil, is deserved. That reintroduces the problem of recompense, and expectation of good-in-kind. Still worse, some searches for pleasure will occur on a scale larger and grander than any available pleasure; in those cases, recompense is impossible, and the toil is vain. In intense straining for pleasure, there is no hope for reward-in-kind, only despair. Early in Ecclesiastes, Solomon so oveneaches for pleasure, and with such grand intent, that the pleasure is entirely overwhelmed by hate . That loathing comes from the frush·ated sense ofrecompense, of which the account is this: Solomon decides to hold onto his wisdom, while releasing his body to temptation and folly (2:3). He envisions this as an ambitious experiment which will teach whether a pleasure-directed life or a wisdom-directed life is better for man on earth. He multiplies his holdings, slaves, buildings, gardens- all beyond measure. He acquires all his eyes want, every enjoyment- and he enjoys himself for a time . In Solomon's despairing words (2: 10) : "I got enjoyment out of all my wealth. And that was all I got out of my wealth." Without the strain of acquisition encouraging Solomon, would he ever have desired more out of enjoyable things than enjoyment? Probably not-the despair came from overexpectation. It can be thus with wisdom, too: wisdom is indeed fine and good, and so it will seem until expected to enlighten every depth, explain every bend. It is not surprising that Solomon makes this connection between expecting too much of pleasure and expecting too much of wisdom. His thoughts above turn from the disposition of his monstrous estate after his death-it would be given to a man whose qualities were unknown, unknowable-from this to the emptiness of wisdom in the face of death. Solomon's desires reach beyond the capacities of any human means, and what can come but loathing and despair? The loathsome world, every loathsome thing, the loathsome appetite that turns every available good grey for its inability to be more than it is-Solomon hates, hates his life's indifference in death to his wisdom, and hates his wealth's indifference in falling into the hand of any heir, however undeserving. No recompense, pleasure gone, Solomon "loathed life . . . distressed by all that goes on under the sun, because everything is futile and a pursuit of wind" (2: 17). He loathes his wealth because it will endure beyond his presumably wealth-deserving life, obdurately willing to be spent by a fool. Wealth and death, of so much interest to wise Solomon, do not return interest: they care not a mite for him. Unstrained pleasure, exemplified by eating and drinking, and youthful maniage, are commended. Such immediate pleasure, pretending to no advantage, searching for no permanence, is good and real. Ecclesiastes' Solomon hopes the wise will take this to heart. The pious may be accustomed to seeking that which endures, but they should not be trapped by that mode. Unstrained pleasures are the good of life under the sun-no riches will make life more worthwhile than do they (see, for example, 6:3). MAN: SWAMPED BY M EN Solomon is sunounded in space not only by accumulated wealth, and by his pleasure-seeking acquisitions , but also by his multitude: Israel. He is bracketed in time by his son and his father. Solomon's disgust at the thought of an undeserving heir inheriting his wealth, mentioned above, occupies a surprisingly large fraction of Ecclesiastes . This prospect threatens Solomon' s esteem for himself; his fear of some mishandling of his wealth in the future by an heir is difficult for him to ignore . As it happens, this threat is also connected to his past, for Solomon both was and has an heir. Solomon believes his wealth to be a God-given accessory to his God-given wisdom and knowledge and shrewdness. But why should his heir, if a fool, be so well equipped? This question galls Solomon, for he wants his wealth to reassure him; he wants his riches to prove to him, above all, that God loves him. He would, with all his heart, that he could believe it so; he would, with all his heart, that unique wealth were evidence of unique divine favor. For all Solomon's splendor and wisdom, God loved his father more. Solomon may have built the temple, but David was after God's own heart. Solomon, for all his splendor, for all God's gifts, must know his heart's inferiority. King Solomon, recall, knows from the mouth of God that his heart was what the Lord wants-and He wants it whole (I Kings 9:4). Solomon knows that his kingship, his realm, his wisdom, his wealth, his enjoyment-every aspect of his superiority ENERGEIA comes from God, who, therefore, will not be impressed to find him thus bedecked. He knows himself a freeloader, heir to God's love for his father . His heir would inherit material wealth, which is so much less. And if his heir is an ungodly fool-and who could know-why, then Solomon cam1ot pretend his gold is proof of God's tenderness toward him. Gold will guild foreign idols as readily as temple walls. When Solomon laments again and again in Ecclesiastes that wealth falls to the unworthy as well as the worthy heir, we hear the lamentation of a man encrusted with wealth, three thousand proverbs, one thousand women, unrivaled grandeur, and every other asset which, taken together in stupendous sum, is outweighed in God's eyes by one faithful heart-like the heart of Solomon's father. King David feasted on the love of the Lord; everything Solomon has falls from that table. When Solomon remembers his father, he sometimes thinks of his son, Rehoboam. Will he be wise, or a fool? And while the words my son at the end of Ecclesiastes or in Proverbs hardly represent Rehoboam, it is well to call him to mind now and then. What, after all, would Solomon want his child to have-his wealth? Yes, but also his wisdom. This is the work of Proverbs: the teaching of wisdom. Proverbs, incidentally, are not wisdom coined; a parent can give a child a proverb, but no parent can simply give a child wisdom. Proverbs and human knowledge are contained in books, but wisdom and understanding are at best conveyed by books. Besides, there is no end to the making of books (Ecclesiastes 12: 12), and Solomon would not have his son forever rummaging in books for the good things like wisdom that books cannot contain. A reader of Ecclesiastes, whether a son or not, is shown a great deal of emptinessand if attentive can learn where not to look for fullness of life. That is a generous gift-to rummage less is to decrease despair. But if one seeks to eliminate rummaging and despair, Ecclesiastes will seem useless and futile itself Solomon cannot assist one who so completely misses his point. The book is, importantly, not splendidly engaging or even terribly clear. Ecclesiastes is a knotty book because it is a book about knots. Much of its beauty lies in its refusal to shine, in its way of being suddenly gorgeous and then just moving on. However maddening for the reader, it is hard to see how a book could reflect the crookedness of the world and its gifts onto a straight line. Wisdom, the great flattener , is not flat; a discussion of wisdom, though it will straighten some things out, will not itself be straightforward. Ecclesiastes is a singular inheritance-few would value it. It must anguish Solomon to have glimmering wealth and dark wisdom and an heir. Which will Rehoboam value, having both? Whether Solomon looks back to his father, or forward to his son, there is anguish. Anguished Solomon seeks solace of just the wrong sort. Surely he knew of husbands and wives who comfort one 25 another, who enjoy one another, who have happiness. Solomon should know that many of the finest and most companionable things about people get smothered in crowds. A thousand friends at once can give, at best, admirationbut not friendship . A thousand wives are less than one in matters of comfort and fulfillment. It is the paradox of the baron's gut: always full, never filled. It is a fool thing to have a thousand women: always caressed, never comforted. Not a husband so much as a connoisseur, he likes his wives foreign . Surely frustrated, and altogether unable to soothe his hea1t, this mass of wives deflect it to their gods, to Israel 's enormous loss. Wisdom, comfort- these things cannot be gotten from a crowd. And if one crowds people together, and calls them wives , why, one will still get no wisdom and no comfort. When put in a crowd, the way to get is to grab, trap, snare. Watch a crowd hy to touch a great man, and see hands become claws . Solomon surely lives in a miserable home, and that is his fault. How sad to think that Solomon likely got more happiness from the visit of Sheba than from all his wives . Solomon's understanding of women as people is, at best, skewed. 5 He engaged many women, but Ecclesiastes' Solomon says he never found the woman he sought (7:28), but found instead that "God made men plain, but they have engaged in too much reasoning ." (7:29) It is a telling transition from women to reason, for Solomon marginalized both in the same way: by excess. Solomon finds himself sunounded in time and in home by people who, in different ways, make him miserable. Solomon lives awash. In wealth, wisdom, women, worksin these and more he sinks his heart. They are not bad things, but rather excess of good and goods. In this heaving sea of a home, Solomon looses his grasp on wholeheartedness, a loss that turns all that he has, every seeming gain or profit, grey. Solomon's relationship to his father, his son, and his wives is controlled by his relationship to his God. He could have been his father's peer, even King David ' s superior, but he turns from the Lord, and guarantees himself a second place, despite wealth and wisdom, beneath David's great heart. He could have been Rehoboam's great benefactor, giving his son riches, wisdom, a united kingdom, and an unbroken connection to that special love of the Lord that was their intended boon- but Solomon turns from the Lord (I Kings 11 :4), and his son's fortunes are splintered (I Kings 11 :32). He could have been a great and happy husband, but he crowds his wives, cheating them of the distinction that should have come from sharing a home with so splendid a man. Instead, they are shamed indeed, remembered for the ages as temptresses, as the catalyst of Solomon ' s tum from the Lord. He could have been remembered as a pacific and munificent king-but gives the people, in the end, not only less than they had, but also his embittered son, who would �26 ALEXANDER oppress them (I Kings 12: 11). But Solomon's relation to every one of them occurs in the context of his relation to the jealous God, and would have been entirely different without His activity. He is the main character in King Solomon's life, and the chief actor in the world portrayed by Ecclesiastes. He is a most active and supreme Lord, who pulls and twines every cord. Goo: LORD OF THE HIDDEN God brings times and seasons just as He pleases, and this is the point of a most repetitive, and oft repeated, set of verses. Their familiarity obscures neither their dogged sameness nor their rhythmic beauty (3: 1-11): A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven. A time for being born and a time for dying, A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted; A time for slaying and a time for healing, A time for tearing down and a time for building up; A time for weeping and a time for laughing, A time for wailing and a time for dancing; A time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, A time for embracing and a time for shunning embraces; A time for seeking and a time for losing, A time for keeping and a time for discarding; A time for ripping and a time for sewing, A time for silence and a time for speaking; A time for loving and a time for hating; A time for war and a time for peace. What value, then, can the man of affairs get from what he earns? I have observed the business that God gave man to be concerned with: He brings everything to pass precisely at its time; He also puts eternity in their mind, but without man ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that God brings to pass . A time for sewing. Ecclesiastes sees God bringing everything to pass precisely at its time. These verses are not primarily interested in soothing the listener. Rather, one feels the utter pervasiveness of God's anangement of time and event. God here sets a time for sewing . God of the large, God of the small-all the things God brings to pass-war and laughing, silence and peace. Humankind will never guess it-God has given them the notion of eternity, but not its content. Death comes , timed by God, unknown to man . This God is strong, and a man will not escape his time: "man cannot contend with what is stronger than he." (6: 10) And, since God gives the good time and the bad, one does well to react well to both (7: 13-14): Consider God's doing! Who can straighten out what He has twisted? So in a time of good fortune enjoy the good fortune; and in a time of misfortune, reflect: The one no less than the other was God's doing; consequently, man may find no fault with Him. God twists lives, and the wise will see the bends. The natural world, lasting longer than do men, curls its bends all the way around into cycles, and it is in that way ever same (Chapter 1); such a world calls for systematic accounting. But the human world was God-bent and truncated by death: there will be no systematic view from beginning to end (3: 10). This human world calls for wisdom, acuity, shrewdness. Solomon knew to ask for wisdom and knowledge, for he was ruler not of the elements, but of Israel. God made man simple, yes, but he remade Solomon wise. Solomon's God is, fittingly, a giving God. Ecclesiastes, too, finds God ever giving-giving times to human works, wisdom and wealth to His favored, eternity to their thoughts, and death to all . If the world were straight, it would be less frustrating . But this frustration is the work of God (8: 10b-15a; note that frustration is here translating 7:J ;i hebe!, or vanity): And here is another frustration [vanity): the fact that the sentence imposed for evil deeds is not executed swiftly, which is why men are emboldened to do evil the fact that a sinner may do evil a hundred times and his punishment still be delayed. For although I am aware that "It will be well with those who revere God since they revere Him, and it will not be well with the scoundrel, and he will not live long, because he does not revere God" here is a frustration [vanity] that occurs in the world: sometimes an upright man is requited according to the conduct of the scoundrel; and sometimes the scoundrel is requited according to the conduct of the upright. I say that all this is frustration [vanity]. I therefore praised enjoyment. The identification of frustration leads to the praise of enjoyment-a primary movement in Ecclesiastes. That God-given frustration often, as here, consists of a fact and a proverb in opposition. Every element of this is God's doing. The frustration is extraordinary, but results from the contact of two most typical elements . The abo ve proverb is of the very most familiar type: righteous rewarded and wicked punished. The above observation-justice delayed and inverted on earth-is the most common counter-observation in wisdom literature. The frustration of combining observation and proverb in the reactive manner above is the very fuel of wisdom literature. There are numerous iterations. Though taken from the passage above, our present example is also the mainspring of the Book of Job: the Godarranged fi'ustration of static wisdom by tempormy inversion of justice. There is very much more to so mighty a book, but that is the mainspring. God-given frustration is the great stimulant of wisdom: without the strange gift of frustration, wisdom would be absurd. Imagine again the uselessness of wisdom were human affairs straightforward, and again the uselessness of wisdom were human affairs utterly scattered. God bends 27 ENERGEIA human affairs, but He does not shatter them. This twisted (but not snapped) middle way is God's underlying giftand the environment where wisdom flourishes. Wisdom isolated from frustration will wither into foolishness. Self-satisfied wisdom will be malign. So it is, for example, with Job's comforters, who refuse to confront their wisdom with the twist of Job's innocent suffering-if they had, their dusty wisdom would have shivered, gasped, and come to life. But more: they would have held to the mighty promise' of restoration. Consider: God keeps wisdom alive by allowing it to make connections, but not of such pemrnnence or universality that it ossifies. This is the work of what we have called stimulation and frustration. It is this divine agitation that engenders the resilience and tenacity characteristic of the wisest people. But, if this were the end of the matter, wisdom being kept alive by nothing more than a divine agitation, wisdom would also be entirely cynical. But there is a second element: the promise of restoration. This is what keeps wisdom right-side-up . One may already have noticed that the bent character of the world, were it isolated, would often produce wisdom on its head-deviled proverbs like this: "It will not be well with those who revere God since they revere Him, and it will be well with the scoundrel, and he will live long, because he does not revere God ." (a conuption of 8: 12f) It is the promise of restoration which prevents this: frustration stimulates wisdom, keeping it alive, and then the promise of restoration keeps it facing in one direction (the righteous direction, of course). Now, restoration marks the endpoint of frustration, and the endpoint of frustration is the endpoint of wisdom's liveliness. Restoration is also the endpoint of Ecclesiastes (12:14). Restoration must occur, to keep wisdom upright, but must occur last, so as not to cut off wisdom from the frustration which keeps it lively. Restoration marks the end of an excursion into wisdom. MAN AND W ISDOM It is, of course, difficult for people when the hope of restoration is put at the end. It seems s'o far off. Yet, for the sake of wisdom's liveliness, the end is the only place restoration can go. Happily there is, as we have seen, the intermediate comfort of simple enjoyment: it is pleasure that makes lively upright wisdom livable on earth. Affliction is very good for wisdom, but not very good for people. A wise people will be best served by bad and good times, enjoyment and affliction. Both must be ultimately empty, so that there is, ultimately, a need to look to a hope ofrestorationkeeping a wise people right-side-up, that is, upright. It is a good God that, yes, twists human affairs, but then provides the promise of restoration and recompense and judgment to help men regain the uprightness with which He created them (7:29). This is the work of God portrayed in Ecclesiastes, the very difficult gift of wisdom, a gift lacking in the sort of profit that would undo itself. The wise have no profit in respect to their being alive-the fool is alive just the same . And death comes for all. The wise in the face of nature and time on earth will discover no impossible advantage, no real value, and they will have pain and enjoyment like the fool. But the words of Ecclesiastes will lodge in the hearts ofa few, and irritate. These are Solomon's true heirs, holders of a dark and fertile gift. Every human spirit is alive, but the wise spirit is liveliest . ENDNOTES 1. The new Jewish Publication Society translation is used throughout, and occasionally the Seow translation from the Anchor Bible series; passages taken from the latter are noted. Often a passage will be involved in one of the many textual difficulties of Ecclesiastes. These difficulties are important, scholarly, and technical, and they are ignored throughout the paper. 2. Loss and restoration for Israel occupies the interest of much of the Scriptures. A reading of Lamentations fits well with Ecclesiastes when considering that subject, and much could be said (elsewhere) about them together. 3. Accomplice connotes it well. The same surprising connotation is found in Matthew 10: 16, a most memorable Christian command: "be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves ." 4. The word translated here as simple, or upright is the one used by God to describe Job to the Satan ( 1117' , yashar). Seow renders itjust right. It is also, as L. Kem recalls, the root for the command given to Israeli taxicab drivers who need to go straight at intersections. S. Two comments about Solomon and women are appropriate here: First, the famous concluding acrostic of Proverbs, on the virtuous woman (31 : 10-31 ), is explicitly not from Solomon, but from King Lemuel of Massa ' s mother. The more than twenty references to women in the Solomonic sections Proverbs are, with one small exception, about strange women, odious women, whorish women, and so on. Both Solomon and the Solomonic proverbs are lopsided when it comes to women. Second, we can reread the dark and deeply strange story of Solomon's judgment over the two women and their baby. This paper's main reading is focused on the wisdom displayed, not the people involved. The story emphasizes, as does this paper, that these women are prostitutes. Solomon's threat to halve the baby seems to assume that the only way to get the truth out of these whores is to provoke a maternal �28 preservation instinct: an animal reaction. It certainly assumes that the lying prostitute will have, not human compassion, but brutish indifference to the child, at best. And Solomon may genuinely qave been ready to halve a baby that is, after all, illegitimate. That is, Solomon may see all Scenic Overlook (secret spy picture) Isabel Clark, A '02 ALEXANDER three as effectively subhuman or animal. While we may tend to see two grieved mothers and a baby, Solomon likely sees two whores and a bastard. Solomon is just the sort of person one can imagine handing a woman a writhing half of what was her baby. Tiffany Joly Andrew Baisch, A '00 �EN ERG El A A Decent Burial Christopher Colby, SJC Community I love a good funeral, especially an in-law's. I'm just that way. Blood relatives' are even better. A chance to share one last lie about their useless lives before they're planted six feet under. But when Brownie died, I must say I was touched. Poor Brownie. I had just gotten home from happy hour. Not too sober, not too tight; enough to chase away the gloom of another grey work-week. There, under his ratty plaid blanket, he lay. Two-hundred pounds of dead mutt. Well, not really a mutt. The Woman's St. Bernard, you understand. I was not overwrought, like The Woman and #1 Daughter were, at Brownie's demise, however. I had long tired of Brownie's thunderclap farts that withered flowers a block away. I found it a great relief that I wouldn't have to cart away any more of his wheel-barrelsized turds that daily littered the patio. A mine-field of poop. How is it that a dog's stomach can do that to Alpo Crunchies? Brownie had his own room. Big enough to house any number of the homeless. Brownie had health insurance. More than most Americans. Brownie had birthday parties, toys under the Christmas tree. Brownie ate more grams of protein than entire thirdworld nations do each day . And, oh yes, how could I forget? When Brownie was feeling a little low, The Woman had a psychiatrist for him. "Can I have some of his Prozac?" I asked once, feeling a bit low myself. But The Woman's eyes shot fire-darts at me. Brownie was dead. I knew this wasn't going to be as much fun as Uncle Bertie's funeral last month. Brownie was a gift from me on the anniversary of one of our weddings . #1 Daughter had not yet been born, and Brownie helped to break up the intensity of our empty life together. Pets and children can do that sometimes. "How ya gonna bury him?" the #1 asked me. "I'm not. We ' ll have him butchered and donate the meat to a soup kitchen." That sent The Woman to our bedroom in tears. She's never had much of a funny-bone. "Da-ad, you're such a pig." Will no one teach our children it's only one syllable? Now that the onslaught of puberty has left its scars on her, the #1 D has few illusions left. Like the rest of us. Claire always said there was a mean streak in every Thule she'd ever known. I, her son, was the only exception to the rule I knew of in all my family. But the # 1 seemed to fit the pattern quite well. "See? She can't help it: it's in the genes," I always tell The Woman. But what was I to do with Brownie? Our rowhouse backyard in St. Paul was a small cement patio. No cemetery there. I considered the dumpster at the supermarket across the street. Or maybe, in the middle of the night, chucked off the Mendota Bridge into the Mississippi? This needed some thought. I'm good at planning things, though. It's my job. "I'm off to The Democratic Club," I tell the locked bedroom door. Hat in hand, and out the door. "You're such a pig, Da-ad." *** Now, you might think the Democratic Club is named after the political organization. It isn't. That would give it a kind of high-mindedness it certainly doesn't deserve. One might think it's democratic, you know, open and equal to all. That its membership is a social and cultural cross-section of the Twin Cities. It's not, and the roster is suspiciously fair-skinned. The name has the advantage, though, of hiding any number of sins. No members ever brought their wives. No, I really think it's named 'The Democratic Club' because, after a few gallons of beer or liters of gin, members sit at their table or the mahogany bar and talk about all the things they hate in the world. We're not racists, or antipolitical, or chauvinists, you see. We hate everyone equally, democratic-like. Mark, my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, that is, introduced me to the D .C. years ago. I am quite fond of Mark. We don 't talk about our wives or our family. We are islands of mutual comfort at dinners, reunions, and weddings. Baptisms and funerals, Thanksgiving and Christmas. At these occasions, Mark and I drink away the tedium family life indentures us to. I had long surmised by the amount of time he spent at the D .C. that he was like the rest of the unhappy husbands that crossed its doorsteps daily. Poor bastard- I grew up with his wife, after all. When I entered that Friday night, he was resting his buns on a tall stool, one foot propped against a decorative spittoon. He pitched salty peanuts into his mouth. "Hey." 31 "How're you?" he slurs at me . Um, he's had a six-pack at least, and not even on seven o'clock. I can catch up though- I've had more experience, you see. Before I settled in, a very dry martini slid before my nose. "Thanks. Yeah, start a tab." I'm partial to gin, you see. Martinis especially. Dry, with ice the only mixer. Just a squeeze of lemon. It's a delicious way to eat olives, and my doctor says I need more fiber in my diet anyway. Ten minutes later, after the third, I told him about Brownie. "Christ, that's a pain in the ass. Wadya gonna do with him?" Somewhere between gin #10 and gin #11 I figure out what to do with Brownie. "We'll hold a drawing for him," I said. Gawd, when I get on a roll, I'm good . "But he 's dead ," Mark objected. Mark can be so annoying at times. "Of course he's dead, but we won't tell anyone." "You'll piss a lot of people off," said Sam. The bartender had gotten pretty interested by now. "No we won't, only the winner, and we'll give his money back ." Sam nods his head in thoughtful approval, even allowing as how I could keep Brownie in the beer cooler until the raffle was over. He lent me the two-wheel dolly to haul Brownie's one-tenth of a ton over. Now, I've always liked Sam. I don 't hold the opinion, shared by others, that he short-changes everyone after they've tipped a few. There now, people can be so nasty, even members of the Democratic Club. I left Mark at the D.C. with his promise to help me move Brownie the next day. Home, over-ginned as usual, but content with my world: we had a plan. I didn 't try to go to the bedroom where The Woman was sleeping. I am used to the sofa in the study. Next to a half-eaten and petrified hot dog, I laid my wallet on the desk. It did seem a little lighter than usual ... I eased my rump onto the sofa, seeking the slight depression it had worn after so many years. Life was getting back to normal. *** "Da-ad, Mum says ya gotta take Brownie to the SPCA." My foggy head was in the refrigerator, looking for something cold to pour over my shoe-leather tongue. "She took the steamer trunk from the attic, and ya gotta take Brownie in it to the SPCA. She says they'll bury Brownie for us." Dreams of paying off several weeks w01ih of gin at the D.C. with raffle money vanished in my pulsating head. "She left a note on the table, and won't be back from Gramrny's until tomorrow afternoon." #1 left, head wrapped in a towel. This week's color was purple. Last week was "manic red." "And call Uncle Markie ." Her bare feet plop-plopped on the kitchen floor as she left. The Woman ' s note gave instructions and the address where I was to take Brownie. *** "Maybe you should have put him in the trunk before rigor mortis set in," Mark said. It had been difficult bending Brownie's legs so the lid would shut and latch properly . Brownie could be such an ornery cuss when he wanted. Mark told me then that Paula had the car, at Claire's, for the weekend. Gawd, what would we be without our mothers-in-law? "We'll havta take a taxi." *** "No way," the cabby said when he got there. When I began to argue and threaten, he drove off, waving good-bye to me with his middle finger. "Hell, we'll have to take an MTC bus ." *** We huffed and pulled the trunk into the bus, where, covering the "Handicapped Seating Only" sign, we propped Brownie. On Hennepin Ave., a grey-haired lady limped aboard, led by a small child. Looking for somewhere near to sit, she tapped at the trunk with her cane. "Please, could you sir?" "Sit somewhere else," I snarled at her. What the hell. People these days have no sense of proportion . It's The Woman's dog, for gawd's sake. "No sensitivity to others ." "Oh ya, do whatever they want," Mark says. Someone behind us asks what that smell is. "Some kinda cheese?" "Um, what kind ya s 'pose?" "Puts me in mind of Asiago." A little girl starts to cry. "No, more like a ripe Brie." "Camembert?" someone suggests . "Maybe it' s Fontina," Mark pipes up . My elbow in his ribs shuts him up quickly. We drag Brownie out to transfer at Nicollet Ave., just before the mob got too dangerous. "Hey, there's Charlie's D&D Tavern," Mark says. I love that about Mark. "Let's have a brew until the bus comes." *** Two hours later I remember Brownie, left outside. We drink a couple more, then head out the door to gather Brownie for his last constitutional. The trunk is gone. *** At the Democratic Club, an hour later, Mark asked what I was going to tell The Woman. �32 I grabbed him by the throat and I shake his head back and forth. "We gave him a decent burial." I could hear his brains swish in beer at every jerk I gave him. He can be so annoying at times. Next afternoon I was still napping off Saturday's memories. Downstairs I could hear The Woman and #1 Daughter talking in the kitchen. The #1 D taps at my door and peeks her head in. I was wrong. More like cranberry than purple. Untitled Caroline Picard, '02 COLBY "Yo, dude, Mum and I are going to the pet store to get a puppy." "Get a chihuahua." "Da-ad, you're such a pig. " #1 's tongue can clip a hedge: God help the poor son-of-a-bitch that marries her. Maybe I'll see him at the D.C. someday, too. I roll over and snuggle my rump into its favorite spot. Waterwitch Cara Gormaliy, A '02 �ENERGEIA Les Poetes des Sept Ans : Arthur Rimbaud French Translation Matthew Holtzman, A '00 Les Poetes des Sept Ans Seven-Year-Old Poets Et la Mere, formant le livre du devoir, S'en allait satisfaite et tres fiere sans voir, Dans les yeux bleus et sous le front plein d'eminences, L'ame de son enfant livree aux repugnances. And the mother closed the workbook with an air Of pride, went away, satisfied yet unaware That beneath his furrowed brow and behind his sweet blue eyes, The spirit of her child was given to despise. Tout le jour il suait d'obeissance; tres Intelligent; pourtant des tics noirs, quelque traits Semblaient prouver en lui d' acres hypocrisies. Dans I' ombre des couloirs aux tentures moisies, En passant il tirait la langue, Jes deux poings Al' aine, et dans ses yeux fermes voyait des points. Une porte s'ouvrait sur le soir: a la lampe On le voyait, l'a-haut, qui ralait sur la rampe, Sous un golfe de jour pendant du toit. L'ete Surtout, vaincu, stupide, ii etait entete A se renfermer dans la fraicheur des latrines: II pensait la, tranquille et livrant ses narines All day long he toiled in diligence, and though of great Intelligence, certain dark suspicious traits Spoke of a mind embittered with hypocrisies. And when, in dark halls, he passed the musty tapestries, He stuck out his tongue, jammed his fist in his pants, And shut his eyes tight to make motes of light dance. A door swung wide on the night, by lamplight He could be seen, high up, blind, drowning on a flight Of stairs, beneath the sun flooding from the ceiling. In the summer, undone, amazed, he found it most appealing In the outhouse, in the chill dark all enclosed; And there he thought, tranquilly, opening his nose. Quand, lave des odeurs du jour le jardinet Derriere la maison, en hiver, s'illunait, Gisant au pied d'un mur, entene dans la mame Et pur des vision ecrasant son a:il dame, II ecoutait grouiller les galeux espaliers. Pitie, ses enfant seuls etait ses familiers Qui, chetifs, front nus, a:il detaignant sur la joue, Cachant de maigres doigts jaunes et noires de boue Sous des habits puant la faire et tout viellots, Conversaient avec la douceur des idiots! Et si, l'ayant supris a des pities immondes, Sa mere s 'effrayait; !es tendresses, profondes, De l' enfant se jetaient sur cet etonnement. C'etait bon. Elle avait le bleu regard, - qui ment! When the garden, washed clean of the smells of noon, Behind the house, in winter, was filled with the moon; Interred in marl, at the foot of a partition, And rubbing at his bleary eyes to conjure visions, He listened to the barren fruit trees moan and bend. Alas! The paupers' children were his only friends; Who, unfed, heads bare, with eyes sunk in their cheeks, And sickly fingers, black with mud, jaundiced and weak Hidden beneath quaint consignment rags, fragrant with stool, Sweetly conversed with him in the gentle speech of fools. And if, catching him immersed in sinful sympathies, His mother took offense, with soothing pleasantries The child would try to calm her, to temper her surprise . All was well; she still received the blue look - that lies! A sept ans, ii fai sait des romans, sur la vie Du grand desert, ou luit la Liberte ravie, F6rets , soleils, rives, savanes ! - 11 s 'aidait De Journaux illustres ou, rouge, il regardait Des Espagnoles rire et des ltaliennes. Quand venait, l'reil brun, folle , en robes d'indiennes, -Huit ans- la fille des ouvriers d'a cote, At seven years he wrote passionate romances On life in the vast desert where shimmering freedom dances: Forests, shorelines, suns, plateaus! He would aid His fantasies with picture books. The drawings made Him stare, the Spanish women made him blush with shame . But when that brown eyed, crazy neighbor's daughter came, (Eight years old in a calico dress - a little brute) continued on next page 35 La petite brutale, et qu' elle avait saute, Dans un coin, sur son dos, en secouant ses tresses, Et qu 'il etait sous elle, ii lui mordait les fesses, Car elle ne portait jamais de pantalons; -Et, par elle meurtri des poings et de talons, Remportait les saveurs de sa peau dans sa chambre. She jumped at him, he hid from her, she gave pursuit, Cornered him, mounted him, then through storms of hair, Note: the savage never bothered wearing underwear, Maneuvering to deflect her blows, he bit her ass . And, still smarting from his tussle with the feral lass, He took the taste of her sweet flesh back to his room. II craignait !es blafards dirnanches de decembre, Ou, pommade, sur un gueridon d'acajou, 11 lisait une Bibile a la tranche vert-chou; Des reves l'oppressaient chaque nuit dans !'alcove. Il n' aimait pas Dieu; mais les hommes, qu'au soir fauve, Noirs, en blousse, ii voyait rentrer dans le faubourg Ou !es crieurs, en trois roulement de tambour, Font autour des edits rire et grondes les foules. -11 revait la prairie amoureuse, ou des houles Lumineuse, parfums sains, pubescences d' or, Font leur remuement calme et prennent leur essor! He feared the wan December Sundays when, well-groomed And powdered, he would stand and read long passages From a Bible with pages green as cabbages. Dreams oppressed his sleep each night in the alcove, He loved men, not God, men like those he ' d see rove The streets on mazy evenings, dressed in over-alls Gathering round the criers to mutter and guffaw At each new edict they announced with drumming din. -He dreamed of loveswept plains, where golden perfumed winds, Pubescent zephyrs of invigorating light, Would rustle calmly in the sage, and then take flight! Et comme ii savourait sourtout les sombres choses, Quand, dans la chambre nue aux persiennes closes, Haute et bleue, acrement prise d'hurnidite, II lisait son roman sans cesse medite, Plein de lourds ciels ocreux, et de f6rets noyees, De fleurs de chair bois siderals depolyees, Vertige, ecroulements, deroutes, et pitie! -Tandis que faisait la rumeur du quartier, En bas, - seul, et couche sur des pieces de toiles Ecrue, et pressentant violemment la voile! And since it was the somber that he savored above all, When, in his empty room with sweating acrid walls, Dark behind drawn blinds, with a ceiling high and blue, He'd read his storybooks, he'd read them each sh·aight through: Taken in by ponderous ochre skies, drowned tree tops, Flowers of flesh unfolding in a starlit copse, Vertigo, collapses, betrayals, and sympathy. -The streets still murmured on outside his fantasies Alone, he sat transfixed by these transfiguring tales, On linen sheets, which violently suggested sails. �Highway 4 New Mexico Peter Heyneman, '02 Looking down upon the valley ringed by red mesas patchwork shadows of perfect clouds quilt the low green weed hills but forever wide. Wide as the inside of Christ's mouth. Swallowing the world between the cows and the molars of sun and sky. The breath of the wind, as a solid wall of air, marching up the mountains and into the wild peaks. Wider than one man can see without swivelling around, wider than he can stretch his arms or the distance between his eyes. As the blanket of shadows ripples in the breeze and the breeze hums to him foolishly a man could feel awe, fear, that the expanse the space is engulfing him, ingesting his car, his camera, his shoes, his hands and leaving his bones to be bleached beside Highway 4 to be ignored by less observant travellers. But this is not the valley. This is looking down upon it. Aswan Karin Ekholm, A '00 �The Legacy of Claudius Ptolemy Cordell D.K. Yee, Tutor 3 Sketches Melina Hoggard, A '00 When we use a map, we take it for granted that it will present accurate information. We usually don't think much about maps until they fail us. Still less do we think of those who make maps, especially now that they can be computergenerated. We can go on the Internet (e.g., MapQuest) and find a map of just about any place we want and, in many cases, have one made to our specifications. We owe a good deal of our cartographic good fortune to one of the authors in the St. John's Program, Claudius Ptolemy. We study one of his works, the Almagest, as one overturned by the Copernican revolution. The most memorable features of what we read are probably the errors: a geocentric conception of the universe, uniform circular motion, epicycles, and the equant. We do not study what is probably Ptolemy's most lasting conh·ibution: the Geography. This book represents the completion of Ptolemy's ash·onomical work. If the Almagest shows how mathematics helps one understand divine and heavenly things, the Geography shows how mathematics helps us to order earthly things. In the Almagest, Ptolemy placed a network of meridians and parallels on the sphere of the fixed stars as a way of locating objects in the heavens. He saw that the same network could be reduced and placed on the earth's surface. All positions on the earth would then be uniquely identified by a pair of coordinates. In the Geography, one of the things Ptolemy does is extend his method of ordering heavenly space to earthly space. He also provides coordinates for about 8,000 places. Tables of these coordinates make up the bulk of the Geography. For that reason, it is not a particularly readable book. Nonetheless, the Geography is important because it is a precursor to the coordinate space that supposedly marks the transition from ancient to modem mathematics, a focus of the sophomore mathematics tutorial. It s~ems to be no accident that a number of key modern mathematiciansGauss, Euler, and Descartes, for example-took an interest in maps, and more specifically, mathematical maps made according to Ptolemy's techniques. Ptolemy described h·ansformations by means of which one could h·ansfer points on sphere to a plane or flat surface (see Figures 1 and 2) . Such transformations are needed for practical and mathematical reasons. Globes are more accurate representations of the earth than flat sheets of paper (or papyrus or parchment), but they can be hard to cany around. If one were interested in a small area, the globe would have to be rather large to accommodate the necessary detail. For Figure 1. One of Ptolemy 's transformations. (From Claudius Ptolemy, The Geography, tr. and ed. Luther Edward Stephenson [1932; rpt. New York: Dover, 1991 [.) Figure 2. Another Ptolemaic transformation. (From Ptolemy, The Geography.) �40 YEE '-'L. ~ I\ '(, 1J- I'<- I<!- ~ :i ~ ~ f----µ ~- 1""1-.....__ ~..: ~ '"" """,.. ·- · ., ::::b\ -T ·c"-' -~ 'i'\ Y\ "\J ~: \1r ~.>~.s' .y , )/.. ~\)· "ii g ;; ' •. / l b~<>- ~ ., ~~~ ··,. . . ·-~~- - - \)" I'; ·~ ' \ ) ,__S N I v ; !( Ji ~~.'.f uv...r . ' 17' V'" "' v.~ L{ ~ t: A:~ ~ I <T"' ~,.;::; 1v..f~ (0; {)ti · ~- / ~ ;?I~ f;\1)5 [.,.:..ih "") 7'~ ~'{I '~u 1 \ ' . ii )J .. ~i~~-)~,~~+: J~ ·Jjrrf--r11r-i~- r r · rrrTT I "'1'1 / / l'ii ' t7" l'----1 ""'> I. 11..-- !>' f----1-- ~ --j 1j .,"D I Ir-r-< fJ !'-<., r-' 1' I 1 1 .v"'" / I r--( I Figure 3. An example of a conformal transformation (Mercator). (From John P. Snyder and Phillip M. Voxland, A11 Album of Map Projectio11s, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1453 [Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989j.) ~!(; ~ ~ ~F=>- >',__ i"i ~- ~- ~- <""I '"' =" r.:~ v~~ l~V ( ~, \ ··, 3/, ~ 'L i-1 !:'-;~ - -- P;l.f.\ I''\ -~~~ \... _j_ -f---f--- _I.I - - f - - - f -- = =+-= :µ l --v ·, . - ( D '-r:i I/ ~- 1---~ - b 4 -' - 1- ~ '~ · 10 •. : \ ',.1.,, ""'- '\\ .l ..,,. - 1i~r~ -;;- ll 7 I I( '<, I ~ -- 'f \_.... - .r -= · ei= -- ~1~ _:~· ~i -~- - r:=;--: - - - ~ Figure 4. An equal-area transformation (Gall orthographic). (From Snyder and Voxland, A11A/b11m ofMap Projectio11s.) Figure 5. A compromise between conformal and equal-area transformations (Robinson). (From Snyder and Voxland, A11 Album of Map Projectio11s.) I such areas, a flat, r~llable or foldable medium would be easier to handle. But one cannot simply take a globe and flatten it out: it is impossible to do so and preserve the original proportions and shapes of the figures on the globe. As a practical demonstration of this fact, one can try to flatten a grapefruit rind that has been hollowed out. It will not flatten out without tearing or overlapping on itself. The same result would happen with the surface of the earth. Ptolemy did not demonstrate this mathematically, but seemed to appreciate its truth. The mathematical demonstration would not come until Euler published a proof in the eighteenth century. 2 A flattened-out globe would have rips and overlapping areas: distances and directions would be distorted. The discontinuous map would lose some of its usefulness . Ptolemy explains how one can derive a flat, continuous map from the globe. But these flat maps entail some loss: to put it simply one can preserve shape while losing accuracy in area; one can preserve area at the expense of shape .3 Maps drawn on projections are usually a compromise: they sacrifice a little of both area and shape (see Figures 3-5). Ptolemy's transformations were geometrical: geometrical conshuctions are employed to relocate points on the globe to a plane. Each point is relocated following the same procedure, as in the Hjelmslev transformation employed in senior mathematics. And, like the Hjelmslev transfo1mation, certain characteristics of the original are retained , while others are lost. The map transformation, or projection, results in a rep lotting of the lines of latitude and longitude, altering their configuration on the plane . The transformation associates each position on the sphere with one and only one position on the plane. From here it is not a long jump to the notion of functions . Since the development of analytic geomeh)', map transformations, or projections, have often been expressed in terms of mathematical functions. These are equations of lines: they describe the behavior of meridians and parallels on the plane surface. Contemplation of the lines of latitude and longitude on the globe could have led to other insights. A Gauss or Euler might have noticed that on a globe it is possible for tTiangles (non-Euclidean of course), to contain two 90-degree angles, to have an angle sum greater than 180 degrees. Map projection could have been conceived as transfom1ing a nonEuclidean space into a Euclidean one. Thinking about maps could have been a way of beginning to think about different kinds of space. None of these possibilities are made explicit by Ptolemy in the Geography. It seems to be intended primarily as a manual for mapmaking. But it also seems to be no small coincidence that the development of analytic geometry and non-Euclidean geometry follow close behind the reintroduction of the Geography to Europe. 41 ENERGElA ... ................... ":_~~::-=-:- . Figure 6. Ptolemaic world map (ca. 1460). (From Ptolemy, The Geography. ) �42 It is necessary to speak of a reintroduction because for about ten centuries Ptolemy was unknown to scholars in Europe. Ptolemy completed the Geography in the second century C.E. After the fall of Rome in the fifth century the work was lost in Europe. European scholars were not reacquainted with it till the end of the fourteenth century. During this period of Ptolemaic darkness , maps of the world were made more for religious purposes than for the communication of geographic information. Some showed Jemsalem as the "center" of a what appears to be a diskshaped earth. It is unclear what people in Europe thought of the world during this time . The disk-like representations of the earth could have been attempts to represent a globe by mapmakers who did not fully understand how to achieve an illusion of depth. Scholars would have had access to writings, by Aristotle, for example, according to whom the world was a sphere. What commoners thought is largely unknown, as they had no access to books. In any case, in the absence of the Geography and other Greek works, scholars in medieval Europe probably had at best a hazy notion of the earth's dimensions. The Geography, however, was known to Islamic and Byzantine scholars. Contact between Europe and Byzantium was limited until the late middle ages . In the late fourteenth century, Byzantium was under pressure from the Turks, and Byzantine scholars began making their way to Europe. One was Manuel Chrysoloras, who was invited to Florence to teach Greek. In 1400, a Florentine who had obtained a copy of the Geography from Constantinople asked Chrysoloras to translate it into Latin. Chrysoloras handed the job to one of his students who finished the translation in about 1406. Florentine scholars began touting the work, and more copies were transcribed. The advent of printing later in the century hastened the spread of the Geography. The print revolution, almost concurrent with cartographic revolution, made mass literacy possible (not to mention a Great Books program). The wide distribution of Ptolemy ' s work was not simply a matter of technology. The book did capture imaginations . The Almagest had been available in Latin translation since the twelfth century, more than two centuries before the Geography was translated, and the merits of the Almagest's mathematical model of the cosmos were recognized. But no one made the leap that Ptolemy had made centuries before and saw that his method of ordering celestial space could be applied to the earth. Roger Bacon had proposed that earthly positions be identified by coordinates but, without a clear notion of the earth's dimensions, lacked a way to make definite assignments: he could not determine a unit. In addition, his proposal, made before printing, was hardly known. With the established authority of the was positioned to stimulate a cartographic revolution. YEE Once one accepts that the earth is one sphere at the center of another, the reduction of the celestial coorqinate system to fit the earth's surface becomes an easy step to take. One sees that taking the height of the polestar at midnight would yield a latitudinal measurement. Longitudinal coordinates can be determined by a combination of astronomical measurements and linear measurements on the earth's surface. The task of those wishing to make a world map was simplified by Ptolemy's inclusion of coordinates . One could, and quite a few people did, reconstruct a Ptolemaic world picture from the data in the Geography (see Figure 6). Such a reconstruction is required since none of Ptolemy's maps survives intact, and the provenance of the fragments of maps that survive in manuscript is unknown. The coordinates Ptolemy provides in the Geography are intended for a world map and twenty-six regional maps, and Renaissance editions of the book often include reconstructions of those maps . Looking at a Ptolemaic world map, one can get a sense of why the Geography stined the imagination. If we accept that the earth is spherical, and if we tmst Ptolemy 's coordinates, it appears that roughly two-thirds of the earth's surface is unknown. The map ends abmptly just south of the equator. The Eurasian landmass extends at least 180 de grees longitudinally, and perhaps even more. In Europe, human beings stretched themselves out to know the rest. There were, of course, other reasons for the European expansion into parts known and unknown. There were economic benefits to finding sea routes to Asia that would allow merchants to avoid middlemen in the Middle East. There was also the quest for gold. Good maps were a necessity in these endeavors. Even so, it does not seem plausible to discount completely intellectual curiosity, a desire to fill in the world map. In hindsight we can see that there is much that is wrong in Ptolemy's world picture . Ptolemy po1irayed the Indian Ocean as landlocked. He underestimated the ea1ih ' s circumference-incidentally, this underestimate probably helped to mislead Columbus into thinking that sailing westward from Europe would be a shortcut to Asia. Since Ptolemy was working before air travel, aerial photography, satellite imaging, and accurate tin1epieces, errors would have to be expected. Ptolemy himself seems to have expected that his data would be improved. It is impossible that he took the measurements for all 8,000 coordinates by himself. For places far from Alexandria, his home city, Ptolemy would have had to rely on reports from travellers, and he recognizes that such reports would tend to be unreliable. Thus the world picture he offers is more of a hypothesis than an established fact. He expected refinements and corrections. Measurements need to checked and re-checked, not only because of errors and variations in observations but also because the earth' s surface itself changes. Second- 43 ENERGEIA . A.- · ·v, N V ~ R::.'-S ·i\"-' L ElI ·' N i..;_~~~~-'-~--=..,__~,._--"'~.-.:::..;:e-:: ~ 0 V----"O._____ _ _ -.; I TiJi.1'. 0N'I LN .< • Figure 7. World map published in 1548 by Giacomo Gastaldi, about 150 years after the reintroduction of Ptolemy's Geography to Eu rope. (F rom Jonathan Potter, Co1111try Life Book ofAntique Maps (1988; rpt. Seracusc: Chartwcll Books, 1989).) hand reports need to be verified, and, if possible, replaced by measurements with instruments. With Europe ' s economic expansion into Asia and the New World, mapmakers had opportunities to refine old geographic data and to collect new data . Pilots for the J?utch East India Company, for example, took measurements of their positions, and the English East India Company sponsored a trigonometrical survey of India. Improvements to Ptolemy's world picture were not steady. Old information has a way of ossifying. It can take some time for conect information to win acceptance, so that old atlases often present both Ptolemaic and Copernican models of the cosmos. Further impediments to progress were laziness and the profit motive. A later map is not necessarily better than an earlier one. The wide availability of print technology made map piracy easy. It was more economical for a map publisher to copy someone's else's map than to draw a new one . (Today with photography, photocopying, and scanning widely and inexpensively available, the temptations to map plagiary are even stronger. Map publishers wishing to protect their intellectual property have been known to include fake place names on their maps in order to trap the would-be pirates.) Despite the hindrances, the progress made in mapping is clear and distinct (see Figure 7). The easy reproducibility of a map also made geographic data open to scrutiny and potentially to verification and falsification. Reproducibility of results and potential falsification would prove cenn·al to the scientific enterprise. The painstaking process of verifying geographic information, not only the profit motive, �l 44 also led to greater uniformity in maps. To some extent, the uniformity was the mark of agreement on what was the case. The easy reproducibility of geographic data, while making it easy to plagiarize, also inhibits unscrupulous practices. Once an updated world picture has won general acceptance, an unscrupulous map publisher will no longer find it profitable to keep reprinting umevised maps. No one wishing to keep geographically current would want to buy a map depicting California as an island, for example. When one looks at a reconstructed Ptolemaic map, one question that arises is that of purpose. In his tables of coordinates, Ptolemy provides nothing about roads, and on the reconstructed maps, no roads are shown. The maps were not meant for travel and, since they do not show roads, would not seem to be of much use for that purpose. They seem to have been meant to as reference tools, to give users a sense of where places were. This sort oflooking could have been an end in itself. The act of looking at the earth whole in a single gaze is physically permitted to a being that can see two hemispheres at once . In a way a flat map of the earth gave us superhuman power: it lifted us off our planet. In the Almagest Ptolemy says that he is interested in understanding motion, both celestial and tenestrial : "almost every peculiar attribute of material nature becomes YEE apparent from the peculiarities of its motion from place to place." 1 A key element in understanding motions is to know where they occur-where they begin and end, and where they pass. To gain an understanding of human movements, often one begins by considering where they took place. Not surprisingly, then, history was one of the ends of cartography in the surge of mapmaking that began after the European rediscovery of Ptolem y. Abraham Ortelius, a Renaissance map publisher, called mapmaking the "eye of history."2 The earth, as the poet Samuel Daniel put it, is the "universal map of deeds ." 3 Maps do help us to understand that geography at least contributes to destiny, as in the case of Athens' Sicilian expedition. There is one respect in which modern mapmaking has not followed Ptolemy's instructions. The Geography focuses on mathematical cartography based on measurement. This sort of mapmaking, geographia, is what lent Ptolemy's book its name. But Ptolemy describes another type of mapmaking, one for small areas, chorographia. This type of mapmaking does not require the skills of a mathemati_ian, but those of a painter. The emphasis of geographia is c on the quantitative (to poson). In contrast, the emphasis of chorographia is not on position, but on the quality (to poion) of a place. Ch.orographia is more detailed than geographia: ENERG EIA 45 if geographia presents the entire body, chorograph.ia fo- be lost-features that say something about and often affect cuses on a small area such as the eye . the people living there (see Figures 8 and 9) . Ptolemy does not say much about chorography, but ReBy including a brief mention of chorography in a naissance interpreters all seem to agree that it is meant to manual of mathematical mapmaking, Ptolemy may have be pictorial rather than abstract and geometrical. With the been warning of the limitations of a mathematical approach triumph of mathematics in the natural sciences, pictorial to the world. It is reductive in more ways than one . A maps have become less and less important in mapmaking. " quantitative approach to mapmaking not only regularizes If atlases today include city maps at all, these tend to be the earth's surface, but is also less challenging, less demandplans, which tell little about the architectural character of ing than a qualitative approach. According to Ptolemy, a the places they represent, suggest little about the look of mathematical map can be made by almost anyone. These places. On plans, distinctive local characteristics tend to are the types of maps that are readily available in this newly christened information age. Ptolemy implies that such ease �46 is not characteristic of chorographic, pictorial maps. Modem examples of such maps are hard to find, even in this age of computer-aided design. So there seems to be something to what Ptolemy says . It seems that we should be describing quantitative studies as soft, and qualitative studies as hard. ENDNOTES Almagest 1.1 (Toomer trans.) . Abraham Ortelius, Preface, Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570; English-text edition, London, 1606). 3 Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599), 1. 910. 1 2 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING (all of which have been used here) Dilke, 0 . A. Greek and Roman Maps. 1985; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Untitled Sara Wilson, A '02 YEE Harley, J.B., and David Woodward, eds. The History of Cartography, Vol. 1: Cartography in the Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 . Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 . Osserman, Robert. Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Ptolemaeus, Claudius. Geographia. Ed. C. F. A . Nobbe. 1843-5; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966. (There is a poorly regarded translation by Edward Luther Stevenson available in a Dover reprint.) Snyder, John P . Flattening the Earth.· Two Thousand Years of Map Projections. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Paris, France Rizo Popovic, A 'oo �Selection from On the Sublime: Longinus Greek Translation Prize, 1998-99 La Promenade d'Automne: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore French Translation Prize, 1998-99 Samuel Garcia, A '99 Robert Dickson, A '00 Et6~vm XP~, ¢tA'W/C€, 8ton, KCX8U7t€p K<iV i;9) KOtv~ ~'tV> ou6E:v tmapxst µBycx 06 'tO KCX'tcx¢povstv scrn µf:ycx, oiov 7tAO~'tot nµcxt 60/;m wpcxvvt8sc; KCXt ocm 8~ aA,A,cx Ex€t 7tOAO 'tO 81;m8sv npocri;pcxym8ooµcvov OOK av 't~ ys ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ¢povtµr;I) 8ol;w-,v 'cxycxBa. 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' ' ' ' A ' ' One must know, dearest friend, that, just as in our daily life nothing is truly great which is great to despise, such as riches, honors, reputations, sovereignty, and as many other things which have an exaggerated exterior-nor would one in his right mind deem things to be surpassingly good whose very contempt is good without measure-indeed, one ad0mires those capable of having these things, but through a greatness of soul choose instead to look down upon them, rather than those who have them-just so, must one consider it here, in the case of the elevated in both poetry and prose; one would not have some image of greatness such as that in which many works are artlessly conceived; unfolded differently, these would only prove empty, works which are more fittingly held in contempt than admired. For, our soul is uplifted by true sublimity and, seizing pride at such a height, is filled with both joy and exultation, as if it itself had produced the very thing heard. Whenever, then, something is heard many times by a sensible man; one well acquainted with words and also possessing a greatness of mind, something which neither disposes his soul towards, nor leaves his soul behind in a thought more considered than the word alone, but instead falls, like a visitation, into disesteem, it is no longer true sublimity in so far as its sound did not outlast its utterance. For this, true sublimity, by being great, whose rebellion against is not only difficult, but impossible, for this, the memory is strong and indelible. Speaking generally, consider sublime and truly beautiful those things which please everyone always. For whenever men differing in their pursuits, lifestyles, interests, ages and languages share one and the same opinion, then the verdict and assent from such discord makes our faith in the object of their admiration strong and indisputable. La Promenaded' Automne Te souvient-il, 6 mon ame, 6 ma vie, D'un jour d'automne et pale et languissant? 11 semblait dire un adieu gemissant Aux bois qu'il attristait de sa melancolie. Les oiseaux dans les airs ne chantaient plus l'espoir; Une froide rosee enveloppait leurs ailes, Et, rappelant au nid leurs compagnes fideles, Sur des rameaux sans fleurs ils attendaient le soir. The Autumn Walk Oh soul, oh life, do you remember the day, In autumn, so languid and pale? As if departing, it seemed to bewail The forest it darkened with sorrow to gray. From the birds in the air, no more hope was sung; Their wings by a frozen dew were encased, And, calling their friends to their nesting place, For evening they waited, to barren boughs they clung. Seule, je m'eloignais d'une fete brnyante, Je fuyais tes regards, je cherchais ma raison. Mais la langueur des champs, leur tristesse attrayante, A ma langueur secrete ajoutaient leur poison. Sans but et sans espoir, suivant ma reverie, Je portais au hasard un pas timide et lent; L'Amour m' enveloppa de ton ombre cherie, Et, malgre la saison, l'air me parut brulant. Alone, I withdrew from a noisy herd, I sought my reason, I fled your gaze . But the pastoral languor, its sadness allured My internal languor with poisonous haze. Along with my dreaming, without hope or goal, My slow, timid stroll transformed into toil; Love enshrouded me with your shadowy soul, And in spite of the season, the air seemed to boil. Je voulais, mais en vain, par un effort supreme, En me sauvant de toi, me sauver de moi-meme. Mon ceil voile de pleurs, a la tene attache, Par un charme invincible en fut comme anache. A travers les brouillards, une image legere Fit palpiter mon sein de tendresse et d'effroi; Le soleil reparait, l' environne, 1'eclaire, Il en tr' ouvre les cieux . . . Tu parus devant moi. Je n' osai te parler; interdite, reveuse, Enchainee et soumise a ce h·ouble enchanteur, Je n'osai te parler: pourtantj'etais heureuse; Je devinai ton ame, et j 'entendis mon cceur. As much as I wanted, as hard I tried, it was something I could not do: I sought to save myself from me by saving myself from you. My eye, veiled with tears, to the cold earth bound, By invincible charm was wrought from the ground. My breast started pulsing, with softness and fear As from foggy murk a dim image grew; The sun appears 'round it, makes vision clear, The heavens half-open . .. Before me stood you. I didn't dare address you; confounded and suppressed, Dreaming and submissive underneath your misty spell, I didn't dare address you: I was happy nonetheless; I divined your spirit, I heard my own heart well. Mais quand ta main pressa ma main tremblante, Quand un frisson leger fit tressaillir mon corps, Quand mon front se couvrit d'une rougeur brulante, Dieu! qu'est-ce done que je sentis alors? J'oubliai de te fuir, j'oubliai de te craindre; Pour la premiere fois ta bouche osa se plaindre, Ma douleur a la tienne osa se reveler, Et mon ame vers toi fut prete a s'exhaler! 11 m'en souvient ! T'en souvient-il, ma vie, De ce tourment delicieux, De ces mots arraches a ta melancolie: "Ah! si je souffre, on souffre aux cieux!" But when my trembling hand was by your hand pressed, When my body was shivered by a delicate chill, When a fiery color flushed my face and chest, My God, tell me, what did I feel? You, I forgot to fear; You, I forgot to shun; Complaint for the first time sh·eamed off your tongue, My grief to yours was finally self-revealed, And my soul to you was almost exhaled! I remember it! Do you recall it, my life, This delicious despair, These words in your strife: "They suffer in heaven if I suffer here!" continued on next page �l 50 Des bois nul autre aveu ne troubla le silence. Ce jour fut de nos jours le plus beau, le plus doux; Pret a s 'eteindre enfin il s' arreta sur nous, Et sa fuite a mon creur presagea ton absence! L'ame du monde eclaira notre amour; le vis ses demiers feux mourir sous un nuage; Et dans nos creurs brises, desunis sans retour, II n'en reste plus que l'image. Aidan Dreaming-Elk Karina Hean, A '00 DICKSON The forest said no more to disturb the silence. This was our sweetest, most beautiful day; It finally stopped about us, prepared to die away, And its quick escape foretold to me your absence! The soul of the world made our love bright; Under a cloud I saw the death of its flames; And in our shattered hearts, which could never again unite, No more than their image remains. Vrbnica, Kosovo; June, 1999 Vada Mossavat, A 'oo �Cain and Saul The Men God Rejected Sarah Whitesel, 'O 1 Jf thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin li eth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire and thou shalt rul e over him. (Gen- Each of his failures comes from looking at the people around him to make decisions which ought to be made with his eyes on the Lord alone. The standard for acceptance comes esis, 4:7) down to a recurring image of the orientation of a man 's heart. In I Samuel 10:9, when Saul is anointed, God gives This verse describes the biblical stories of both Cain him another heart. 'Yet even with this reborn spirit, Saul is and Saul. Both men try to serve God as they see best and unable to keep his attention focused upon the Lord. In 13: 14, are rejected. Both are much desired by sin, succumb to its Samuel tells him that he will lose his kingship to a man seduction, and, because of their own failures, seek to pun- after God ' s own heart. That man is David, who is chosen ish others for their successes. Both wander the land in an- because, even as a child, his heart is filled with love and guish, marked so that other men will not slay them. Yet it reverence for God (I Sam. 16:7). Saul falters by misplacing is the conh·ast between these two lives that ultimately al- his priorities. His heart is guided by a fear of and preocculows their similarities to info1m one another. Cain's story pation with men like himself, rather than God's commandrealizes the formula of rejection, sin, and punishment with ment. perfect simplicity. Abel dies, Cain's crime is complete, its Cain and Saul have not done well. They have not earned consequences absolute, with personal reprimands from God God's acceptance. Sin crouches desirously at their doors . at every misstep . In his exile he builds the first city and The dreadful undoing of these men is so much more signififounds a glorious dynasty. Saul's situation is more com- cant than their initial rejections . When reading these texts plex. He sh·ives to kill David several times, each time fail- there is a powerful temptation to justify how Cain and Saul ing, humiliated and repentant until his fury blazes anew. began unworthily, to find a primary reason that will explain With every fresh iniquity, he becomes further seduced by away what follows. We long to justify why an offering of sin, committing progressively more grievous mi sdeeds , the soil deserves rejection. For instance, the harvest of Cain punctuated by tenib le, hopeful moments of pain and re- came from land bearing Adam' s curse . His sown frnit was morse. At last, thoroughly steeped in wre tchedness, having lifeless while Abel's lambs yielded up their breath on God 's lost many battles, his kingdom, and his sons, Saul commits altar. When he kills his brother he spills onto the cursed sui cide. earth the blood that he failed to offer God, now as a sacriThe origins of sin and the possibility of conquering it fice to his wounded vanity. In the same way, Saul was made are the two most important issues in these tales. All we are king for his stature , a soulless value, while David was chogiven in the austere case of the Second Man Alive is that sen for his noble heart, an an imate versus an inanimate virGod "had not respect" unto Cain and his offering (Gen. tue. Saul ' s position as king exists only because God finally 4:5) . His fa ilure is briefly touched upon, mysterious. The relented in disgust to the pleas of the faithless Israelites who disgrace of the First K ing is more complicated. Saul' s fears wanted a powerful human figurehead to lead them in battle. on the battlefield are strnnger than his faith and he offers They desired him as cravenly as sin longs for weakness in sacrifices without waiting for God's prophet, Samuel (I Sam. men; and as the tall, unholy sovereign they had asked fo r, 13). Two chapters later he bows to the will of the people he pandered to their fears instead of ruling over them in the and disobeys Samuel' s order to desh·oy all of the Amalekites name of the Lord. Saul and Cain had to be rejected and and their goods, saving some to burn on God's altar. It once their rejections hav e been explained, their j ea lous seems to be the combination of these errors by which Saul bloodlust that follows dwindles to a vicious mis ery ravenis lost. After the first, Samuel declares that his kingdom ous for other men ' s ruin. will not. continue. After the second, the Lord regrets ever Such explanations of rejection are attempts to sew up making Saul king, Samuel abandons him, David is anointed, the lives that proceed from them with threads of demerit and an evil spirit descends upon Saul. Just as the villainies and necessity . They render the infinite potential for human later engendered by his failure are compounded, so is the strength and frailty in the narrow terms of a balanced equafailure itself. tion. They also gloss over the weight of the choices rejected Both of Saul's misdeeds involve putting immediate, men must constantly make between, on one hand, followworldly concerns before his obedience to and trust in God. ing sin's compelling call which grows louder and louder 1 Guardians, 1998-99 Anne McShane, A 'oo �WHITESEL 54 with each error, and, on the other, the increasingly difficult, but always present, possibility of resisting it. This is particularly important for Saul whose conditions of failure are so detailed. The life that comes afterwards is so indete1mina te that one cannot dismiss him as a man justly and irrevocably lost, possessed by the evil spirit of his own guilt and anger, consumed by an impotent pantomime of malice that he must reenact until he can bear it no more and kills himself. Saul's gradual decay is actually far more sophisticated. In that bitter sinking, he wrestles desperately with his corruption, calamitously choosing sin more often than God. For Saul and Cain, in narrative and psychological te1ms, rejection is an instigative engine. Without dictating what their reactions will be, it is the condition of pain which calls for an answering choice. Cain's immediate response to rejection is a scowl, the loss of self-control. Unable to accept that he has not been accepted, his ungoverned countenance falls "wroth" (Gen. 4:5), wounded and defiant. Then God makes the crucial speech cited at the beginning of this essay: And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire and thou shalt rule over him. (Gen. 4:6-7) This warning makes explicitly clear that his rejection is just. Cain cannot have done well and receiving even such a painfully true judgment is no cause for anger, exactly because it is true . This is enough. This is all. Perhaps Cain should have known better or perhaps God could have respected his offering for its earnest submission. Neither of these possibilities matter once they are no longer possible. The thing now at stake is Cain's future acceptance or corruption. The only significant reflections he can make are those that apply to doing well now, as opposed to the bitter attempts at justification which prevent him from moving beyond the past. Outrage against truth, the determination to challenge and transform the hurtful verdict, seeking other people to blame and punish-making the destruction of their wellbeing the cure for one's own despair-these seem to be the streaming lights of weakness summoning sin to the door of a man who has failed. In this speech God acknowledges for the first time how vulnerable man can be to sin- that wickedness actually lies in wait, lusting after him. Never before has a man been tempted as the result of a previous misstep. Juxtaposed with this peril is the possibility of subjugating that iniquity . Cain may still master his sin. "Thou shalt rnle over him." It is framed almost as a declaration, promise, or command. Man is not to be the passive victim of his own weakness, rendered defenseless by pain and anger. Failure may bring man closer to evil but it remains in his power not merely to resist sin, but to conquer it. Anger is very clearly sin's access point to Saul as well. Until he tastes fury, Saul is not drawn to sin. After the failures that cause him to lose his kingship and the favor of God, Saul listens penitently as Samuel upbraids him. His countenance is meek and abashed . He accepts God's judgment and asks for forgiveness. One of the most poignant moments in Saul's life occurs in his final hours with Samuel. The elderly prophet has just ripped Saul's royal cloak to signify how his kingdom will be torn from his hands. Samuel, who made Saul king , must soon abandon and mourn him. This point marks the culmination of Saul's failures and he asks Samuel, "Tum again with me that I may worship the Lord thy God" (I Sam. 15). Although Saul is broken and alone, having lost his throne and God's counsel, it is still possible for him to look to God. He knows what penalties he has earned and accepts the Lord's judgment. Until he becomes jealous of David's glory and anger kindles within his breast, Saul, with all of his inadequacies , has still chosen God. Back in Genesis, one verse after he is cautioned by the Lord, "Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him." In Cain's simple narrative, rejection, anger, and envy climax in sin. But what exactly is Cain's sin? Is it fratricide? There are still no commandments, no prohibitions against murder. Abel is the first man ever to die. Human mortality, one of the curses of Adam's fall, has just entered the world and it is wrought by sin rather than nature. Is Cain's crime attempting to deceive God? Abel's blood cries out from the ground, from the earth cursed by Adam, from the land where Cain raised his unfortunate offering. When asked where his brother is, Cain naively and clumsily dissembles, "Am I my brother's keeper?" offering the Lord a flippant and defiant answer (Gen. 4:9). God's own asking implies that even God must gage Cain's understanding of what he has done. There is no reason to assume that befo e he kills his brother, Cain comprehends that men 's lives must end or that other men can end them. He has some knowledge of good and evil from the error of his parents-enough to realize that what he has done is wrong and to speak of it disingenuously to God. Does Cain's fault lie in claiming an office of God? The Lord's jealousy of his own authority has already been evidenced in Eden. Propitiating wrath has the flavor, if not the character, of justice. Is Cain's crime a sorry parody of God-establishing his own pathetic pride in the place of divine judgment, dispensing life and death in his defective way? Or does he try to punish the Lord by destroying the man God has blessed? This account hardly seems adequate. Cain's brutality is neither intelligent nor controlled enough to be worthy of the name of judgment. All of these things, brother murder, deceit, and the presumption to God's power, are merely peripheral evils blos- 55 E NERGEIA soming from the actual sin of Cain. The essential nature of Cain's-and later Saul's-sin is really an unwillingness to accept the Lord's initial judgment, which brings them to violate the intimacy of each's relationship with God. Cain and Saul both en in believing that what lies between God and other men can somehow become part of their own dynamic. Cain has disregarded God's explicit warning. The Lord ' s respect for Abel's sacrifice is no more connected to Cain's rejection than David's triumphs are the result of Saul's decline. Their jealous anger comes from a failure of personal responsibility. Their misbegotten and misplaced feelings of rage and jealousy become violence. This inappropriate connecting of blame fosters the false idea that killing another man could possibly amend or assuage the pain of their original failures . Saul is able to bear his disgrace until his tortured soul lays it beside David's honor. His fatal purpose is born as the people sing, "Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands" (I Sam. 18 :7) . Then, with the evil spirit upon him, filled with guilt and anger, Saul rises up and tries to slay David. However, the Lord is with David and the javelin misses its target (I Sam. 18: 11). Then in the hopes that David will fall in combat, Saul offers the young man his daughter's hand in marriage on the condition that he twice defeat and collect a hundred Philistine foreskins. The pitiful king conh·ives an accidental escape fr~m his will to sin, but the plot fails and David is victorious (I Sam. 18: 17-27). Saul endeavors to avoid his wicked purpose but will not relinquish the bitterness that goads him forward. In chapter 19, when Jonathan speaks in defense of David, Saul hearkens to his righteous cause and swears his first oath to respect David's life. However, as soon as the evil spirit returns to him, his anger and guilt recalled, Saul hurls another ill-aimed jav~in at David before he flees and Saul's pursuit begins. At this point, the simple (Cain's) and complex (Saul's) stories diverge; one moves while the other tangles . Abel is dead. Cain 's m alice is brought to complete fruition and God renders Cain's sentence (Gen. 4:11-12). He is cursed by the ea1ih into which he poured his brother's blood, may no longer till the soil nor reap its harvest, and must wander in barren exile. To soothe his fears, Cain is given a protective mark that caITies sevenfold vengeance for any man who would slay him, a mark to shield him from becoming the victim of a crime like his own . As Cain has dearly learned, and Saul will later recognize, it is necessary that the right of judgment and punishment belong to the Lord alone. So Cain roams away, far from the presence of God, where he builds the first city and sires a family ingenious in music and metalwork that flourishes for many generations. That is the end of Cain's story. Saul's murderous efforts cannot be completely analyzed without also considering his wandering, since it is the pursuit of his lethal fury that drives Saul to vagabondage. Just as Cain was condemned to rove, hidden from God's face , Saul too suffers the affliction of a fugitive as the price of his sin. He flees before his guilt and anger. He runs to lay the bloated burden of his failures on another man ' s head . Saul makes two more bloodthirsty expeditions in search of David, and, with each new resolution to plunge back into wickedness, Saul commits graver and graver atrocities. The second time Jonathan speaks in David's defense, Saul attempts to kill his own son by casting yet another poorly aimed javelin (I Sam. 20:33). He orders the slaughter of the priests who gave David food and armor and then commands the execution of their entire city (I Sam. 22). His next predatory foray brings him into the wilderness of Ziph and Maon, but David proves elusive and Saul must cut short his hunt to repel a Philistine attack (I Sam. 23 ). In the following two pursuits, God almost seems to be mocking Saul's dete1mination to satiate his rage. Saul assembles three thousand men and marches to the wilderness ofEngedi where he immediately makes camp and falls asleep in a cave in which David and his men lie concealed (I Sam. 24). David cuts Saul's robe but spares his life , refusing to raise his hand against the Lord's anointed. In the succeeding pursuit, Saul returns to the wilderness of Ziph where he chased David once before. The Lord covers Saul and his host with a deep sleep. David easily enters his camp and takes Saul's spear as a trophy and evidence of the respect he has shown the anointed of the Lord (I Sam. 26). Saul, like Cain, has a protective mark, only for Saul the value of the mark is bluned. It preserves his life each time the Lord delivers him into David's hands, except this protection carries with it an intense humiliation. The noble mercy of his intended victim compounds Saul's already monstrous shame. It is unclear whether God means for Saul's anointing to keep him safe. David, not God, declares his respect for Saul's status. The Lord simply delivers Saul defenseless into the hands of his enemy over and over again . David's anointment doesn't prevent Saul from trying to kill him. Perhaps David is being tested and Saul is genuinely in peril. Perhaps he is safe, made ridiculous by his inability either to kill or be killed. Either way, this mark of anointment, originally a blessing upon Saul, has become the mark of Cain, a testament to his cursed failure. In Genesis 4:7, God cautions Cain that failure will make him desired by and vulnerable to sin, and promises the po·tential for still ruling over that weakness and conquering the temptation to further abasement. It is still possible to do well and win acceptance . For Saul, the key to this acceptance lies in the living example of David. When David confronts Saul, after each double deliverance (Saul into David's hands and David sparing Saul), his words apply to the wretched king's entire life: The Lord judge between thee and me bur mine hand shall not be upon thee. As saith the proverb of the an- �WHITESEL 56 cients, wickedness proceedeth from the wicked : but mine hand sha ll not be upon thee. After whom is the king of Israe l come out? after whom dost thou pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea. The Lord therefore be judge and judge between thee and me, and see, and plead my cause, and deliver me out of thine hand . (I Sam. 24: 12-15) David places judgement in the hands of the Lord and submits his will to that judgement. Of the biblical proverbs, there are three that David might be paraphrasing (Proverbs 11 :15, 13:6, and 26:26). All of them describe how wicked actions undermine their perpetrators , just as each of Saul's misdeeds increase his rapacious appetite for sin. David understands how every offense disposes a soul to further evil. The power of sin is a desire, a negativity, a yearning. Mastery of sin lies in resisting that compulsion. David' s relationship with God is perfectly intact, a fortress many leagues away from sin. This completeness, this safety make it impossible for him to sympathize with or even comprehend Saul's anguished jealousy. When David cannot understand why Saul finds any meaning in chasing after him, like hunting for "a dead dog, a flea," his speech portrays a man so secure that he is almost incapable of entering into this aching world~ David may be secure, but David has never failed . It seems impossible that Saul and Cain could simply tum their eyes to God, regardless of their flawed histories. Wouldn't such callous progress really constitute the dismissal of God's judgement? The answer appears paradoxical. By concentrating on the vindications and vengeance that would unmake his failure, a man amplifies its results, arousing the event in his sh-uggle to tame it. A wroth countenance cultivates a disposition to sin. There are three ways in which a man might respond to rejection and only one of them makes him stronger against iniquity . He might try to forget the disaster and move on, accept it and move on, or clutch hold of it and let his bitterness fester. The first is not really an option because the impact of rejection is undeniable and any attempt to void its tneaning could only lead to deeper enor. The third response is an invitation to sin. In this context, moving beyond each failure without trying to deny its consequences and returning to God-with the understanding that there is no effective alternative-is the real hallmark of respect and reconciliation that drives sin away from one's door. When he puts aside his anger and listens to Jonathan's first intercession, Saul resolves to change. However, he does not rule over sin for long and this promise is soon broken. In the wilderness of Engedi, faced with David's integrity and having come so close to death, Saul acknowledges his enemy's righteousness and swears to end his wicked quest. He concedes David' s right of succession to his throne and David pledges to preserve Saul's descendants. After breaking this second oath and encountering David again in the forest of Ziph, Saul repents once more. Even David's diction recalls the slaying of Abel when he entreats Saul, "Let not my blood fall to the face of the earth" (I Sam. 26:20). Saul recognizes his own error, "I have sinned ... behold, I have played the fool and erred exceedingly" (I Sam. 26:21 ). David is able to redirect Saul's gaze to God for brief interludes in which Saul, having acknowledged his guilt, is relieved and conscious of his potential to do well and conquer sin. After each contrition, Saul's wandering is permitted to end. Both apologies are followed by Saul returning home . Yet Saul continually loses his inte1mittent sovereignty over sin. His gaze always falls back to the figures of his oym guilt and anger and the man gloriously before him. This may be because he is continually led aright by David's words, rather than forging his own independent reconciliation with God. It is only in the presence of his external compulsion, the human object sought by his sin, that Saul is able to repent. Just as David's harp soothed away Saul's evil spirit in their early days, so David's virtue mends him at moments in their confrontations. It is as if David's voice has become the only one that Saul can hear-even Jonathan's ~annot reach him anymore . The only person able to penetrate his fixation is its object, just as the Lord might succor one who looked upon him. Thus, though God no longer answers Saul, God is no longer what Saul seeks or craves . Saul does not ask the witch of Endor to raise Samuel 's spirit so that he may ask how to serve God well. He rouses the dead prophet hoping to receive the reassurance in battle that he deservedly lost, committing a new sin in search of a promise that the penalty of his old sins may fall more lightly (I Sam. 28) . It is no wonder Samuel declares the Lord to be Saul ' s enemy: for Saul, in his weakness before sin, has chosen to be the enemy of the Lord. David helps him to tum to God, but only Saul's own sustained resolution could have held him on that path. His repeated assurances and oaths, while sincere, are shortlived. David knows this and flees to the land of the Philistines after their second encounter because he mistrusts Saul's ability to keep h\s promises. Though genuinely wretched each time he glimpses at what he has become, Saul throws away this insight over and over when he chooses instead to slake his iniquity and avoid the fact of his rejection. Since God will not permit the harming of David, there are only two ways for Saul to halt his descent. He must either truly abandon his obsession or die . The latter fate is how his sin ultimately ends. Just as Samuel prophesied, the next day the Lord delivers the host of the Israelites into the hands of the Philistines. The battle turns overwhelmingly against Saul. The arrows of his enemies sorely wound him. All three of his sons are slain. He entreats his armorbearer to kill him that he might not fall into the hands of his foes, but the servant refuses . Saul falls upon his own sword . EN ERG EI A These two lives have such different final acts. Cain builds a city. His ending is also a beginning. Saul falls on his sword. His situation doesn't close with either of the conditions, renunciation or murder, that could have fully concluded it. Saul spends his reign wavering, suffering between these two opposed states, and his death only reinforces this limbo. His tale is complete, not because it actually resolves, but because the possibility for any closure dies with him. So where does the distinction between these stories begin? Cain killed Abel. Saul was never able to kill David. As a result, Cain's sin was fulfilled and discrete. Punishment clearly followed . It is this crucial difference that makes Cain simultaneously more fortunate and more miserable than Saul. Like the farmer he is, Cain sows and reaps his sin. He is more fortunate than Saul in that this fru)tion, this crime as irrevocable as his rejection, brings him to accept his chastisement and the history that caused it. Cain crosses over his sin and moves beyond it. He is never forgiven, never reverses the meaning of his past, but assumes its weight and makes that burden a foundation for his future accomplishments. Cain succeeds, not because his sin at last proves acceptable, but because he relinquishes the belief that it could ever be made so. He is more miserable than Saul in that, despite God's warning, he never even dimly admits the possibility of ruling over his sin until it is too late and he is a murderer . Saul's position is more ambiguous, his struggle more complex. Sin and punishment are intricately entwined for him. His castigation is the escalating product of his sin. Cain does not work past his wickedness until it is realized. It is as though Cain must pass through his sin bef~re he is able to abandon it. Saul is unable to commit the crime that might help him make such a passage . The first king sees the innocent alternative to his evil, the repudiation of his unconsummated malice, but this resolution never holds sway for long over his wrath. Yet, although Saul cannot take credit for his repeated deliverance from error, he does not kill the man he hates and therefore never loses the possibility of renouncing his ter-ible purpose forever. So Saul and Cain are never doomed by their previous evils . Although every descent makes Saul a more cherished object of sin's yearning, increasingly vulnerable to choosing deeper wickedness, there is always the possibility of turning aside and conquering sin. The potential for re- 57 demption is always present. Saul proves that dishonor is neither a direct nor inevitable fall. Rather, he welds a sinuous chain of causality-his descent is causal, but not deterministic . His weakness nourishes his corruption, corruption weakens him but this only means that it becomes more difficult, but never impossible, for Saul to break free . Every link, every crime, draws the next one nearer, but only because Saul fails to sustain his resistance and pursues the siren song of sin, forging his own shackles . This is emphasized by Saul's periodic epiphanies when, however briefly, he huly repents and promises to change. For that moment he recognizes that such a choice is possible . Cain and Saul look to the mundane context sunounding them to resolve their own struggles over serving God. Unless such a man claims personal responsibility, unless he assumes self-control and the sense of exclusive and absolute accountability to God, he cannot conquer sin ' s desiring. Sin supine at one's door is the characterization of unfortunate proximity to something external, to a lure from the realm beyond its prey's concerns. This image delineates the ties to and pressures from circumstances foreign to one's situation. Both men judge themselves reactively from within such a context. This meager, mortal perspective constantly fabricates false relevance between itself and other people, refusing to accept responsibility for the choices it pursues among the fibers of this web. Cain and Saul evaluate their failures before God in terms of other men ' s successes. It is so easy to sympathize with Cain because one immediately misunderstands the same thing he does, that is, why he should kill Abel, a response which clearly cannot address the source of his misery. It is the way in which both men misconstrue and react inappropriately to their original errors that makes them vicious, not some necessary product of the original enors themselves. For this reason, sin is never justified by the events that precede it. Saul and Cain's awful conclusions that murder might assuage rejection stem from their denials of God's judgement. They do not realize that, for God, their failure is irrevocably over. Its consequences are immutably set. There is no cause for anger. If they do well, they shall be accepted. The painful severity of such a firm ending is what make~ choice and change possible at all. In this finality lies the p~ssibility of redemption, human freedom through divine justice . �Elephantine Island Karin Ekholm, A '00 Gjinovce, Kosovo; July, 1999 Vada Mossavat, A '00 �ENERGEIA The Importance, to Consciousness, of the Discovery of Self Piroska Kopar, A '99 In the Phenom enology ofSpirit, Hegel introduces a new, revolutionary way of understanding both the world and philosophy. He does not follow the traditional route of presenting an argument with an extensive commentary in its defense, or the even older method of Plato's dialogues; nor does he merely record some selected facts, like a historian. Instead, Hegel invites us into a theatre- the theatre of philosophy. He asks us to take a seat in the front row and let him show us a play in which we can see all the phases of our cultural and philosophical evolution. He takes it upon himself to narrate the play in the order that will reveal the necessary logical progression of the different scenes. Let this play be called The Becoming of Spirit.' We philosophers are not used to such peculiarities; we want to know the truth, and we want to know it now. According to Hegel, our impatience is understandable, but unacceptable; the evolution of truth takes time, and it is only at the right time that our minds are prepared to take in the truth. In the Preface, Hegel claims that his time is the birth-time of Spirit, or of Truth (11). 2 The time, then, is right for us to step off the stage of philosophy, and look at it from the outside, with the eyes of a viewer and not those of a participant. Only thus will we be able to see the truth in its progression and comprehend it as a whole. It is essential that we keep the distinction between viewer and participant perfectly clear throughout this exposition. The participant, or the main character on the stage, is the consciousness of the Universal Individual. The consciousness of the Universal Individual is the consciousness of all human beings past and present, joined together. Its being is superimposed on the individuals of the world, and its development overarches all cultural progress. The transformation of the Universal Individual begins with the primary form of consciousness and is completed with its final maturity. The viewer of Hegel's theatre is the student of his philosophy. He is a very advanced participant who is ready to step off the stage and whose testimony will earn him the last step in the development of consciousness. He has already been through most of the transfo1mation, and is at the stage in which he can proceed only if he steps down and observes. While the participating Consciousness sees everything subjectively, the audience takes an objective point of view. By the end of the play, the viewer will have seen who he himself is, generated by the truths that he carries within his consciousness. He will then know that he knows, and this knowledge will elevate him to become the com- pletely transformed Consciousness, or Spirit. "The goal is Spirit's insight into what knowing is" (29) . But why should we commit ourselves to become students of Hegel? What would convince us that his play might reveal Truth to us? Do we even have the capability of seeing the truth? Hegel addresses this question in the Introduction: Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? It presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of truth. (74) Hegel reasons that we should have no scruples about suspending our disbelief in our abilities, because the kind of knowledge that we are investigating is phenomenal knowledge. Consciousness knows its object, as the object is present for Consciousness. What this means is that the object of our investigation is our knowledge of the object. It is nevertheless a true knowledge, because the object is for Consciousness. If the object were in essence something else, Consciousness would never have any knowledge of it. The nature of this phenomenological knowledge will become clearer as we examine it in the context of the actual transformation . Consciousness, in its most primary form, is made up of two moments. "The immediate existence of Spirit, consciousness, contains the two moments of knowing and the objectivity negative to knowing" (36) . The first moment corresponds to what Consciousness knows of its object. The second moment corresponds to the knowledge that Consciousness has of its own knowledge of the object. At the outset of the play, then, the protagonist is the immediate, yet undeveloped, form of Consciousness; he is natural Consciousness. Now consciousness contains two moments : knowing and objectivity. Imagine that the actor portraying consciousness enters in a white costume, and starts to examine an object on the stage . This corresponds to the first moment, to knowing. No sooner does he begin his examination, however, when a figure, of the same shape and size but wearing a black costume steps out from behind him to one side, and starts examining the first actor in his 61 examination of the object. Here the object for Conscious- cess, a circle that repeats again and again. It is, nevertheness is its own self, which in the first moment was a subject. less, more than a pure formalism, because the completion This corresponds to the moment of objectivity; this is when of each circle invariably depends on the content to which Consciousness is aware of the fact that it knows something one applies this method. As the content determines the about an object. outcome of the cycle, and the contents may be varied indefiBut both of these moments evidently lie within Con- nitely, the dialectical movement is an ever-changing, dysciousness. The immature, yet undeveloped, Consciousness namic, vital experience. is not aware of this. It thinks that what it takes to be the Hegel writes in the Preface, "it must be maintained that case about its object is indeed the case. But in reality it truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed finds this is not trne, because when Consciousness com- ready-made. Nor is there such a thing as the false .. ." (39). pares what it knows of the object with the criterion pro- We, the spoiled children of mathematical thinking, need vided by its own self, it keeps discovering contradictions in some convincing of the superiority of such a conception of its knowledge of the object. It therefore enters on a path huth. Dogmatic systems (including mathematics) are dethat Hegel calls the "pathway of doubt, or more precisely . . fective, because they are based on a few principles from . the way of despair," which will constitute the learning which the sequence of the propositions do not follow in a experience of Consciousnes's (78). necessary order. Their arrangement is not a strict succesOn this road, whenever Consciousness attains a new sion; the order of arriving at them may be varied to our truth, it removes another one of its veils. Consciousness liking. In addition, the result of a proposition, the very manages to get behind the object by tr·ansf01ming its own point of it, is complete Iy detached from the body of the propounderstanding of it. All of the same veils are also present sition: we can prove a proposition in countless different ways. in the object, but it is only for Consciousness that they ex- . These systems therefore cannot justify their principles. This hibit themselves as obstacles of the development. The ob- kind of science can indeed supply us with the answers to ject contains all the phases of the logical progression of the practical questions of everyday life, but it is unable to Consciousness, not as its own logical progression, but as penetrate into the deeper realm of truth where everything is simple truths. While on stage, however, Consciousness does dependent upon everything else, and where the end result not recognize its own alteration; it believes that it is actu- contains everything that is true within it (42-44). We are ally removing the veils of the object. This subjective knowl- therefore in need of a method that will provide a system edge will become objective knowledge once we understand that is organized according to necessity. This method is the what Consciousness has learned on this road. Once we see dialectical movement. the veils that Consciousness removes from itself in their In the particular case of the metamorphosis of Contrue light, our knowledge will also present itself in its full sciousness, the dialectical movement begins with the first truth. truth Consciousness discovers. Consciousness now tries to Before we examine this process more closely, we must hold fast to this as the ultimate huth. But soon Consciousunderstand the nature of truth in this play. For Hegel, the ness recognizes that its huth cannot be the ultimate tmth, True is the whole, or the Absolute. because it does not include the opposite of the first truth within it. The first truth cannot said to be the Absolute, The True is the whole. But the whole is nothin g other because it cannot account for the existence of its opposite . than the essence co nsummati ng itself through its develThe quest of Consciousness for the Absolute huth must conopment. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentinue. Since its first truth has proven to be untrue, Contially a result, that only the end is what truly is; and that sciousness takes its opposite to be hue. Naturally, this will precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, give rise to the same problem that arose in the case of the subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. (20) first truth. The second truth cannot be the Absolute, beFor Hegel, the ultimate truth can only be the Absolute that cause it does not contain the first truth within it, since it is contains the truth of the entire development in itself. A . its direct opposite. Consciousness, thus defeated in its attempt to find huth blooming red rose is a fragile, green bud before it opens its in its second object, returns to its first truth. It rea lizes, petals to the sun. Its final beauty is the result of all the phases of its growth; the flower carries their truth within it. however, that to avoid having to switch its objects again, it The hue result is the developed flower that contains, but must find a new truth in its first object. It in fact discovers supersedes, its first truth, the bud. To access a truth of this that the second truth gave determination to the first huth: it kind, we have to follow a progression, a movement, to which defined the way in which the first truth was defective. The Hegel often refers as the dialectical movement, or a simple third, new truth for Consciousness is created out of the union reflection. The method of the dialectical movement is the of the first two truths. For its third truth, Consciousness principle of all of Hegel's philosophy. It is a three-step pro- invents an object in which both of the first truths are necessarily brought together. In the third truth the contradiction �62 of the first two moments is no longer an opposition, but a distinction. This completes a cycle of the dialectic.al movement and a scene of the play. In terms of the actors on the stage, the play should continue from where it left off: the two moments of consciousness portrayed by two different actors . But Consciousness, just because it is in essence a unity, cannot remain thus alienated from itself, so it returns into itself. On the stage, we see the actor in the black costume stepping behind the first actor. But the first actor now changes completely: his size, his shape, his figure have become completely different, and his costume is half-black and half-white. Consciousness thus returned into itself contains both of its moments; it is the whole movement. Hegel calls the three huths of the dialectical movement the three moments. On stage, the three moments conespond to the three actors. The first moment is always the initial truth for Consciousness; the second is its negation, or its opposite; the third moment is a creation of Consciousness that necessitates the existence of the first two moments as distinct. This, of course, is still only the empty form of the dialectical movement that will be filled with specific content once the transformation begins. From our seat in the audience, we see that in fact the third moment is a deeper tJ.uth in Consciousness, because it necessitates the first two moments . Each time a cycle of the dialectical mCYVement is completed, Consciousness reaches a truth that, because it includes all the previous moments, is closer to the Absolute. Whenever Consciousness uncovers a defect in its truth, it starts a new cycle of the dialectical movement or begins a new scene of the play. The movement is initiated qy what is missing in the object of Consciousness, and is driven by the necessity for a truth that encompasses the whole. The quest can end only when Consciousness discovers an object that satisfies this desire . Only the Absolute can put an end to this movement that is set in m~tion by what is lacking, or the negative . "Notion" is the name of this moving negative, and "Logic" is the organizer of this movement. But Notion, because it displays the defect of the previous moment, is also a form of knowledge . Logic is what guides Consciousness in the direction that will compensate for the defect of the previous moment. Logic is what dictates to Consciousness the character of the new object to which it can appeal for the solution of a contradiction. Consciousness, thus driven by the Notion in the direction indicated by Logic, continues its exhaustive search for the Absolute. I shall now give a brief description of the first two chapters of the Phenomenology, in preparation for considering the third chapter, which will constitute the core of this essay. Kor AR S ENSE-CERTAINTY Consciousness steps on stage and is instantly astounded by the richness of the world. What is the first experience Consciousness is likely to have upon encountering an object in the world? An object appears to Consciousness unexpectedly, and it overwhelms Consciousness with its presence. Consciousness wants to seize the object as it finds it, just as it is "now" and "here." But how can Consciousness possibly say what it sees "now" and "here"? By the time it does so, the truth of its claims will vanish. Consciousness immediately faces a new "now" and a new "here" of whose content is quite different from what it was a second ago. In fact, Consciousness itself changes from one moment to the next. Consciousness tries to say what its first "now" and first "here" were, but it cannot. Instead, it points out the moments, but even pointing out takes time. Thus Consciousness learns that its object is not the particular that it fa ces at any one moment, but the universal that is indifferent to the specific contents of the "now"s and "here"s. P ERCEPTION Ever since Consciousness stumbled upon its obj ect it has been trying to grasp the truth of it. Sense-Certainty failed to do this : its object slipped away from it. At the stage of Perception, Consciousness fa ces the obj ect not in its living immediacy, but as a thing. Perception has given up on defining the object in terms of the "now" and "here ;" it wants to describe its obj ect, the thing . In the process of description, however, there arises an antithesis. The thing, on the one hand, is a "One": it can be distinguished from another thing. On the other hand, the thing is a "Many" : it can be described in terms of its color, shape, size, and so forth . For example, if I talk about a book, I am talking about this book here; it is one thing. On the other hand, this book is small, and blue, and bo x-shaped; it has many different properties . These properties do not seem to affect each other; in fact, each seems indifferent to others. The book is blue and also small, and also box-shaped. But if they do not affect each other at all, how can this book be distinguished from another thing? It seems that the properties must demarcate the boundaries of the thing. But if they are definitive properties, what allows me to talk of them independently? Percep tion alternately makes the obj ect and Consciousness itselfresponsible for the "oneness" and the "manyness" of its object. To avoid contradiction, it posits the object as the cause of "oneness," and Consciousness as the cause of the "manyness," and then it reverses its position. But as a consequence of positing alternating truths in the same place, Consciousness is unable to find a way to grasp both of these huths simultaneously. Instead, it introduces the "sophistJ.·y of in-so-fars"(130). Hegel equates this activity of Percep- ENERGEIA tion with sound common sense. The thing is "Many" inso-far as it is in itself, but "One" in-so-far as it is conh·asted with other things. As a "One" the thing is a unity, as a "Many" it holds the distinguishing qualities of the object, or it gives the object "determinateness." But it is through its "determinateness" that the object preserves itself. This means, then, that the thing preserves itself through its outside opposition: the thing has its essential being in another thing. But to have the essence of a thing outside of the thing is absurd! Perception can see the tmth of a single moment, but is unable to see the object as the entire movement of the different moments. It holds fast to the idea that its object is a real, sensuous thing, and is unable to give up the solidity, the "thinghood" of its object. Not being able to justify the antithesis concerning its essence, it must give up the object itself. 63 moments of the "One" and the "Many" not as opposites, but as two aspects of the same thing. Such an object is Force. When we think of Force we conceive of a unity, but at the same time, it is impossible to imagine a particular force without opposition. The principle ofN.ewton's Third Law of Motion seems appropriate here: To every action there is always an opposed and equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. ( 13 )3 Force necessarily implies two, but as a cause, it is taken to · be one. It is important to note that "Force" here is a primarily intellectual result. It is that object of Consciousness that fulfills the need to be a "One" but which creates the "Many." Force is therefore the solution to the problem of PerFORCE AND THE UND ERSTANDI NG ception. Force itself is one object, but in action, it must This brings us to the main topic of our examination: split up into many; that is to say, there is never only one the section on Force and the Understanding. Why is it nec- force . Forces are always acting against one another, and it essary to go on to this phase? How does this phase of con- is forces in this state that Hegel calls "Force expressed." sciousness differ from, and accomplish more than the pre- The different fo rces that we detect in action are now what vious ones? One thing is readily apparent: as a result of used to be the contradictory moments of Perception, the this chapter Consciousness becomes Self-consciousness. By "One" and the "Many." But the one concept that is behind the end of this phase, the obj ect of Consciousness will have the acting forces as their cause is what Hegel calls "Force changed into itself; it will be a Consciousness that knows proper. " The same inherent necessity that revealed Force to be itself to be Consciousness. This suggests that in the course the new truth of consciousness is what brings about the fa ilof inves tigating the truth about the wo rld, we find it in ourse lves; in some sense we become one with trnth. Ag ain, ure of this new huth. This plot complication comes about when Consciousness realizes that since Force is essentially Hegel claims that this pro gression is a logical necessity. both of its aspects, the distinction that Consc iousness has Perception has failed, but the obj ect is still in front of Consciousness. In giving up the object, Consciousness can- made between its two forms is mere ly its own distinc tion ; it not ignore what is physically present before it, so it starts is a distinction in thought (1 36). Consc iousness sees that on the only available path: it lets go, not of the obj ect, but of both of the moments of Force, "Force expressed" and "Force the object as a thing, or of its thinghood. Consciousness proper," are essentially forces; it is therefore impossible to cannot hold that a concrete thing could be essentially a make a distinction with respect to their essence, or content. What is the significance of this failure? Let us recall "Many" and also a "One ." As a result of the fa ilure of perthat the moments that are here exhibited as th e "Force excep tion, Consc iousness now thinks of its object, because it rea lizes that it is poss ible to hold the contradictory moments pressed" and "Force proper," are the transformed moments of the "One" and the "Many." But the "One" was the obj ect's together in thought. "in-itself," or how it was perceived by itself; it was th e " inHegel now begins to discuss the new obj ect of Consciousness that is such a thought: Force enters the stage. ner" essence of the obj ect. The "Many" was exactly the Why is Force the next phase of the development? How is opposite of this. It was the obj ect' s "being-for-another,'' as Force a solution to the problem of Perception? Conscious- it was in conh'ast to other things, or its "outer" esse nce. ness was confronted with a conti·adiction. Were Conscious- Since the distinction turns out to be one of thought alone ness to stop at this point, it would be forc ed to admit that it and not one of content, these two essences become the same fo und no truth in its obj ect. A contradiction is simply not thing: there is now no difference between "outer" and " inacceptable as an end, fo r Truth must be a One. Conscious- ner." If Force falls short of accounting for the distinction of ness needs to create the third moment of this cycle of the outer and inner, it does not solve the problem of Perception . dialectical movement. It needs to find a truth that will ne- Force would then not be the one object that necessarily crecessitate the existing contradiction, not as a contradiction, ates two. The disappearance of this distinction deprives Force but as a distinction. That is to say, Consciousness needs to of any claim it might have laid to the title of the Absolute: find an underlying cause that will result in the two distinct �62 of the first two moments is no longer an opposition, but a distinction. This completes a cycle of the dialectic.al movement and a scene of the play. In terms of the actors on the stage, the play should continue from where it left off: the two moments of consciousness portrayed by two different actors. But Consciousness, just because it is in essence a unity, cannot remain thus alienated from itself, so it returns into itself. On the stage, we see the actor in the black costume stepping behind the first actor. But the first actor now changes completely: his size, his shape, his figure have become completely different, and his costume is half-black and half-white. Consciousness thus returned into itself contains both of its moments; it is the whole movement. Hegel calls the three truths of the dialectical movement the three moments. On stage, the three moments conespond to the three actors . The first moment is always the initial truth for Consciousness; the second is its negation, or its opposite; the third moment is a creation of Consciousness that necessitates the existence of the first two moments as distinct. This, of course, is still only the empty form of the dialectical movement that will be filled with specific content once the transformation begins . From our seat in the audience, we see that in fact the third moment is a deeper truth in Consciousness, because it necessitates the first two moments. Each time a cycle of the dialectical mO'Vement is completed, Consciousness reaches a truth that, because it includes all the previous moments, is closer to the Absolute . Whenever Consciousness uncovers a defect in its truth, it starts a new cycle of the dialectical movement or begins a new scene of the play. The movement is initiated qy what is missing in the object of Consciousness, and is driven by the necessity for a truth that encompasses the whole. The quest can end only when Consciousness discovers an object that satisfies this desire . Only the Absolute can put an end to this movement that is set in m~tion by what is lacking, or the negative. "Notion" is the name of this moving negative, and "Logic" is the organizer of this movement. But Notion, because it displays the defect of the previous moment, is also a form of knowledge . Logic is what guides Consciousness in the direction that will compensate for the defect of the previous moment. Logic is what dictates to Consciousness the character of the new object to which it can appeal for the solution of a contradiction. Consciousness, thus driven by the Notion in the direction indicated by Logic, continues its exhaustive search for the Absolute. I shall now give a brief description of the first two chapters of the Phenomenology, in preparation for considering the third chapter, which will constitute the core of this essay. KOPAR SENSE-CERTAINTY Consciousness steps on stage and is instantly astounded by the richness of the world. What is the first experience Consciousness is likely to have upon encountering an object in the world? An object appears to Consciousness unexpectedly, and it overwhelms Consciousness with its presence. Consciousness wants to seize the object as it finds it, just as it is "now" and "here." But how can Consciousness possibly say what it sees "now" and "here"? By the time it does so, the truth of its claims will vanish. Consciousness immediately faces a new "now" and a new "here" of whose content is quite different from what it was a second ago. In fact, Consciousness itself changes from one moment to the next. Consciousness tries to say what its first "now" and first "here" were, but it cannot. Instead, it points out the moments, but even pointing out takes time. Thus Consciousness learns that its object is not the particular that it faces at any one moment, but the universal that is indifferent to the specific contents of the "now"s and "here"s. PERCEPTION Ever since Consciousness stumbled upon its object it has been trying to grasp the truth of it. Sense-Certainty failed to do this: its object slipped away from it. At the stage of Perception, Consciousness faces the object not in its living immediacy, but as a thing. Perception has given up on defining the object in terms of the "now" and "here;" it wants to describe its object, the thing. In the process of description, however, there arises an antithesis. The thing, on the one hand, is a "One": it can be distinguished from another thing. On the other hand, the thing is a "Many": it can be described in terms of its color, shape, size, and so forth. For example, if I talk about a book, I am talking about this book here; it is one thing . On the other hand, this book is small, and blue, and box-shaped; it has many different properties. These properties do not seem to affect each other; in fact, each seems indifferent to others. The book is blue and also small, and also box-shaped. But if they do not affect each other at all, how can this book be distinguished from another thing? It seems that the properties must demarcate the boundaries of the thing. But if they are definitive properties, what allows me to talk of them independently? Perception alternately makes the object and Consciousness itselfresponsible for the "oneness" and the "manyness" of its object. To avoid contradiction, it posits the object as the cause of "oneness," and Consciousness as the cause of the "manyness," and then it reverses its position. But as a consequence of positing alternating truths in the same place, Consciousness is unable to find a way to grasp both of these truths simultaneously. Instead, it introduces the "sophish·y of in-so-fars"(130). Hegel equates this activity of Percep- ENERGEIA tion with sound common sense. The thing is "Many" inso-far as it is in itself, but "One" in-so-far as it is contrasted with other things. As a "One" the thing is a unity, as a "Many" it holds the distinguishing qualities of the object, or it gives the object "determinateness." But it is through its "determinateness" that the object preserves itself. This means, then, that the thing preserves itself through its outside opposition: the thing has its essential being in another thing. But to have the essence of a thing outside of the thing is absurd! Perception can see the truth of a single moment, but is unable to see the object as the entire movement of the different moments. It holds fast to the idea that its object is a real, sensuous thing, and is unable to give up the solidity, the "thinghood" of its object. Not being able to justify the antithesis concerning its essence, it must give up the object itself. 63 moments of the "One" and the "Many" not as opposites, but as two aspects of the same thing. Such an object is Force. When we think of Force we conceive of a unity, but at the same time, it is impossible to imagine a particular force without opposition. The principle of Newton's Third Law of Motion seems appropriate here : To every action there is always an opposed and equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. (13) 3 Force necessarily implies two, but as a cause, it is taken to · be one. It is important to note that "Force" here is a primarily intellectual result. It is that object of Consciousness that fulfills the need to be a "One" but which creates the "Many." Force is therefore the solution to the problem of PerFORCE AND THE UNDERSTANDING ception. Force itself is one object, but in action, it must This brings us to the main topic of our examination: split up into many; that is to say, there is never only one the section on Force and the Understanding. Why is it nec- force. Forces are always acting against one another, and it essary to go on to this phase? How does this phase of con- is forces in this state that Hegel calls "Force expressed." sciousness differ from, and accomplish more than the pre- The different forces that we detect in action are now what vious ones? One thing is readily apparent: as a result of used to be the contradictory moments of Perception, the this chapter Consciousness becomes Self-consciousness. By "One" and the "Many." But the one concept that is behind the end of this phase, the object of Consciousness will have the acting forces as their cause is what Hegel calls "Force changed into itself; it will be a Consciousness that knows proper." The same inherent necessity that revealed Force to be itself to be Consciousness. This suggests that in the course the new huth of consciousness is what brings about the failof investigating the truth about the world, we find it in ourse lves; in some sense we become one with huth. Again, ure of this new truth. This plot complication comes about when Consciousness realizes that since Force is essentially Hegel claims that this progression is a logical necessity . both of its aspects, the distinction that Consciousness has Perception has failed, but the object is still in front of Consciousness. In giving up the object, Consciousness can- made between its two forms is merely its own distinction; it not ignore what is physically present before it, so it starts is a distinction in thought (136). Consciousness sees that on the only available path: it lets go, not of the object, but of both of the moments of Force, "Force expressed" and "Force the object as a thing, or of its thinghood. Consciousness proper," are essentially forces; it is therefore impossible to cannot hold that a concrete thing could be essentially a make a distinction with respect to their essence, or content. What is the significance of this failure? L t us recall "Many" and also a "One." As a result of the failure of perthat the moments that are here exhibited as the "Force exception, Consciousness now thin.ks of its object, because it realizes that it is possible to hold the contradictory moments pressed" and "Force proper," are the h·ansformed moments of the "One" and the "Many." But the "One" was the object's together in thought. "in-itself," or how it was perceived by itself; it was the " inHegel now begins to discuss the new object of Consciousness that is such a thought: Force enters the stage. ner" essence of the object. The "Many" was exactly the Why is Force the next phase of the development? How is opposite of this. It was the object's "being-for-another," as Force a solution to the problem of Perception? Conscious- it was in conh·ast to other things, or its "outer" essence. ness was confronted with a contradiction. Were Conscious- Since the distinction turns out to be one of thought alone ness to stop at this point, it would be forced to admit that it and not one of content, these two essences become the same found no h·uth in its object. A contradiction is simply not thing: there is now no difference between "outer" and " inacceptable as an end, for Truth must be a One. Conscious- ner." If Force falls short of accounting for the distinction of ness needs to create the third moment of this cycle of the outer and inner, it does not solve the problem of Perception. dialectical movement. It needs to find a truth that will ne- Force would then not be the one object that necessarily crecessitate the existing contradiction, not as a contradiction, ates two. The disappearance of this distinction deprives Force but as a distinction. That is to say, Consciousness needs to of any claim it might have laid to the title of the Absolute: find an underlying cause that will result in the two distinct �64 KoPAR This true essence of Things has now the character of not Force is now most definitely not the end of the quest for being immediately for consciousness; on the contrary, Truth. consciousness h'as a mediated relation to the inner being The Understanding must give up Force as the perfect and, as the Understanding, looks through this mediating object, and so it becomes the "Notion of Force." It is the play ofForces into the true background of Things. ( 143) "Notion of Force" because it is the moving negative principle that drives the dialectical movement. One thing seizes our attention immediately: Hegel has sudAfter the effort of Consciousness to distinguish between denly switched to the plural. Instead of having one thing the moments of the "One" and "Many" in terms of their for its object, the Understanding now concerns itself with content as an "inner" and an "outer" force proved unsuc- things. In fact, however, its object is still one: it is the "incessful, it next endeavored to differentiate between them ner being of Things," and the plurality exists not in the according to their form (137). If Consciousness managed object of the Understanding, but in the number of things in to draw an essential difference between different forms of which this object is present; that is to say, all things. Havforce, it could still retain force as its new object. With the ing had to bury Force because it fell short of the absolute, vaporization of the difference in the content of the two mo- the Understanding must produce an object that extends to ments, they were reduced to pure forces. The only remain- all things. Its focus changes from one thing to an object ing way for Consciousness to distinguish between them is that is in everything in the world; it is trying to find the to determine which one of the two forces initiates the heart of this world. At the very least, then, this new object struggle. This distinction would identify one of the forces is one that contains the truth of all objects, and in this sense, as the active and the other as passive. it has greater potential to become the Absolute. Consciousness, however, is unable to assign activity and passivity to these forces. One moment, or one force, apThe inner world, or supersensible beyond, has, however, proaches the other as something alien, or as Hegel says, come into being: it comes from the world of appearance which has mediated it; in other words , appearance is its "solicits" it. Now Consciousness realizes that the first force essence and in fact , its filling. The supersens ibl e is the could not have approached, or "solicited" the second force sensuous perceived as posited as it is in truth ; but the in the first place, had the second force not approached the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearfirst (137) . ance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua Consciousness sees that the distinction between the two appearance. ( 14 7) moments in terms of their form is a trivial, merely nominal distinction. Thus the second trial of Consciousness to disThe truth of the inner world is thus the truth of appearance . tinguish between the forces failed as well. Force as subPerhaps one would like to call this movement the saving of stance, or as existing in its separate moments, slips away appearances, because Consciousness does not have to give from our hands . up its truth; it is contained in the new result. When talking The "Notion of Force qua Notion" is the failure of Force this way one must exercise caution. Logic teaches us that recognized as a failure . It is more than the simple Notion the object is no longer beyond our reach. There is no object of Force in that Consciousness realizes the essence of Force existing in a separate world with inaccessible foim and propto be just this- that the distinctions made in it are insigerties. The object is what Consciousness has made of it, nificant. Having watched the struggle of solicitation it sees and as the deve lopment has been a necessary logica l prothat the moments of Force have lost actuality: Consciousgression; the playground of forces, or appearance, necesness takes Force to be the thing in which these determinasarily determines the content of the next moment. tions lose their individuality and become one as the Notion. What is saved here is that which remains constant in the play of forces: "appearance qua appearance. " This LAW means that this next moment will take appearance as it really is, or a disappearing moment. But since the very esThis moment [the "Notion of Force qua Notion" ] is sence of this new true world was to conserve what is stable nothing less than the death of Force as a real object. What from the playground of forc es, it logically follows that its is th e new obj ect, and how does it overcome the problems of content should come from this playground. Force? Since it is the result of the previous movement, it This new moment therefore ought to contain the play must be the "Notion of Force qua Notion," only viewed from of forces, but contain them in their disappearing: "What is a different angle . Following the spiral of the dialectical immediate for the Understanding is the play of Forces; but movement, it must be the positive result yielded by the lack what is the True for it, is the simple inner world" (148). We of actuality of the forces. This Hegel christens the "inner have seen that in the play of forces all the differences that being of things": distinguish the two participating moments collapse. The different moments of the "One" and the "M any" with re- ENERGEIA spect to content, and the "soliciting" and "solicited" with respect to fmm, become interchangeable. The defining factor of this next moment is precisely the loss of all differences. The truth of the playground of forces , or appearance recognized as appearance, is Law. Before we begin the examination of what has thus filled in the emptiness of the "inner," let us notice that "Law of Force" is a distinctly physical expression. What Hegel means by Law is what is common to all of the Newtonian Laws. Recall Newton's Corollary 1 to the Laws in the Principia: it demonstrates the constrnction and validity of a forc e parallelogram. Such a force parallelogram can be constructed out of any number of forces, whether by separation or integration. One simple rule governs the procedure, and the extent of its power is undeniably one of the most far-reaching in physics . Here the individual forces are independent of experience; that is to say, we are free to separate the force of gravity into two or more vectors. In the process of integrating forces, the result is similarly a force that does not belong to any one of the participating bodies. We talk about the force of gravity and the force of a string holding an object, but when combined according to the First Corollary, we talk of a resultant force. The resultant force cannot be assigned to any one thing. It will certainly be expressed in the change or motion of something, but strictly speaking, it does not belong to any one body. The procedure according to which the resultant force is obtained remains indifferent to the forces of experience. It is detached from the snuggle itself. Its truth originates in the struggle, but is itself devoid of any such struggle. Here Fo~·ce in its actuality has died; what subsists is a rule that is universal. By Law, Hegel must mean something like the truth of the First Corollary. Consciousness has thus filled in the emptiness of the inner world. The content of the inner world are laws, which give a new foim to this realm. They incorporate the constant str·uggle of the appearances, but in themselves are stable:· 65 contain difference, the difference is universal, indeterminate." To have proper causes for all appearances requires many laws. But the plurality of the laws is something that goes against the very thing Consciousness was hoping to find in this solution : Law was supposed to be a unity . As the underlying heart of the world, its truth was supposed to consist precisely in its singularity as a governing principle. To find a solution to this new problem, Consciousness must create a "container" for all of the laws . This new object should include all the specific laws within it; it should be their unification. The name of this new object, by virtue of the place it occupies in the dialectical movement, is called the "Notion of law." At this point it seems to Consciousness that its new object is merely the negation of the many laws . Science in general aims at abstracting the accidental, unessential qualities of occurrences, and thus the majestic Moon is placed on an equal footing with the our planet of imperfections. But Hegel finds that the loss of all particularities leaves the general form empty . In the fusion of the specific laws, the new object loses all specificity and is stripped of any determinate significance. It is completely universal and lacks any reference to actuality . The object of Consciousness is now the "Notion of law," the essence of which is to express this emptiness. Logic, however, impels Consciousness to seek content for its new object. What it finds is that there is inherent necessity in the "Notion of law," though this necessity supersedes the truth of Law. This necessity is the common denominator of all the laws: they are laws because they are necessary. Consciousness grabs this necessity and makes it the positive content of the "Notion of law." Through this positive result Law reg~ins its form as a one :· it is that which is necessary. Consciousness thus recognizes Laws, on the one hand, containing several rules for distinct phenomena, but on the other, the unity of pure necessity. As Hegel goes on to explain, however, the necessity arrived at here is meaningless in a twofold manner. First, because given positive electricity, negative electricity is given Consequently, the supersensible world is an inert realm by definition. In other words , "positive" would mean nothof laws which, though beyond the perceived world ing without "negative." But that these two forms of elecfor this exhib its law only through incessant change - is tricities should be united in the one notion "Electricity ," equally present in it and is its direct tranquil image. (149) does not seem necessary. Second, because in the case of motion, time and space-the two moments of motion are In the form of Law, Consciousness has arrived at a new completely indifferent to one another. Without any diffitruth. By positing a unity b eyond the constant change of culty we can think of space by itself, or time by itse lf; there the play of forces , the play [of forces] becomes justified. If seems to be no inherent connection between them (153): one can assert that Law is true, its expression in the struggle of forces can also be asserted to be true. If one can think of The difference, then, in both cases is not a difference in Law as the cause of the play of forces, then the effects beits own self: either the universal, Force, is indifferent to come parts of the tluth of Law . the division which is the law, or the differences , the parts, There is, however, a negative consequence to saving of the Jaw are indifferent to one another. (154) the forces. This is what Hegel tells us in 150: "What seems to be defective in it (i.e. in the law) is that while it does �KOPAR 66 Without a necessary connection between two things, one cannot call them parts of a whole. If they were parts, they would have to have something common to them that was essential to the being of both. The necessity of the connection between the parts, or laws, and the whole, or Law as the "Notion of law," is precisely that the Understanding made an abstraction and found the truth of the former in that of the latter. Similarly, the necessary connection between the independent parts (for example space and time) arises from the Logic of the Understanding. Consciousness understands the separate moments of time and space as united in gravity, because Logic has connected these moments for it. For the Understanding, the moments of electricity are the same thing as Electricity, except one is the abstraction of the other two. When Consciousness alternates between the two forms of Electricity, it is said to "explain": The moments are indeed distinguished , but, at the same time, their difference is expressly said not to be a difference of the thing itself, and consequently is itself immediately cancelled again. This process is called "explanation." (154) Generally speaking, the purpose of an explanation is to shed some light on an obscure phrase or definition. The one who explains, in order to remain faithful to the truth of the plu·ase at hand, must find alternate means of expressing the exact content of the phrase. Thus, while the words used in the explanation ar.e different, what is said is the same. In the process of "explanation," the Understanding switches back and forth between thinking of Law in its two· separate components and thinking of it in its entirety. Both ways of looking at the matter belong to the Understanding 's view of the truth. Thus since the content of both forms of the explanation are the same, they are in fact connected in the object. Electricity is really positive and negative electricities, and space and time really compose gravity. To us, the audience, it is clear that here Consciousness is switching back and forth between h-uths that it has discovered in the object, but in which the distinctions are really within Consciousness: The reason why 'explaining' affords so much self-satisfaction is just because in it consciousness is, so to speak, communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something else, it is in fact occupied only with itself. ( 163) The process of explanation is the perfect mirror-image of the play of forces, or appearance. The struggle between the soliciting force and the solicited force is the same as the struggle between Law expressed in its specificity, and Law as unity: In the process, then, of explaining, the to and fro of change which before was outside of the inner world and present only in the appearance, has penetrated into the supersensible world itself. ( 155) Consciousness is here faced with a problem opposite to that which it had to overcome in the sensible world. On the playground of forces, Consciousness saw a constant opposition that lacked determination. What was determined about it was only the existence of differences that gave rise to their underlying unity, Law. Law solved the problem of the play of forces by giving a stable ground to the constant change , or "absolute flux." In this law, all the differences were brought together into one medium. Here in the explanation, however, differences arise that are in fact not differences. Consciousness therefore devises a solution parallel to its earlier solution. What was missing from the first Law, or the way it was defective, was precisely the lack of flux. Without this, Law fell drastically short of reflecting the dynamic nature of the play of forces. This dynamism; this flux, is found in the process of explanation. This is the second time that Consciousness is presented with a scene of constant change. In the first case, the opposing forces of appearance lost their difference in the Law of the supersensible world . No~ in the second case, the fluctuating moments are evidently identical at the outset. But Consciousness, to complete the correspondence between the sensuous world and the supersensible world, is in desperate need of constant change. Consciousness therefore creates a new Law that it calls the "law of appearance." The "law of appearance" is what disturbs the unity of the first Law; it is what makes two electricities out of one. The supersensible world is thus defined by two Laws: The Understanding thus learns that it is a law of appearance itself, that differences arise which are no differences, or that what is selfsame repels itself from itself; and similarly, that the differences are only such as are in reality no differences and which cancel themselves; in other words, what is not selfsame is self-attractive. ( 156) Here we have Hegel's brief summary of the two laws of the supersensible world. One of the Laws unites the differences: in the first Law, moments that are different become one . This "self-attractiveness" is exactly what we have seen between the soliciting force and the solicited force. The other, or second Law, to preserve the dynamics of life, breaks up the unity into different moments. The supersensible world is thus divided into two separate worlds. To wit, the first Law governs the first world, and the second Law governs the other one. These two kingdoms, the first supersensible world and the second, or what Hegel calls the inverted world, are not only different, but are the direct opposites of one another. While the first kingdom satisfied the need of Consciousness to find truth in a 67 ENERGEIA unity, the inverted world supplies the change that is also so indispensable to this truth. THE INFINITE The strife of the "One" and the "Many" here takes on a yet different form. With the opposition of the Laws, Consciousness has still not escaped the same problem. The first Law is what makes the "Many" a "One," while the second Law is what makes the "One" a "Many." There are, however, still two Laws. As a necessary step in the h·ansfo1mation, Consciousness must unify these two, separate, in fact, opposite Laws , and this opposition is just what allows Consciousness to do this. What Consciousness is trying to do is to identify a world that is the cause of the appearances of the sensuous world, but which, just because it is the cause of the sensuous world, also mirrors every aspect of that. Therefore this new world should contain the particular opposites found in the sensuous world, but should also be a world that is a unity. To raise the two kingdoms of the supersensib le world to this new level , the two kingdoms have to be direct opposites of each other that are nevertheless the same, or one world. Upon first examination, the second world is merely the opposite of the first one. The inverted world turns the first supersensible world upside down. It is fascinating to watch how the sensuous world has managed to completely duplicate itself. The birth of the inverted world has not only given motion to its stationary counterpart, but also allowed for the return of particularity. By being the opposite of the first supersensible world, the content of the "beyond" can be more specific than pure Electricity, for example. Because of the introduction of the second Law, both of the moments of "explanation" are present in the inner world. Thus both negative and positive electricity have their place in the "beyond." This admission is extended to other particulars. Because the content of the first supersensible world is immediately posited as an opposite in the second one, determinate contents, such as a particular color, or an individual taste, can now become the filling of this world. But the significance of the inverted world is more than to provide an opposite. What Hegel means here is that we must not assign reality to the objects of the inverted world. Thus if there is an object in the sensuous world that is dark, we must not think of it as really being light. The inverted world is not the world of opposite things, but the world of opposition. The reason for this is that Consciousness is trying to leave behind its object as a thing by entering into the supersensible world (hence the name "supersensible"). If one were to conceive of the inverted world as a realm filled with the opposites of what exist in the appearances, one would have to realize that the creation of the inverted world was in fact a waste of effort. There is absolutely no need for Consciousness to invent an inner, inverted world for the opposites of things. Whenever one sees something dark in appearance, or in the actual, sensuous world, one is bound to see something light immediately next to it. In fact, one would be unable to notice what is dark without the contrast provided by the light object. The significance of the inverted world, then, must be greater than being an opposite thing. The inverted world is not a thing that simply has an opposite somewhere. It is its essence to be an opposite, a "pure change," and as such, it must provide the something of which it is an opposite . The purpose of its very Law, the "law of appearance," is to create an opposition not outside, but within the object. It thus comes to be the case that the inverted world contains the first supersensible world in it. Now, since the first supersensible world developed out of the sensuous world, while the inverted world developed out of both of these, the inverted world also contains the sensuous world. In the inverted world we see a new, higher level of the Absolute: its truth includes the truths of the previous levels. [The] power of God is what is often referred to as the infinite power, or infinite goodness of God. Similarly, Kant', when writing about the logical function of the Understanding, insinuates that the "Affirmative" and the "Negative," when combined, yield the "Infinite" (B96). It is therefore no great surprise to us that what Consciousness finds in the inner difference of the inverted world is, in fact, the Infinite ( 160). Infinity here has three meanings ( 161). First, as we have said, the difference is one within the object. Second, if Infinity is the "beyond" of appearance, it provides the sensuous world with a firm, trne ground. And third, tlu·ough the firm ground, the opposite moments have a necessary connection to each other: they have a common "container" from which springs their difference. Hegel calls Infinity the "absolute Notion" because in it everything is negated. The negation at the same time is positive; it yields knowledge of the thing through its opposite. We, the viewers of the Becoming of Spirit, recognize that Infinity has been there all along; it has been the heart of the dialectical movement. The product of each new circle of the dialectical movement proves to be a truth that includes both an assertion and a negation. About Infinity, Hegel further says: Appearance, or the play of Forces, already displays it, but it is as 'explanation' that it first freely stands forth; and in being finally an object for consciousness, as that which it is, consciousness is thus self-consciousness. (163) The new, true object does not merely contribute to the development of Consciousness, but fundamentally reforms it. Enter Self-consciousness. Infinity, the catalyst, has been �68 implicit in the entire movement. In "appearance," the opposites are already in the process of disappearing: the forces consume each other. In "explanation," the Understanding is already aware of the fact that the difference between its moments is only a verbal, nonessential difference: Consciousness sees two different ways of expressing the same content. At last, Infinity is unveiled for Consciousness in the inner world : it becomes the object of Consciousness. KoPAR Of course, we, the audience, have seen all along that while Consciousness believed that it was digging deeper into the truth of the object, it was deceived, and in fact, was uncovering its own depths. Consciousness has never been able to access the object alone; it had to remove its own veils to see the truth of the object. All along, its object has been its own self. The transformation has allowed Consciousness to recognize this as well. Self-consciousness, this amazing result, is now the new shape on our stage. At this point it is still colorless: SelfCONCLUSION consciousness, just as all new truths in the course of the As Infinity becomes the object of Consciousness, Con- development, is at first an empty truth. Consciousness has sciousness realizes that because of the nature of its object, it not exited the stage; it has only changed form . In order to itself can simply no longer be a separate entity. Infinity see the truth about self-consciousness, one has to look at it includes everything: the distinction between subject and objectively, from the seat of the audience . Though Conobject vanishes, and Consciousness recognizes its object as sciousness can now look at itself objectively, it is still far its own self. The difference between subject and object was from looking at self-consciousness itself objectively. Selfthe final obstacle Consciousness had to overcome in order consciousness is the end of this cycle of the dialectical moveto see its object as we see it. Once Force became an object ment, but it is still only the beginning of the Science that for the actor, Consciousness first had to remove the veil that will expose the Absolute. Consciousness does not yet know was the distinction between the "One" and the "Many." The the content of self-consciousness; it does not know its prob"One" was the moment that expressed the thing as it was lems . For us, the audience, this result is astonishing in a difin-itself, or a single object, while the "Many" was the way the thing exhibited itself for-another, with many properties. ferent way. We are not merely taken aback by the recogniWhen Consciousness removed this veil, it saw that the dif- tion of our object as the actor on the stage is; we are amazed ference between the "inner" and the "outer" had disappeared. by the implications of this result. What this result tells us is Next came the task of eliminating the seeming differ- that we are the truth. The doubts of Descartes are now ence between "force that solicited" and "force that was so- washed away and Kant's wall is burned to ashes. There is licited." By the removal of this veil, Consciousness has no room for despair: the philosopher can trust his philosoreduced the distinction between the "active" and the "pas- phy. The question of many centuries is answered: Truth is sive" into nothingness: Law became its new object. Finally, within our reach. But why now? How is it that self-consciousness is a in the medium of the Infinite, Consciousness learns that there is no distinction between itself and its object: the dif- result of the movement of something that was only clearly articulated at least three thousand years after man was first ference of subject and object is demolished. In the next section Hegel provides a brief description ashamed of his actions? What possible sense does it make of what self-consciousness is, not merely as a result of the to anive at such a self-explanatory notion after understand-· ing the ways in which remote physical objects interact? We transformation, but in our ordinary experience: must recall that Hegel is not trying to set up a table for the I distinguish myse lf from myself, and in doing so I am chronological evolution of the human mind. Hegel's object directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is is a logical order, a progression that makes sense of phinot different (from me). I, the selfsame being, repel losophy as a whole, even though it does not coincide with myse lf from myself; but what is posited as distinct from chronological order. Nevertheless, it is a bit strange that me, or as unl ike me, is immediate ly, in being so distinself-consciousness should come so late in the progression. guished, not a distinction for me. ( 164) E~erything in the metamorphosis of Consciousness is dependent upon the dialectical movement. The dialectical To justify this account, one can only appeal to everyone's movement takes fo r grante d that true knowledge arises from private experience. It should suffice to recall a situation in phenomenological knowledge. It accepts as a fact that Conwhich one is particularly uncomfortable with an action of sciousness cannot touch the object alone, but must reform one's own. In the midst of such a situation, I begin, in a itself in order to find truth. Everything else that Hegel presense, to observe myself from the outside. But no sooner sents in his exposition of the bi1ih of self-consciousness simhave I divided myself in this way than I realize that I feel ply follows the necessity prescribed by the Logic of the diaboth embarrassed and disapproving: to distance myself from lectical movement. To question the truth of self-consciousmyself is impossible. ness, we have to question the truth of Hegel's Logic . This is a complex and difficult task. Hegel puts forth some com- ENERGEIA pelling arguments in favor of his method, and I have discussed the essence of his method earlier. But however persuasive his arguments may be, they cannot be completely convincing. If we are to take the phases of Consciousness as true results, we must have some faith in the Logic of Hegel. After all, Hegel himself admits that principles, just because they are beginnings, are defective in themselves (24). Only the entirety of the system can justify the beginning . Self-consciousness, however, is not yet Spirit. The only way I can imagine testing the h-uth of this result is by examining whether self-consciousness, as described by Hegel, makes sense to us. Since we are not yet at the final stage of the. play, I cannot attempt to provide a rigorous proof here. I can, however, suggest a way in which Hegel's self-consciousness accords with our experience. What has come before it? 1. Sense-certainty; 2. Perception; 3. Force; 4. Law; and 5. Infinity. Now, is it not the case that these concepts are all prior to and included in the concept of self-consciousness? Though inner reflection is a peculiarly human attribute, we are outward beings. Everything about us is defined by our physical circumstances. To this effect writes Hume: I never can catch myself at any time without perception, and never can observe any thing but perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. (Book I Section Vl) 5 We are outreaching beings, with primarily outward experiences. Sense-Certainty and Perception are precisely the beginnings of these experiences. Force, as I have already pointed out, is fundamentally physical, and only in abstraction is it intellectual. But this abstraction is not particularly sophisticated ; simple induction will yield an intellectual force. We must have abstracted the concept of force from our elementary experiences well before Newton. To continue , the early ex istence of law is perhaps the most evident. We see things according to an order. Whether the order really exists, or is a mere imposition of our imagination, we nevertheless recognize it in everything we see and do . Our concept of infinity is probably the most difficult to account for. It seems to me that our understanding of infinity is merely intellectual. What I mean is that the kind of experience from which it could have stemmed would be one in which we fail to see the end of something. Imagine someone looking at the sky and aspiring to see beyond its obstinate blueness. He might decide that the sky is a neverending, ever-growing aether, or he might conclude that it definitely ends somewhere, only its boundary is beyond the reach of his eyes. Most of our experiences would support the latter conclusion: plants dry out, animals and people die of old age. All of these experiences suggest not the infinite, 69 but, on the contrary, the finite. But the concept of infinity can also be grasped as the power that destroys everything, or the might that puts an end to all oppositions. Thus death is infinite because nothing is exempt from its hands . The Infinity of Hegel is infinity in this sense. Of course, we cannot experience death. We are fully aware of its existence and of its power, but we cannot/eel it. The concept of infinity thus remains solely intellectual for us . We know it, but we don't understand it. I have organized a short list to summarize how our ordinary understanding of self-consciousness may be present in the metamorphosis of Hegel ' s Consciousness: 1. Self-consciousness is what allows me to notice myself as an object. But since I am an outward being, I must have had an experience with 'noticing objects outside me: I must have experienced Sense-Certainty. , 2. Self.;consciousness is what allows me to perceive my own actions. But for this I need the ability to describe myself as a being that is one, but with many actions. Me and my actions are my object here: to describe them I must have experienced Perception. 3. Self-consciousness is the medium in which I tear myself apart from myself: it is the greatest force imaginable. To understand this as a force, I must have experienced physical force and then abstracted it: I must understand Force. 4. Self-consciousness is that which renders me competent to make moral judgments of myself. For this, I must have an order, or law, within me : I must know Law. 5. And finally, self-consciousness is the medium in which all boundaries are destroyed. It is that which includes the opposite moments of subject and object, it is that in which all distinctions vanish: it is Infinity. Again, Self-consciousness is not the end of the journey of Consciousness. The transformation continues until Consciousness becomes the Absolute. Since the necessity of the progression is only exposed in the exposition of the progress itself, one can only speculate about where self-consciousness will lead. The overall movement up to this point has transformed the object of Consciousness into an object that is its own self. We have seen the way in which Consciousness has been distancing itself away from thinghood, and into the intellectual. The static nature of the object was replaced with the dynamics of Force, and the absolution of the Infinite. The birth of Self-consciousness fundamentally reforms the nature of the transformation. Whatever the Absolute Truth is going to be, it will have to be seen in self-consciousness. With self-consciousness comes life, and with life comes war. The journey will be long and arduous with countless hardships and a myriad of obstacles. In the course of the development, more and more boundaries must be destroyed and more distinctions must collapse. Eventually the distinction between man and divinity must arise in the play. �70 KoPAR Naturally, the result of this opposition must contain the truth as seated in self-consciousness. It is as if Consciousness has discovered that its object is a mirror in which it can see its own reflection. But the mirror is still foggy and the reflection obscure. Consciousness still has to wipe the mirror clear in order to see its ultimate truth, the Absolute. Consciousness has yet to learn that what it sees in self-consciousness is not merely itself, but Spirit, and it has yet to see that its actor shall enter the stage not solely as a consciousness, but as God. 0 Light Eternal, who in thyself alone Dwell'st and thyself know'st, and self-understood, Self-understanding, smilest on thine own! (Canto XXXIII, 124-126) 6 Part of Me Karina Hean, A 'oo ENDNOTES '[Due to space considerations, this essay has been considerably modified from its original f01m, which is available at the St. John's College Library.-Ed.] 2 All quotations from: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit ; Translated by A.V . Miller, Oxford University Press, unless indicated otherwise. The number marks the paragraph, not the page. 3All Newton references from: Newton, Principia Vol. I; Translated by Andrew Motte, University of California Press 4Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, St. Martin's Press. 5Hume, Treatise on Human Nature; Ed ., L.A. Selby-Bigge, Clarendon Press 6 Dante, Paradiso; Translated by Laurence Binyon, The Viking Press Sketch (woman) Melina Hoggard, A 'oo �Liberty Tree Cara Gormally, '02 �\ \ \ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. 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U.S. POSTAGE PERMIT NO. 66 PAID LUTHERVILLE, MD �to yap £pyou t£A.rn;, i] 0£ £v£pyna to £pyov. 010 Kat 'tOUVOµa EVEpyna A.EyEtm Kata to £pyov, Kat O"UV'tEl yn npoc; TflV eV'tEAEXEtaV. For the end is work, and the work is a being-at-work, and this is why the phrase being-at-work is meant by reference to work and extends to being-at-work-staying-complete. -Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, 8 I OSOa-b, 20-25 Translated by Joe Sachs Staff. Amy Humphrey Susan Ellis Catherine Stirling Jessica Morgenstern Johan Swindler Todd Pytel Kelly O'Malley Josh Emmons Assistant Editors: Hannah Pittard Vanessa Cohen Michael Busch Jessica Brotman Paige Postelwait Junior Editor Anne McShane Senior Editor Eve Gibson Design Sarah Waters Faculty Advisors Catherine Haigney Cordell Yee Cover art b Corey Sebastian, A99 y The Energeia staff would like to extend its gratitude to Chris Colby, the St. John's Print Shop, Barbara Goyette, the Public Relations office, Vicki Cone, the Library, Terry Maguire, Harvey Flaumenhaft, and Chaninah Maschler. Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine published annually and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis, and Santa Fe. The I 999 issue contains a sampling of student work from the previous school year which the prize comminees have selected for public recognition, and submissions from members of the community. Energeia welcomes essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, photography, and the like for the 2000 issue. �Contents Seeing the Light: How Light Illuminates Aristotle's Noetic T heory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . . . I Mark Alzenhaur, AOO Detroit (photograph) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paige Postelwait, AO 1 . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . 3 Aries, France (photograph) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · · · · · · · . · · 7 Vada Mossavat, AOO Puerto Escondido, Mexico (photograph) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . · · · · · · · · · · · · 1I Abigail Weinberg, AOO On Mimesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · l 2 Robert Dickson, AOO Architectural detail, 1984 Winter Olympic Museum, Sarajevo (photograph) . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Vada Mossavat, AOO Greek Translation and Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . . . . · l 9 Samuel Carcia, A99 Attorney General (conte on watercolor paper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . . . .. . · 20 Corey Sebastian, A99 Sarajevo, 1997 (photograph) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · . . . · 21 Vada Mossavat, AOO French Translation Prize, 1997-1998 . . . . . . .. . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 22 Lauren Connolly, A98 Translation and Commentary on Le Cripuscule du Soir .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .. 24 R. Justice Schunior, A99 Your Choice Was to Live: lsmene's Resistance to Her Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · . . . . . · 27 Megan Greff, AO 1 Math Prize, 1997-98, Geometry: Solution and Commentary . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . · · . . . . . · 30 Piroska l<Dpar, A 99 Math Prize, l 997-98, Trigonometry: Solution and Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · . · . . . . · 33 Daniel Braithwaite, AO I Lobachevski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 35 Wendy Braithwaite, AC! Sophomore Essay Prize, 1997-98: Striving for Harmony: A Reading of the Book of Job . . . . . . . . . . .. . . · 36 Michael Goodrum, AOO Amendment XV, (gouache on paperboard) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Corey Sebastian, A99 Sarajevo, 1997 (photograph) . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Vada Mossavat, AOO Senior Essay Prize, 1997-98: Understanding the Mythical Nature of the Wilderness and its Role in Isaac McCaslin's Repudiation in ''The Bear" Aaron Pease, A98 . . . . . . . . 47 Freedom and Limitation: The Understanding in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Todd Pytel, A99 Aries, France (photograph) Vada Mossavat, AOO . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. . . . . 67 Junior Essay Prize, 1997-98: Sympathy and Selfishness in George Eliot's Middlemarch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Deborah Carlos, A99 Airborne . . . Alicia Potee, A02 Gone West . . Eva T H. Brann, Tutor ode to my mug Eve Gibson, A99 Listening For Planets Alicia Potee, A02 Three Husbands Alicia Potee, A02 Untitled . .. Eve Gibson, A99 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 .. .. . . . . . . . .. .. . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . 83 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 �I Seeing the Light: How Light Illuminates Aristotle's Noetic Theory Mark Alznauer, AOO 0 f necessity, there is a certain degree of difficulty in investigating nous (or, the intellect). It is not something we directly perceive, but is only intelligible through the things it thinks. And though it is perhaps among the most knowable things there are, it is, because of this distance from sensible things, also among the most unknown. An examination of it must be careful, and not rushed to understand it in its most proper formulation too quickly. One's eyes need to adjust to the metaphoric light. Adjusting to the light will be, in a way, the focus of this inquiry. And the very quickness with which we are willing to accept such visual imagery as a natural metaphor for acts of the mind suggests that the connection is not an insignificant one. Aristotle makes the connection several times himself, but this essay will focus mainly on his use of it in the fifth chapter of the third book, De Anima. The main goal of this essay, however, is to clarify the workings and foundation of Aristotle's noetic theory, so in that respect our focus on that passage and the light metaphor will be subservient to the greater task of understanding what nous is and does. As the subject dealt with is somewhat obscure, the first section of this essay will be an attempt to isolate the function of nous in Aristotle's other works. Then, with this preliminary investigation accomplished, I will proceed to the passage mentioned above. In the second section, I will restrict myself to an examination of Aristotle's statements about light. Then, in the third section, I will try to pin down what Aristotle meant by comparing nous to light. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle describes philosophy as being certain concerning the things about which dialectic is tentative. This inquiry, then, could best be described as "dialectical," in that it will not be a straightforward expostulation of the "Aristotelian" position, but rather a tentative attempt to flesh out Aristotle's ideas which will examine many possibilities, only focusing on the analogy of light in an exploratory fashion. PART ONE: A PRELIMINARY UNDERSTANDING OF NOUS Before we approach the light analogy to see what it has to add to our understanding of nous, it is best that we learn what role Aristotle has designated to nous in his other writings, keeping in mind that he might in them be speaking of nous in a more restricted (or even looser) sense than he is in De Anima. In this reconstruction of the Aristotelian noetic, I will remain mostly within the Posterior Analytics. The Nicomachean Ethics, in a briefer account, repeats a lot of what is said there, and the Metaphysics in many ways surpasses it, both in scope and in complexity. I have taken the middle road. The only major drawback of staying within the Posterior Analytics is that it uses largely mathematical illustrations. These can mask some very significant differences between the knowing involved in mathematical and logical studies and the knowing involved in other forms of knowledge. Though the mathematical many times serves as a good analogy for what Aristotle is trying to say, it is often a bad example. This difference will be dealt with in greater detail in the third section of this paper. At the end of the first book of the Posterior Analytics (AP88b36), we are given a compact definition of nous. Aristotle calls it the "arche epistemes." This has been translated as "the source of knowledge," "the principle of science;' and "the starting-point of scientific knowledge.'' All translations are necessarily vague until a determinate knowledge of the terms a translator employs is worked out. Aristotle has something very definite in mind when he chooses these words and we are well advised not to quickly arrive at a cursory understanding of them. In this section, we will look at each word closely and then see if we can come to a more complete understanding of what nous is. I will start with "episteme." Traditionally translated as "knowledge;' "episteme" is used more narrowly by Aristotle than we use "knowledge.'' Aristotle in AP7Ibl0 speaks of what he means when he says we know something: �2 3 We think we know each [thing] without qualification, but not in the sophistical manner with respect to an attribute, when we think that (a) we know the cause through which the thing exists as being the cause of that thing and that (b) the thing cannot be other than what it is. This clearly distinguishes episteme from other faculties of the rational part of men's souls, such as opinion (by which one apprehends true things of which one does not have the cause) and prudence (which is about changeable particular situations and can thus be other than what it is). The object of knowing appropriate to epistemic knowledge, then, exists of necessity, and hence is eternal, and what is eternal is ungenerable and indestructible" (NEI 13%24). The only things which meet these qualifications are universals. And knowledge is not just of universals, but is universal itself. Aristotle makes this clear in AP88b30: "Knowledge and the knowable object differ from opinion and the object of opinion in this: knowledge is universal and proceeds through necessary [premises], and that which is necessary cannot be other than it is." This is why there cannot be knowledge of Callias or of any other particular, only sensation of them. Another primary characteristic of episteme is that it is teachable and, therefore, can be learned. It is not an experienced facihty or a "knack" with things. It is a reasoned understanding. It is in the master craftsman, who knows the "why" of his art, more than in his obedient apprentice. What makes anything learnable is that it is discursive, or follows from what one knows by reason. Aristotle speaks of this following upon reason as syllogistic. That is, it demonstrates the unknown by conclusions drawn from the known according to the dictates of reason. One trait, then, of demonstrable knowledge is that it "must be acquired from primary [premisesJ which are undemonstrable: otherwise one who has no demonstration of them [i.e. demonstrable principlesJ will not know" (AP7Ib27). Those primary premises must be outside of epistemic knowledge, in the sense that episteme is built upon them. Without those primary premises being known, there could be no episteme. This, Aristotle would contend, is part of the reason Socrates disclaimed knowing anything. For a premise is "dialectical if it is any one part of a statement taken indifferently {we might say, "hypothetically"}, but it is demonstrative if it is defi11 nitely that part which is true" (AP72al0). This is undoubtedly a more complicated issue when it comes to the Socratic method, but, merely to contrast this method with Aristotle's, it suffices to say that the basic indeterminacy of Socrates' premises (his archai) enabled him to continue to explore new possible answers to fundamental questions, while it prevented him (at least on the surface) from coming to a definitive answer. For Aristotle, however, these principles are determinate and knowable enough to build definite, demonstrable knowledge upon. With Aristotle, one can know. But this knowledge has a questionable foundation until we can come to an understanding of what these principles are and where they come from. They cannot be merely assumed or hypothetically posited without man falling into Socratic ignorance. Aristotle states this in no uncertain terms in the NE: . . . it is only when one is both convinced and is familiar with the principles ( archai) in a certain way that one has knowledge, since he will have know ledge only by accident if he is not convinced of the principles more than the conclusion (I I 39b33). And in the AP: . . . it is necessary not only to know the primary [principles], whether all or some, prior [to the fact or conclusionJbut also know them to a higher degree ... . (72a27) The archai of episteme need more certitude than the syllogisms based upon them. We should find out, then, what these archai are. The meaning of "arche;' however, is no easier to grab hold of than that of episteme." In fact, it is one of the "words used in more than one sense" that is listed in the fifth book of the Metaphysics. And the comprehensive definition given there (" . .. what is common to all sources { archai} is to be the first thing from which something is, or comes to be, or is known") is wide enough to encompass almost any usage. It is extremely important to pay close attention to Aristotle's use of arche'' in the whole of his philosophy (he uses it in a systematically ambiguous way), but we can get more specific here without sacrificing too much of the word's rich meaning. In the Posterior Analyics1 it is reasonably clear 11 11 Detroit, Paige Postlewait, AO I �4 that there are three sorts of archai on which demonstrative knowledge is based. For various reasons they are never listed together, but they are (a) axioms ( koina ), (b) definitions/ terms ( horoi), and ( c) what I have named "existentials" (with thanks to William Jennings for the felicitous term). These three designations effectively describe the extent to which any episteme is dependent on archai. Axioms are the most conventionally perceived "first principles." There is usually little doubt that these are archai of episteme. The most frequently mentioned example of an axiom is the so-called "law of non-contradiction." It is easy to see how premises like this are necessary for knowledge to exist. Further, in Euclid's Elements we are deluged with a host of example axioms. There they are called "Common Notions" and all of them meet the criteria clearly: they cannot be demonstrated, cannot be other than they are, and one must surely be convinced of them more than the proofs which are based upon them. The only remotely surprising thing about these principles, is that they are not the only principles. The next category of archai are the definitions (or terms) of episteme. These, too, have their mathematical counterpart in Euclid: the point which has no part, the length which has no breadth. It is relatively evident that these two and their other counterparts in Euclid are principles. One could not learn geometry without knowing these, and they certainly cannot be proved through some more fundamental knowledge. But definitions are principles in a wider sense than the one Euclid used. The definition of a triangle, for example, is an arche. It is both universal and eternal. But there is definitely a difference between definitions of things we must accept and those we can construct out of the former. That difference is made manifest by the third and final category of archai. The last kind of archai includes what I ambiguously referred to as the "existentials." Existentials are no more than statements positing some definition's (or term's) existence. One can see how it is necessary to posit the existence of a point, in a way that it is not necessary to posit the existence of a triangle. This is because the triangle can be constructed, or proved to exist. The existence of a point, however, must be assumed or posited. So a triangle is an arche only in the sense that it is a definition, but a point is an arche in two senses: that of the definition and that of the existential. Axioms do not admit of this division because they are states of affairs which must exist (e.g. the law s of non-contradiction), and do not admit of even the possibility of being false. Now these distinctions are clear in formulation, but their very precision is a little bit misleading. Finding these distinctions in other sciences may prove difficult. But Aristotle gives a list of six qualities all archai share that help such a task and neatly summarize our discussion of archai. ... it is also necessary for demonstrated knowledge to proceed from [principles which areJ (I) true, (2) primary, (3) immediate, and also ( 4) more known than, ( 5) prior to, and ( 6) causes of the conclusion; for it is in this way that the principles will also be appropri.:. ate to what is proved. (AP7Ib20) They must be true in the sense that knowledge is of unchanging universals. They must be primary and therefore undemonstrable. They must be immediate, which means not known through anything else. And the three qualities they must have in relation to the knowledge based on them are that they are more knowable (which explains the mandate that one be more convinced of them), prior to (which explains the mandate that one be more familiar with them), and causes of their conclusions. That last one will prove very significant. And such are archai. Nous is more an enigma. As the variable in our initial formulation (nous is the arches epistemes), I have left it for last. Aristotle proceeds similarly in the Nichomachean Ethics, concluding that nous is responsible for providing the archai of episteme only after trying to account for this dispensation by means of the other faculties of the rational part of man's soul. In the Posterior Analytics it makes a late appearance on the stage and is only then unveiled as the foundation for knowledge. The mystery is how nous provides us with these principles. Aristotle has left us some clues as to this, and a close reading of his works yields several examples. We will be spending the third part of this essay looking more closely at this phenomenon, so here only a brief sketch of the activity will be given. We will start in the Posterior Analytics. At one point, Aristotle speaks quite comprehensively about the matter at hand. One must keep in mind while reading this that when he says we "learn either by induction or demonstration" that he is speaking both of the learning of knowledge proper (episteme) and of its principles. But perhaps this is clear from context: It is also evident that if a faculty of sensation is absent from the start, some corresponding science {episteme} must be lacking, seeing that a science cannot be acquired if indeed we learn either by induction {epagoge} or by demonstration. Now a demonstration proceeds from universals, whereas an induction proceeds from particulars. But universals cannot be investigated except through induction and even the so-called "things by abstraction { aphairesis} ," although not separable [from substances { ousia} ], are made known to us by induction ... and it is impossible to learn by induction without the power of sensation. For of individuals [there can be onlyJ sensation, and no knowledge { episteme} of them can be acquired; and neither can we demonstrate conclusions from universals without induction, nor can we acquire universals through induction without sensation. (AP8Ia38-8Ib9) There are three things I would like to emphasize from this passage. First, nous attains universals (and therefore archai) by epagoge. This is not an insight peculiar to the Posterior Analytics. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle explicitly states that "it is by induction {epagoge} that principles {archai} are acquired" (NEII39b31). This is regularly translated "induction" but there are problems with rendering it so. It seems to limit the term to an analytic understanding, or perhaps suggest that one needs a number of lower premises from which one can "induce" a primary premise. Although both of these senses are included in Aristotle's use of "epagoge," they do not exhaust it. Joe Sachs suggests translating it as "example," in his translation of Aristotle's Physics, suggesting that we learn universals by looking at single instances: This seems to get at the meaning more, for Aristotle seems to use the word every time he describes the culling of a universal from a particular, even in cases where this is done from only one particular or in settings far from analytic. The second thing I would like to emphasize is the sub-species of epagoge, aphairesis. r'Aphairesis" is almost always translated "abstraction" and has the connotation of a subtraction or a taking away. It is used exclusively for mathematical terms. A circle, for example, is abstracted from a beach ball, whereas its logos or definition (its ballness) is properly "induced." The difference between the two is an important one, and I will deal with it in more detail in the third section. Third, I would like to emphasize the dependence of epagoge upon the experience of sensation. All knowledge for Aristotle can be traced back to sensible th~ngs. Without sensation we would never know anythmg. Aristotle is very explicit about this and in the De Anima goes as far as to say that we cannot think anything without images (though this is not to be taken without qualification). Below is an example of the induction of principles: ... it is for our experiences concerning each subject to provide the principles { archai}. I mean, for instance, that it is for astronomical experience to provide the principles for the science {episteme} of astronomy (for when the appearances had been sufficiently grasped, in this way astronomical demonstrations were discovered; and it is also similar concerning any other art or science whatsoever. (APR46al8) A similar passage occurs at AP87b40. This example, with what we have said about nous as the "arche epistemes" will serve us as our preliminary definition and understanding of Aristotle's noetic. To break new ground, and come to a more fundamental understanding of it, we will look at the ways the light analogy changes or informs our conception of nous. Before we can understand the analogy, however, we must look at Aristotle's general account of light. SECTION TWO: LIGHT AND THE FACULTY OFVISION IN DEANIMA Aristotle's comparison between light and nous in De Anima is brie£ It does not even carry a sentence by itsel£ but instead merely serves as the last clause in a sentence that would be interesting without it. With this in mind, it might seem excessive to give an extended treatment of Aristotle's theory of light in order to explicate it. However, my hope is that the value of such an endeavor will become clear in its application in the third section. The account of sight that I will be explicating can be found primarily in the seventh chapter of the second book of De Anima. My recapitulation will be mostly (and without further reference) drawn from that account. Any references to other parts of De Anima will be given. �... 7 6 respect, we can apply what Aristotle says of sense in general to sight. For sight, as is the case with all senses, The proper object of sight is the visible, and that is color. By "proper" it is meant that color is not sensed by any other sense than sight, in contrast to things like motion which can be sensed with two or more senses (in the example of motion: sight and touch). It is regarding "proper sensibles" that one has the least chance of being mistaken. Aristotle refers to color as "that to which sight is directed." This directedness of sight reminds us that Aristotle describes sight as potency ( dunamis), and that since potency is in a way stretched out toward its fulfillment or actuality (energeia ), this fulfillment for sight is in the being-atwork of perceiving color. Things in the world, he says, are not perceivable because of a certain articulation (logos), but because they have their cause of visibility (color) within themselves. That is to say, we do not see a bright blue ball against a dark green wall because of its ballness, but because its surface is colored. The way color affects this perception is by having the "potency { dunamis} to set in motion what is actively { energeia} transparent." This dunamis is the nature of color. The transparent that it sets in motion is the medium of sight; Aristotle's examples of this transparent include air and water. It is the realm of the visible, the place visible things come together and are made manifest. The transparent is in energeia when it is lit, and it is in dunamis when it is not lit, or dark. "And for that reason it {any color} is not visible without light, but of each thing every color is seen in light:' The formula for sight then seems to be as follows: one needs the actively transparent (light) first, then the colored object which is switched from dunamis to energeia by that light, then the color sets in motion the transparent which causes (as in efficient cause) something visible to be sensed in the eye. The transparent is not ever seen by itself. It is said of the transparent that light is its "color," but this is only said metaphorically. A lit transparent with no colored objects in it would be invisible. The transparent is not an object of our sight except in that it can be said to be that which is between the colors we see and our eyes. But colored objects without the transparent would also be invisible. Aristotle's example is that an object held directly against the eye is not seen. This is the sense in which the transparent is the realm of sight. It is where sight happens. To understand this process in a different ... is receptive of the forms of perceptible things without their material, as wax is receptive of the design of a ring without the iron or gold, and takes up the golden or bronze design, but not as gold or bronze: and similarly the sense of each thing is acted upon by the thing that has color or flavor or sound, but not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute and (DA424a I 9) according to a ratio {logos}. First, and most obviously, this passage makes clear that the material of a visible object is not reproduced in the sight, but merely its form, which in this case seems to be color. But this restricted understanding of form's analogue in sight is made questionable by the last phrase in that passage: "according to a ratio {logos}:' We stated earlier that the sense of sight is not affected by something because of its "definition," the Greek of which is also " logos". This must be a different understanding of the word. Sachs, again, seems to hit on the appropriate translation with "ratio". This indicates that perception, then, is not like a game of "Kick the Can" where our sense organ is the can and the colors are the kickers. For perception is not without logos, even though it is physically affected by its respective stimuli. It still retains a sense of perspective, or proportion. Without this sense, assembling our perceptions of things around us would be as fruitless as trying to understand the exact topography of a river by examining the chaotic path of a feath er floating down it. And so it is in this sense that all perception worthy of the name has a certain logos. This logos is both in the perceptible things themselves and also in our sense organs, which explains why extreme ratios in sensible things (colors too bright, pitch too high) can destroy their corresponding sense organs. For the ratios in colors are duplicated by the ratios physically formed in our eyes. And since our eyes have some physicality, and are not pure potency, they can only accommodate a certain range of ratios. These are the basics of Aristotle's theory of light. As I said before, we will not find this to be a perfect model for intellection (they are, after all, different phenomena), but with luck we should be able to use it to see into the actions of nous in a way we could not before, Arles, France, Vada Mossavat, AOO �8 9 even if part of the benefit we derive :&om this stems :&om contrasting Aristotle's theory of light with his noetic. SECTION THREE: HOW NOUS IS LIKE LIGHT, ONLY BETTER It is not the entirety of what we call nous that Aristotle compares to light, but nous poetikos) the maker mind. Let us look at the passage in which the comparison is made: But since in all nature one thing is the material { hule} for each kind (this is what is in potency { dunamis} in all the particular beings of that kind), but it is something else which is the causal and productive thing by which all of them are formed, as is the case with an art in relation to its material, it is necessary in the soul too that these distinct aspects be present; the one sort is the intellect { nous} by becoming all things, the other sort by becoming all things, in the way an active condition such as light does, for in a certain way light too makes colors that are in potency be at work as colors. (DA430aI 0) It seems likely from the analogy that the nous that becomes all things would be analogous to the sense organ, which becomes the form of all sensible things. But the dichotomy between the maker and nous and its counterpart, the material and nous (which is in potency), does not line up with light and the sense of vision as cleanly as it might first appear. Like so many difficult terms in Aristotle, "dunamis" is used relatively. Because of this non-static quality of the word, Aristotle finds it more efficacious to define it by analogy. In MetI048a30 Aristotle gives us two examples, corresponding to two degrees, of dunamis. His examples are: Hermes in a block of wood or a half line in a whole, because they can be separated out, or someone who knows, even if he is not contemplating, if he is capable of contemplating. This is reminiscent of a similar distinction made in DA4I7a2I: There is something that has knowledge in the way we say any human being is a knower, because humanity is part of the class that knows and has knowledge, but there is also a sense in which we mean by a knower the one who already has, say, grammatical skill; and each of these is in potency { dunamis} but not in the same way, but the former is because his kind and his material { hule} are of such a certain sort, while the latter is because he is capable of contemplating when he wants to, if nothing outside him prevents it. Both passages make the same distinction, and it is clear that Hermes in a block of wood has the same degree of potency as the human being who is a knower only in the sense that he is a human being. Both require something outside of themselves to help them into actuality (energeia), for both have potency ( dunamis) as material (hule). Since this potency is furthest removed from actuality, or being-at-work, I will henceforth call it "first potency". The human being who knows grammar already and is merely not thinking about it is in "second potency" as regards his status as a knower. Now material nous, both in virtue of its name and its dependence upon maker nous, is in first potency. The problem is that the sense of vision, in contrast, is in second potency. Later, in the same chapter from which the above quotation &om De Anima was taken, it is explicitly stated that "In the potency { dunamis} of perception, the fust change comes about by the action of the parent, and when a living thing is born it already has what it takes to perceive, just as it has the capacity for knowledge." That is, a living thing at birth has already undergone the change from first potency to second as regards sight, whereas it only has the capacity (first potency) for knowledge. The baby only has to open his eyes to see, but he still has to learn grammar before he conjugate. This makes the analogy between light and nous trickier. It implies, first of all, that light effects a transition in the sense organ from second potency to full actuality ( energeia ), whereas nous effects only the change &om second potency to first in the mind. As we learned above, these are substantially different changes and they would make the two (light and nous) very difficult to compare. One would also have to answer the question of what it is that brings the material nous into full actuality, and why it is that whatever that may be is not compared with light. I propose a sort of compromise based on a reading in the eighth book of the Metaphysics. Aristotle gives there examples of the ways in which energeia (actuality, being-at-work, etc.) takes precedence over dunamis and establishes that ... it seems impossible to be a house-builder if one has not built any houses, or a harpist if one has not played the harp at all; for the one learning to play the harp learns to play the harp by playing the harp, and similarly with those who learn things. The harpist is helped into second potency by the same instrument of actuality (a harp) with which he will take himself into full actuality. His case is unlike the baby's, in which development in the womb brings the baby's sight to second potency and a different instrument (light) takes it to full actuality. Aristotle says in this passage that learning works on the harpist model. One does not have the capacity to think of grammar added to one like a memory expansion on a hard drive, and then have the ability to actualize that knowledge or not. Rather, the thought occurs to you (or is presented to you) and then you can think or not think about it. The difference is not in the faculty by which you understand a grammatical concept, but in the agent by which the thought is generated. In the first case, it is a teacher (or the thought, itself) which brings itself to your attention (there is an analogy at the end of the Posterior Analytics that makes this especially evident) and then it is you by your will that can think of it. But, in both instances (and regardless of the origin of the act of thinking), your actual conceiving of the grammatical concept is grounded in the maker nous. This is an important difference to understand, and it seems to stem from memory. The one who has never thought of a specific concept cannot will himself into thinking it because it is not an object on his horizon. One who has thought the concept before can open himself up to cognizing them again. (In this way, thinking of something you have already learned is very much like opening your eyes to something.) But in both the case of the person who first comes across a concept and the case of the person who is recalling it for the hundredth time, it is nous which perceives the concept. And this understanding makes the light analogy tenable, for it makes the degree of potency to which maker nous takes material nous unimportant as far as understanding the workings of maker nous, because it causes both changes and acts the same in both. By following that thread we have made significant progress into how we are to read light (it repre- sen ts maker nous) and the sense organ (which seems to represent material nous). But by looking more closely at our experience of the transition from first to second potency we are led to formulate a question about the object of vision, or rather its analogue, the object of thought. I will let Aristotle both formulate and answer the question I am thinking of: And if one were to inquire why it is possible for a boy to become a mathematician but not wise or a physicist, the answer is: the objects of mathematics exist by abstraction { aphairesis} while the principles { archai} of philosophy or physics are acquired from experience; and young men have no conviction of their principles but only use words, while the nature of the objects of physics and of wisdom is not unclear to physicists and to wise men. (NEI 142al5) It is the difference between aphairesis and epagoge that was made in the first section that is key to understanding this passage. Apparently, we are more quickly disposed to allow maker nous to abstract mathematical objects &om our experiences that we are to "induce" through maker nous the archai of philosophy and other such sciences. Insight into the difficulty of coming to see the true archai of such studies, and how easy it is to come up with vacuous archai, can be had from a look at the process Aristotle goes through in De Anima to find the characteristics and essence of the soul. There are two ways Aristotle defines the soul there; one he describes as empty and the other, meaningful. The meaningful definition takes into account all of the faculties of a particular kind of soul. It must do this because a truly meaningful definition is about a single kind of soul, something that gets to the essence and thinghood ( ousia) of a particular being. The empty kind is one that would "fit them all but be appropriate to none" (DA414b24). The meaningful kind of definition takes experience and time to unfold. It is not, like mathematical objects, immediately obvious. As an afterthought, I would like to add that there seems to be another difference between mathematical and philosophical objects which springs from Aristotle's ontology. Because ousia is being in the primary sense, and mathematical objects have a derivative and abstracted being, there is a sense in which mathematical objects do not strive for any energeia like �IO II beings in the more primary sense do, but borrow their energeia from the particular contemplative thinker (see Metl 05 I a30). Philosophy is the study of living essences, not of the empty and static relations between magnitudes to which math is restricted. Because of their dependence on the thinker they do not stretch themselves out toward (or suggest) "metaphysical" questions, as Aristotle would understand that term. This is what I meant, earlier, when I said that they were a good analogy for much of what Aristotle wants to say but a bad example. The failure of the young to see in a clear way the principles of philosophy, and the requirement of time and experience to accomplish that task, seems to contradict something else Aristotle says about the maker nous. In DA430al8 he says the maker nous is by its thinghood ( ousia) a being-at-work ( energeia). And right after that, that it is not the case that "at one time it thinks and that at another time it does not think." If objects of thought are perpetually bathing in the light of nous, why do we not see them? Aristotle answers in Met993b5: ... perhaps, ... the cause is not in the things but in us; for in just the same way that the eyes of bats are related to the mid-day, so also is the intellect {nous} related to those things which are by nature most evident of all. It seems that we are too used to seeing things as particulars and not looking for the reasons past where we have already found them, as though we were accustomed to feeling our way around a room with our eyes shut because the lamp-light hurt our eyes and the rooms colors were too bright. This brings us back to the original analogy and asks what noetic ingredient corresponds to color, and if an answer to that can be found, what corresponds to the transparent. Its equivalent in intellecdon is probably universals, and they are drawn from images probably in the fashion "universal judgements" are said to develop in the first book of the Metaphysics. That is: we have multiple sensations which stick in our memory, and many memories of the same sensation which make our experience possible, and then "out of many conceptions from experience, one universal judgement arises about those that are similar:' This also makes the most sense out of the brief elaboration Aristotle gives the analogy (that it is "in a certain way light too makes colors that are in potency be at work as colors") because making one see universals in particulars is equivalent to making things intelligible (for knowledge is of universals). Maker nous makes the potentially thinkable, actually thinkable. And as light is the energeia of the transparent, we are tempted to say that maker nous is the energeia of something like an inner transparent. Perhaps, though, no such analogue for the transparent can be found in the mind because the material nous is what it thinks, it "becomes all things;' and there is no separation between the thinker and the thought. This seems to be the limit to which this analogy can be stretched. But before we leave this text, we should see if what we have discerned can help supply an answer to one of the bigger questions about the maker nous. ls the maker nous also the Maker? It seems unclear whether nous poetikos can be considered God or whether it is merely a part of every man. D.W. Hamlyn, in a gloss of his translation seems to think it is not, because (among other reasons) Aristotle would have mentioned something like that. This seems to me to assume that if Aristotle linked our minds to God's through the maker nous this would, in the context of his other works, be surprising. But I will try to make a case that there is reason to believe that the maker nous is God and that this claim makes sense in relation to Aristotle's other works. The Metaphysics makes this point most clearly. For what is receptive of the intelligible and of thinghood is the intellect {nous}. And it is at work when it has them: therefore it is in being-at-work { energeia} rather that in receptivity that the intellect seems god-like, and its contemplation is pleasantest and best. So if the divine being is always in this condition that we are sometimes in, that is to be wondered at; and if it is in it to a greater degree than we are, that is to be wondered at still more. And that is the way it is. But life belongs to it too, for the being-at-work of the intellect is life, and that being is being-atwork, and its being-at-work is in itself the best life and is everlasting. And we say that it is a god who everlastingly lives the best life, so that life and continuous and everlasting duration belong to a god; for this being is god. (MetI072b22) Now the maker nous is always at work in a state of contemplation, it is also continuous and it is also everlasting. And as much as we participate in the energeia of the maker nous (which is always itself an Puerto Escondido, Mexico, Abigail Weinberg, AOO energeia) we are participating in the divine. It seems that separating the maker nous from Aristotle's god is unnecessary. Why, then, is Hamlyn hesitant to do it? Perhaps he thinks this would turn Aristotle, who seems to be an otherwise level-headed philosopher, into a transcendental mystic. There is no reason to conclude this either, though. Taking Plotinus as our model of mysticism, who, in a mystical moment, is one with the divine only to slip down from intellection back into the discourse of reason, it is clear to see that Aristotle is no mystic. For Aristotle's divine is pre-eminently rational. In fact, it is only in the discourse of reason that the eternal and divine is attained (and it is that {nous} in us which is deathless and eternal"). He understands the world as a certain intelligible whole with a beginning ( arche) and an end (telos). Thus his pleasure in contemplation is similar to the pleasure of contemplating a well~written play, not the ecstasy of a religious experience. The Aristotelian experience of the divine is not even something properly transcendental. For man is the animal with logos. Participating in god-like contemplation is natural to him. He is fulfilling his dunamis by contemplating. And Aristotle even concedes that the difference between man and god is unbridgeable. One can never contemplate perpetually, like the gods do. Men get tired of thinking, and get hungry and need to feed themselves. But inasmuch as they think on eternal notions, they become those notions, and it is that within them that is deathless. It is not the per- sonality of man that survives, but the intelligible notions his intellect becomes. And it is because these intelligible notions are in substances and things all around him, that his survival in them is no departure to another realm. That is the essential novelty of Aristotle's understanding of objects of thought, as he contrasted it with Plato's (or whoever's doctrine it was that he attributed to the Platonists of his day). This understanding objects of thought (and by that I mean noetic objects) is primary in two ways to Aristotle's noetic theory. First, since objects of thought are archai, they are primary in the sense that they are the principles of all knowledge. This relationship, and the way these archai are perceived, was the main theme explored by this essay. The second way this is significant is that understanding the being of objects of thought is necessary before any epistemology or noetic can be formulated. At least on the surface, Aristotle distanced himself from Plato (and Socrates) by coming to a different understanding of the ontological status of these notions. This is then the groundwork for an understanding of how Aristotle saw his place in the tradition. + Thanks to Mrs. Pamela Kraus for advising this paper. All translations are Mr. Joe Sachs). In cases where he does have a published translation, Mr. Hippocrates G. Apostl.e~ are used. All statements within { } are my own words. �12 13 On Mimesis Robert Dickson, AOO I n his Poetics, Aristotle argues that mimesis is natural to humans, both as something to engage in and something to enjoy. Described as one of the engendering causes of poetry, our relationship with mimesis remains unclear as the Poetics explains how playwrights should best move us with their craft. In the first book of his Metaphysics, Aristotle again speaks of mimesis in passing, recounting the Pythagoreans' understanding of the universe: So he called this other sort of beings forms, and said the perceptible things were apart from these and all spoken of derivatively from these, for the many things with the same names as the forms were results of participation. He changed only the name participation, for the Pythagoreans said that beings are by what of mimesis of the numbers, but Plato by way of participation, having changed the name. What this participation or mimesis of the forms might be, however, they were in unison in leaving behind to be sought. [Metaphysics 987b8J Obviously, the word 'mimesis' meant more to Aristotle (or the Pythagoreans) than simply what occurs when we create art. But why would the same word be used fo r the writing of Oedipus Rex and for the relationship between the tangible realm and the eternal? T hough Aristotle's thought differs greatly from what the Pythagoreans must have meant by mimesis, his view of our world and of our art gains great clarity when we widen the definition of mimesis to its limit and ask what relevance our art has to our souls and nature itself. By considering general mimesis, we shall be forced to consider its relation to our souls, our education, our politics, and our universe. Then we may return to the particular mimesis that goes into making art and ask why it is natural for us to imitate what is outside us. Mimesis: General and Poetic Before we can understand how the human soul produces and enjoys mimesis in its arts, we must fully comprehend mimesis in a more general sense, not limited to human creations or even to humans. For clarity, we will speak of mimesis in two ways: the widest way the word allows and the specific kind of mimesis relevant to our inquiry. By general mimesis we mean not the activity by which a thing becomes the same as another (such as when water comes to be air through evaporation) but rather when a thing assumes some defining characteristics of another thing without changing its own nature (such as when water is dyed to look like red wine but remains water). By 'defining characteristics' we mean that if being a given thing means possessing X necessary qualities (such as being red wine means being alcoholic, derived from a grape, red, and tasteful), the mimetic object assumes not all qualities encompassed by X, but rather so many as to appear the same as or closer in relation to the original object (such as water imitating red wine may mean simply being dyed red). We must acknowledge now that general mimesis is not restricted to human perception or creation, evidenced at the least by chameleons and other animals that assume the color of their surroundings seemingly at will. By poetic mimesis we mean general mimesis restricted to that which is ordered by a human to effect emotion in any human who should see it (such as poetry, painting, and music). The observer must know the object to be mimetic; if he or she is fooled into thinking a painting is actually a window, there will be no pleasure particular to poetic mimesis. It is clear why an art like painting fits our definition of general mimesis: it is paint arranged to present the image of an actual thing. But something should be said about what way music and abstract art are mimetic when there is no clearly imitated thing outside the work. In his Poetics, Aristotle states that poetry is more philosophical than history, "since poetry relates more of the universal, while history relates particulars" (Poetics I 45 I bS). T here is a way in which history is generally mimetic, in that it recreates as best it can actual events in new form. But what separates history from poetry is the structure given to events in order to effect emotion, so that what is conveyed from artist to audience is not merely fact but feeling. In this way, it is not only the particulars that are imitated in art, but the more universal human experience of emotional reaction to things. Music does not attempt (usually) to resemble anything outside itself; it is form and motion applied directly to sounds. But contained in a piece of music is mimetic human emotion, a universal more directly imitated through music than even tragic poetry, which must effect emotion through the use of particular names instead of generic notes. A casual listening to a major and a minor scale reveals that music imitates tension, resolution, conflict, brightness and dreariness (feelings entirely present but difficult to articulate) through differently pitched tones while tragedy must imitate the same human feelings by presenting tension, resolution, conflict, happiness and pathos as they occur in our actual lives, as if we are the tones. Thus we understand music to be poetically mimetic not in that it imitates any particular outside itself but because it attempts to reflect universals directly. The same can be said for other art that effects emotion without representing particular things. Mimetic Creation For it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes them from other animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his earliest understanding) [Poetics I 148b4J This curious claim described by Aristotle as one of the engendering causes of poetry is difficult to believe when we restrict ourselves to reading "mimesis" as poetic mimesis. For how many children speak in verse? Or gain their earliest understanding through painting? Widening the term to general mimesis reveals how mimetic man truly is. That we gain our earliest 1tpcfrta~, better translated as "primary" or "first") understanding through mimesis is a remarkable statement considering that mimesis is not mentioned in On the Soul as a distinct faculty of the intellect. But perhaps we again limit ourselves reading mimesis as something independent in the soul: superfluous, mimesis is the soul's fundamental method of acquisition in all its respects. In their different ways, perception, imagination and intellect are all mimetic faculties. We shall speak of them individually. Perception, as a potency, is nothing other than what it sees, constantly assuming potentially the actual forms of the things before it. Its being is strictly mimetic, taking upon itself the objects of the senses as they are in outside things. This fits well our definition of general mimesis, as the perceptive potency remains a potency as it beholds a rock, though it assumes the being-at-work visible nature of the rock outside of it. Intellect is much like perception in its mimesis, though complicated greatly by the fact that there is no clear distinction between the intelligible thing and the intellect thinking it ( OTS 430 a20). H ow is this mimesis if the intellect not only takes the form of a certain thought but is the form and thought? Without fully exploring the difference between the intellect that becomes all things and that which forms all things, it is enough to recognize that intellect is abstraction from tangible things, an existence that one could say is mimetic of that which can be perceived. "And it [the intellect J is itself intelligible in the same way its intelligible objects are, for in the case of things without material what thinks and what is thought are the same thing, for contemplative knowing and what is known in that way are the same thing... but among things having material, each of them is potentially something intelligible, so that there is no intellect present in them (since intellect is a potency to be such things without their material), but there is present in them something intelligible" ( OTS 430al). The intellect that becomes all things is the clay of the sculptor, taking upon itself (in fact becoming) the form of something else. The intellect that forms all things is the sculptor of all that follows the order of intellect, causing a formed universe, existing as a being-at-work without which nothing thinks. Intellect is mimetic in the same way it is potential and at-work, as the formed and as the one who forms. We are left with imagination: "the motion coming about by the action of sense perception while it is at work" ( OTS 429al ). Its mimetic nature is different from that of perception and intellect, which take on qualities of objects outside the soul. Imagination represents the objects of perception as imaginings for the intellect, in a sense translating the objects of one faculty into those of another. "And for the soul that thinks things through, imaginings are �14 15 Architectural detail, I 984 Winter Olympic Museum, Sarajevo, Vada Mossavat, AOO present in the way perceptible things are ... for this reason the soul never thinks without an image" (ors 43lal5). Imagination is the only potency of the human soul that is mimetic of the soul for the soul. Imagination's mimetic function is especially significant to an inquiry into poetic mimesis. Just as through a synthesis of imaginings we derive something greater with the intellect ( OTS 43 lb), in poetic mimesis it is through a synthesis of particulars that the audience is brought to recognize some underlying universal and feel some elevated emotion. Both imagination and poetic mimesis are willed types of mimesis, instances of one person being able to recreate a universe according to some reason. We will see below exactly how related imagination and poetic mimesis are. Something more should be said about human reason and its mimetic nature. For the intellect is not only mimetic in becoming and forming things, but in articulating what things are. Our words are symbols of impressions in the soul, impressions common to all people, though our words differ (On Interpretation, l 6a5). Words gain meaning mimetically, the sound of "horse" only meaning something to someone who can attach it to its appropriate thought. Complex statements, such as "All horses have hair," are instances of us unfolding in speech what is already present in what we know simply horses to be. This is mimesis, humans representing simple forms and divisions between things in statements of truth and falsity. This is significant to our inquiry because our speech only lets us represent thoughts of things, not other impressions in the soul. The word "fear" spoken by one person can conjure the thought of what fear is in another, but not the emotion itself. Poetic mimesis is what allows us to do this: by representing a fearinspiring thing, an artist can conjure that emotion in another. As A.6yoa is to thought, poetic mimesis is to emotion. Both are extensions of our political nature, which is further confirmed by the shared pleasure of more than one person responding similarly to the same poetically mimetic object. Another way in which mimesis is natural to us from childhood is in our acquisition of virtue, which occurs through habituation. Consider: The virtues ... we acquire by first having actually practised them, just as we do the arts. We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it: for instance, men become builders by building houses, harpers by playing on the harp. Similarly we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. [Nie. Ethics l I03bI J Thus although actions are entitled just and temperate when they are such acts as just and temperate men would do, the agent is just and temperate not when he does these acts merely, but when he does them in the way in which just and temperate men do them [done with knowledge, chosen deliberately and for its own sake, and with the act sprung from a fixed and permanent disposition of character]. [Nie. Ethics I I 05b5J In order to become morally virtuous, we do the things that virtuous people do until we do them for their own sake and we take pleasure in the act itsel£ This is general mimesis continued until it is more, actual change into the thing imitated. Moreover, it is through childhood mimesis that children grow to become full members of family and community: by mimicking parents and neighbors they assume what qualities are specific to their families and communities, such as language, customs, and mannerisms. The link between mimesis and our political nature is strong. Mimetic Enjoyment ... and [it is J equally natural that everyone enjoys mimetic objects. A common occurrence indicates this: we enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as the forms of vilest animals and of corpses. [Poetics I I 48b8J Aristotle here seems to speak mainly of poetic mimesis and our enjoyment of it, though what is said is quite similar to this statement about imagination in On the Soul: When we have the feeling that something is terrifying or frightening we immediately feel the corresponding feeling, and similarly if we think it is something that inspires confidence, but with the imagination we are in the same condition as if we were beholding terrifying or confidenceinspiring things in a painting. [ OTS 427b23] This furthers the above claim that imagination is an �17 16 instance of general mimesis tied closely to poetic mimesis. Our imagination presents to us an image of, say, a bear, which we do not fear but instead welcome (~atpci V, translated above as "enjoy"). We are "in the same condition" as when we behold the bear as a poetically mimetic object. Why is imagination so much like poetic mimesis? As stated above, both imagination and poetic mimesis are willed. They grant humans the god-like ability to create things not merely as they are but according to whatever reason seems best. Both then grant humans the power to study images outside of any time of immediate duty to act. Imagination and poetic mimesis bring us omnipotence and omniscience over tangible things through a divine removal. But a grand impasse arises when this removal is considered: How, if the removal of the object from us removes us from the corresponding feeling, does tragedy (mimesis of "fearful and pitiable matters") excite us to feel fear and pity? More generally, how exactly does any poetic mimesis move us to emote when the things represented are removed as such from us? Our answer is in the difference between particulars and universals. Though poetic mimesis removes particulars from our experience, it effectively calls to light universals that are not at all removed from us. In our bear example above, for instance, the painted claws of the bear are removed from us and do not excite fear. But a sudden recognition that some animals are created by nature to do violence to humans would not be at all removed from us, and would excite fear. Even a sudden recognition that we are terrorstricken at irrational creatures would be more generally fear-inspiring than being afraid of a single bear's claw. The difference between particular and universal should be made clear. The particular represented by poetic mimesis is the apparent object independently existent outside of the mimesis, such as the actual bear in our example above. The universal may be a more general truth articulated through symbols or, more likely, a common human response to a given thing. A play may use particular names and actions to convey the truth that "Courage is a necessary virtue for kings" or it may simply call to light in the audience's minds the happiness that follows from courageous actions. Since poetic mimesis is created primarily to effect emotion, it follows that the primary universal relayed is not a rational truth, but rather a response, such as the connection between action and happiness that can be described but not relayed through words. We return to imagination. Aristotle says: Now the thinking potency grasps in thought the forms that are present in things imagined, and since what is to be pursued or fled from is marked out for it in those imaginings, even apart from sense perception, it is moved when it applies itself to imagined things. For instance, perceiving that a signal light is fire, and observing by what is common to the senses that it is moving, one recognizes that it is an enemy; but sometimes, by means of the imaginings and thoughts in the soul, just as if one were seeing, one reasons out and plans what is going to happen in response to what is present. [OTS 43lb2J The particular imaginings, say of fire and motion, are independently removed from our actions and emotions. But through a synthesis of the imaginings something new arises in us, knowledge that it is an enemy, and we are moved to act or to emote. This mirrors and cannot be far in soul activity from the beholder of poetic mimesis, synthesizing particulars relayed directly to recognize something more general. The relation between poetic mimesis and imagination does not fully address the main question raised by the above passage: Why do we enjoy mimetic objects? The explanation of this too is that understanding gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but likewise to others too, though the latter have a smaller share in it. This is why people enjoy looking at images, because through contemplating them it comes about that they understand and infer what each element means, for instance that "this person is so-and-so:' For, if one happens not to have seen the subject before, the image will not give pleasure qua mimesis but because of its execution of colour, or for some other such reason. [Poetics 1448bl2] The enjoyment of mimetic objects is the enjoyment of knowledge. Yet beholding poetic mimesis is not the same as learning, for it follows from the above passage that poetic mimesis cannot present anything new to the audience: the pleasure would not be that particular to poetic mimesis but rather of the lesser parts of the art (diction, spectacle, color, etc.) But is this restricted to particulars or to universals? · It is the particulars represented that cannot be new to the audience. Without knowing what an apple is, one cannot enjoy a painting of an apple as something relaying a univers~l. If a language is a common collection of symbols for thoughts, it follows that an artist can no more communicate a universal through an unknown mimetic object than a Greek word can convey a thought to a strictly English speaker. But the universal relayed through poetic mimesis is different, and does not appear to be the sort of thing that one "knows" like one knows what an apple or a king is. The universals relayed are recognized by the audience through their own activity: "through contemplating them it comes about that they understand and infer what each element means." There is pleasure in coming to understand the particulars of an artwork as elements of something larger, even if the larger truth is something already somehow known to us. This is different from learning, as what is universal must be apparent to everybody. "Recognition" is an appropriate name for what happens in observing poetic mimesis: something known but not acknowledged is brought to light by the audience's response to the object. Political Mimesis Mimesis, general and poetic, has been discussed as closely tied to our political nature in its creation and its enjoyment. As the emotional counterpart to our rational 'A6yoro, it represents the impressions in our soul for others. It is how we are habituated to moral virtue by others, and it is how we become members of communities. But the most striking connection between mimesis and politics is in the most elevated relationship possible, that of two virtuous friends. Friendship, the bond of the state (Nie. Ethics l 155a25), is in its most perfect and complete form when it is between two people who are exceedingly virtuous. The affection between the two is prompted by similarity in virtue (Nie. Ethics l 156b20). Aristotle says the following: Also, when men wish the good of those they love for their own sakes, their goodwill does not depend on emotion but on a fixed disposition. And in loving their friend they love their own good, for the good man in becoming dear to another becomes that other's good. Each party therefore both loves his own good and also makes an equivalent return by wishing the other's good, and by affording him pleasure; for there is a saying, '.Amity is equality; and this is most fully realized in the friendships of the good. [Nie. Ethics l l 57b30J Though we wish goodwill for our friends, it is our own virtue that we see in their actions. The approval of a virtuous person is self-recognition for the approved one, who cannot fully know himself independently. Happiness follows from a virtuous person's actions, but a virtuous person may not recognize the extent of his or her virtue unless it is reflected in another, someone admired. I believe the difference between being happy from virtue and being aware that you are .happy because you are virtuous is what friendship provides and poetic mimesis presents for contemplation. Is this mimesis? Obviously, there is no true creation of the friend like there is of a poem. But if a sculpture was created of a man,' he could see himself through the eyes of another and react to himself in a new way. He could gain insight into not just what he is but how he is to others: he could see himself as a political animal while remaining himsel£ We are friends with people as much like ourselves as possible, such that our choice of friends is something of a poetic selection. We replace mimesis of ourselves with what actually is us, unimitated, and we behold ourselves as if we are images. The "bond of the state" is akin to poetic mimesis, a recognition of everything outside us as fair or poor reflections. Before any more can be said about poetic mimesis, we must understand more fully general mimesis in its most universal sense and what causes it. opE;t~ and Mimesis Consider these passages: Its [the nutritive/ reproductive potency's J work is to beget offspring aswell as to use food, since the most natural thing for a living thing to do ... is to make another like itself, for an animal to make an animal and a plant to make a plant, in order to have a share in what always is and is divine, in the way it is able to do. For all things yearn [6pE:yemt J for that, and for the sake of it do everything that they do by nature ... So since it is impossible for them to share continuously in what always is and is divine, since no destructible thing admits of remaining one and the same in number, each of them does share in �19 18 it in whatever way it can have a share, one sort more and another less, enduring not as itself but as one like itself, that is one with it not in number but in kind. [ OTS 4 I 5a25J There is a certain ceaseless motion that is always moving, and it is in a circle (and this is evident not only to reason but in fact), so that the first heaven would be everlasting. Accordingly, there is also something that moves it. And since what is in motion and causes motion is something intermediate, there is also something that causes motion without being in motion, which is everlasting, an independent thing, and a being-at-work. But what is desired [ 'tO opEK'tOV J and what is thought cause motion in that way: not being in motion, they cause motion... And it [the unmoved moverJ causes motion in the manner of something loved, and by means of what is moved moves other things. Now if something is moved, it admits of being other than it is; and so, even if the primary kind of change of place is a beingat-work, insofar as something is moved, it is in that respect at least capable of being otherwise, with respect to place even if not with respect to thinghood. But since there is something that causes motion while being itself motionless, this does not admit of being otherwise than it is in any respect at all. [Metaphysics I 072a20] In the On the Soul passage, Aristotle presents the activities of ensouled, mortal things as imitative of that which does not change, what is eternally itself In the relation of the fixed stars to the unmoved mover, a circularity is the proper motion of place to mimic the eternal because it is more continuous, more perfect than linear. This is ope~t<;, translated often as 'desire' or 'appetite: But it truly means a thing's stretching itself out, a meaning almost captured by the English word "longing." ope~t<; is the link between the tangible and the eternal, that which the transient has in its attempt to be as complete as that which does not change and never will. It is also evidence of the most grand mimesis existent, that of all changing things in their efforts to be like the eternal and constant. In fact, the only 11 thing that is never mimetic is that which does not admit of being otherwise than it is in any respect at all," the motionless first mover. All motion of comingto-be, all being-at-work from potency, is mimesis on the part of a changing thing attempting to assume the completion and perfection of the eternal, the unmoved. If OpE~tc; is a grand cause of motion, and of our general mimesis, what particular relevance does it have to our poetic mimesis? The answer is that it is the same: poetic mimesis is a stretching out to the divine on the part of humans, elevating our practical concerns to the level of the unchanging. The difference between history and tragedy, discussed above, is that tragedy presents a universal behind its particulars. What's more, the events of tragedy follow strictly according to necessity from each other, whereas history does not present the cause of each action in its scope. All art presents some kind of nature in a frame, a thing with a beginning, middle and end. An observer, as said above, is granted omniscience about a contained image of our practical realm, something we would normally deliberate about (as if we were to act) , and instead he contemplates (Poetics I 448b I 5). This is the opE~tc; of poetic mimesis. Just as the fixed stars stretch their natures to partake in the divine, poetic mimesis stretches the part of the human soul generally reserved for changing things and elevates its function to something akin to contemplation of unchanging things, the most divine activity of the human soul. The true feat is that it does so through an appeal to our emotions, in a sense elevating them as well, allowing us to contemplate them as well as the mimetic objects. This is not particular to tragedy, though it is illustrated well by it. Beholding any poetically mimetic object allows the human soul to treat the affairs of the transient earth as eternal ideas of contemplation. This is a luxury present because of the structure, the extended A.6yocr, introduced by the artist to changing things. A person's perception of a bear must be met with deliberation. A person's perception of a painting of a bear is removed from deliberation and will not alter in any way so long as the observer wills. It becomes a thing that can be contemplated like a metaphysical truth, continually. A melody arranges sound so that it all seems present, that what has been heard and what is anticipated are felt together as parts of a thing, something that can be understood as a whole but experienced in parts, and contemplated. I believe this to be a fair way to understand aesthetic beauty: a contemplation of that which, without the added order of a person, could simply not be contemplated. This is the cause and end of poetic mimesis. • GREEK TRANSLATION Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Lines 668-720 Samuel Garcia, A99 Chorus: In this land, stranger, renowned for its horses you have come to the fairest dwellings of the earth, splendid Colonus, there the sweet nightingale sings, ·incessantly engaged, from under the green and wooded glens, dwelling in the flushed ivy and in the god's inviolable foliage, hidden from the sun, with countless fruit, with neither wind nor wintry storms; where Dionysus, ever the reveler, spends his days, tending to divine nurses. And beneath the dew of heavens, day after day, the fair-clustering narcissus blooms always, ancient crown of might goddesses, and so does the · gold-gleaming crocus; nor do the tireless springs from which the wandering streams of Cephisus issue forth diminish, but ever daily, with water undefiled, does that river flow fervently over the plains of the broad-swelling earth. The choruses of Muses loathe not this place, nor, in turn, does Aphrodite of the golden reins. And there is something the like of which the land of Asia has never known; nor has it ever yet grown in the great Dorian island of Pelops, a tree planted not by the hancis of men, but rather self-produced, a terror to hostile spears which flourishes mightily in this land: the leaf of the gray olive, nurturer of young life. This none of the young nor any dwelling in old age will ravage nor make barren with their hands; for Zeus Morios, with all things ever in his sight, gazes upon it and so too does gray-eyed Athena. And I have yet more praise for this city our mother, a gifi: of a powerful divinity, the greatest glory of the land, glorious for its noble steeds, for their young colts, for its prosperity so near the sea. For it was you, Son of Kronos, Lord Poseidon, you who enthroned her in this glory, having brought first to these streets the bridle that tames the steed. And the much rowed oar of the sea, marvelously wrought by the hands, leaps in the air, following after the hundred-footed Nereids. Xo EUt7t7tOU, ~EVE, 'tUOe xwpao I.Kou 1a Kpchtma yfo; e7tauA.a, 'tOV apyfi'ta ICOA(J)VOV' eve a A.iyeia µwupe'tat 0aµ.i~ouoa µaA.tm' ariorov xA.ropa'ic; u7to pacromc;, 'tOV oi. Vffi7tOV EXOUOa !ClOOOV Kat •av <'iPmov Sc.au cl>UAAaOa µuptOKap7tOV clVcXAtOV clVTJVeµOV 'te 7tclV't(J)V xc.tµ.rovrov· 'i.v' o l3aKXtffi1ac; ad L\tovuooc; eµj3a1c.uEt 0dmc; aµcl>t7toA.ffiv neiivmc;. 0aA.Af:t 8' oupaviac; u7t' axvac; o KaUi(3o1puo Kai-nµap ald vap!Ctoooc;, µeyaA.otv 0eo'iv apxa\.ov O'tecl>avroµ', 0 'te xpucrauyiic; Kp6Koc;· ouO' au7tVOt Kpfivm µtvu0ouoiv Kricl>toou voµ.aoc.o pc.e0prov, aU' aii:v E:n'T\µan cOKU'tOKoc; 7teoirov E7ttvioc.'tat clKT1p<hcp crUV oµppq> mc.pvouxou xeov6c;· ouoi: Mouoav xopoi VtV cl7teITTUYTIOOV, ouo' au a xpuoavwc; 'Acl>poooi.a. EO'tlV o' ofov Eyffi yoc; 'Acri.a<; ouK E:naKouro, ouo' EV ·~ µ£clA.<;i L\ropiOt vaocp neA.o7toc; 7tc07to1c. PA.ao-rov cl>u1c.uµ' axdprowv au't07tot6v, enerov <1>6P11µa oo'lrov, o ·~& eaA.Af:t µEyrn-ra xc.Op<;<. yA.auK<lc; 7tat0o1p6cl>ou cl>l>Uov E:A.aiac;· 'tO µEv nc; OU veapoc; ouoi: yvp<;i ouvvairov aA.tcOOel XEPl 7tEpoac;· 0 yap dcrmi:v opffiv KUKAO<; Af:uocrc.t vtv Mopiou L\1oc; XU yAaUKffi7tl<; 'NJava. «AA.av o' at vov exro µa'tp07t0Aet 't~Oe Kpcl'tlO'tOV, oropov tau µeyaA.ou 0aiµovoc;, d7tciv, (X0ovocr) aux11µa µf.ytO'tOV, c.um7tov, eu7troA.ov, c.u0aA.aocrov. ro 7tat Kpovou, cru yap VtV E<; t60' etcrac; auxriµ', ava~ IlooetMv, t7t7tOtcrlV 'tOV clKecnfipa XOAtVOV 7tpcO'tatOt 'tatOOe K'ttcrac; ayma'ic;. a O' c.uijpc.tµoo h7tayA: aA.ia xc.pcrt *7tapa7ttoµEva* 7tA.a.a 0pq)mcc.t, 1&v hmoµ7toorov Nripflorov aK6A.ou0oc;. �21 20 COMMENTARY Sam Garcia, A 99 I wooded glens, I dwelling in the flushed ivy, I and in the gods inviolable.foliage... " began by doing something that may soundpecuThe word.for ivy, Ktooov, is modified by liar: I rendered it as gracelessly literal as possible. a word that often describes a persons complexion, Only after having a basic understanding ofthe otvronov, what I translate a.s 'Jlushed. "This word thoughts and images that the original seeks to convey otvronov is related to the Greek word.for wine do I feeljustified in departing.from it, as depart we (otv0<;). The color, then, ofthe ivy is obviously ultimatelymust. For, in my opinion, a translation being compared to that ofwine; must not simply aspire to beauty, but, more interestingly, the ivys in sonority and arrangement of complexion is perhaps being words, but to beauty and accuracompared to the complexion of cy: Ifbeauty be your only criteria man grown drunk.from wine. on, you may wellfind yourself The ivy, then, is a perfect symcomposing some beautiful new bolfor an exuberance which, passage, rather than.fashioning the chorus declares, distinguisha beautiful rendition ofan es Co/onus. This beautiful already existingpassage. Of personification of Colo nus' course, what you are attempting landscape gives this passage to translate is also an important a life it would have otherwise consideration. Aristotle sLogic lacked. admittedly deserves a different In such a way can sort ofattention than, say, poetry, much like paintings, Baudelaire s Les Fleurs du Mal. offer us an image oflife which AttMney Ctnt1'al, Conte on Watercolor Paper, "What seemed most important Corey Sebastian, A99 seeks not only to capture a about this particular Greek pasmoment in time, but the very sage was the vividness ofits movement oflife. In this passages case, the images imagery: More than anything else, I wanted to prearise not onlyfrom the choice ofwords, butfrom serve that in translation. the structure within which those words are cast. I will give a briefexample ofthis vividness, ''Flushed ivy" is an example ofdescription which I hold p rincipally responsible fo r the bringing life to a passage; but looked at from passages beauty. In the first stanza, the chorus anotherperspective, so does the very succession eulogizes Colonus. Apart ofwhat makes the ofdescriptions surrounding it. The structure of imagery .so powerful here is that the descriptions this passage and its individual images offer us .succeed each other very rapidly, building a palpaa vividly memorable picture I hoped to convey ble momentum: "there I the sweet nightingale .sings, in translation. + I ince.s.santlyengaged,from under the green and n translating this passagefrom Greek to English, I Sarajevo, 1997, Vada Mossovat, AOO �22 FRENCH 1997-98 TRANSL A TION Ia Chanson du Mal Aimi, by Gaullaume Apollinaire Translation by Lauren Connolly, A9 8 A night of half-fog in London A hooligan who resembled My love came to meet me And the look he threw me Made me lower my eyes in shame I thought of these happy kings When false love and the one With whom I am still in love Colliding with their faithless shadows Made me so unhappy I followed this lout Who whistled hands in pockets We seemed between the houses Open wave of the Red Sea Him the Hebrews me Pharaoh Regrets upon which hell relies That a heaven of oblivion would open on my wishes For her kiss the kings of the world Would die the famous poor For her might have sold their shadow Let fall these waves of brick If you were not well-loved I am the sovereign of Egypt Her sister-spouse her army If you are not my only love Ac the turning of a street burning With all the lights of its facades Wounds in the bloody haze Where the facades were lamenting A woman resembling her It was her look of inhumanity The scar on her naked neck Drunk leaving a tavern Ac the moment I recognized The falsity of love itself When wise Ulysses returned Ac last to his homeland His old dog remembered him Beside the cloth which hung shimmering His wife was waiting that he might come back The royal house of Sacontale Weary of conquering rejoiced When he found her pale from Waiting and her eyes grown dim with love Caressing her male gazelle I have wintered in my past Sun of Easter return To warm a heart more frozen Than the forty of Sebaste Less than my life martyred My beautiful ship o' my memory Have we sailed enough In wave bitter to drink Have we rambled enough From beautiful dawn to sad night Farewell false love confounded With the woman who draws away With the one that I lost Last year in Germany And chat I will not meet again Milky Way o' luminous sister Of the white streams of Canaan And of the white bodies of loving women Will we dead swimmers follow panting Your course towards other nebulas I remembered another year It was the dawn of an April day I sang my beloved joy Sang love with virile voice At that moment of love the year Un soir de demi-brune a Londres Un voyou qui ressemblait a Mon amour vine a ma reconcre Et le regard qu'il me jeta Me fit baisser les yeux de honte J' ai pense a ces rois heureux Je suivis ce mauvais gari;:on Qui sifflotait mains dans les poches Nous semblions entre les maisons Onde ouverte de la mer Rouge Lui les Hebreux moi Pharaon Regrets sur quoi l' enfer se fonde Qu'un ciel d' oubli s' ouvre a mes voeux Pour son baiser les rois du monde Seraient morts les pauvres fameux Pour elle eussent vendu leur ombre Que tombent ces vagues de briques Si cu ne fus pas bien aimee Je suis le souverain d' Egypte Sa soeur-epouse son armee Si ti n' es pas l' amour unique J' ai hiverne dans mon passe Au tournant d' une rue brulant De tous les fuex de ses fa~ades Plaies du bruillard sanguinolent Ou se lamentaient les fa~ades Une femme lui ressemblant Mon beau naivre o ma memoire Avons-nous assez navigue Dans une onde mauvais a boire Avons-nous assez divague De la belle aube au triste soir C' ecait son regard d' inhumaine La cicatrice a son cou nu Sortit saule d' une taverne Au moment ou je reconnus La faussete de I' amour meme Adieux faux amour confondu Avec la femme qui s' eloigne Avec celle que j' ai perdue L' annee derniere en Allemagne Et que je ne reverrai plus Lorsque' ii fut de retour enfin Dans sa patrie le sage Ulysse Son vieux chien de lui souvint Pres d'un tapis de haute lisse Sa femme attendait qu' il revmt Voie lactee o soeur lumineuse Des blancs ruisseaux de Chanaan Ee des corps blancs des amoureuses Nageurs motes suivrons-nous d' ahan Ton cours ver d' autres nebuleuses L' epoux royal de Sacontale Las de vaincre se rejouit Quand il la retrouva plus pale D' attente et d' amour yeux palis Caressant sa gazelle male Je me souviens d' une autre annee C' ecait I' aube d' un jour d' avril J' ai chance ma joie bien-aimee Chance l' amour a voix virile Au moment d' amour de I' annee Lorsque le faux amour et celle Dont je suis encore amoureux Heutant leurs ombres infideles Me rendirent si malheureux Revienne le soleil de Paques Pour chauffer un coeur plus glace Que les quarante de Sebaste Moins que ma vie martyrises �24 25 Translation of and Commentary on Baudelaire's "Le Crepuscule du Soir" R. Justice Schunior, A99 Twilight Here is the charming evening, friend of the criminal; It comes like an accomplice, with a wolf's step; the sky Closes slowly like a great alcove, And impatient man changes into a musky beast. Oh evening, lovable evening, desired by the one Whose arms, without falsehood, can say: Today We have toiled! It is evening which soothes Minds that a savage grief devours, The stubborn scholar whose forehead weighs him down, And the laborer who regains his bed. Nevertheless unhealthy demons in the atmosphere Awaken heavily, like businessmen, And knock the shutters and the awning as they fly. Through gaslights that the wind torments Prostitution kindles the streets; Like an anthill she clears her exits; Everywhere she pushes through a secret path, Thus as an enemy attempts a night raid; She moves to the bosom of the city of filth Like a worm that steals from Man what he eats. One hears here and there the kitchen hiss, The theatres shriek, the orchestras purr; The gambling tables, where games cause delights, Fill with whores and swindlers, their accomplices, And thieves, who have neither mercy nor respite, Soon go to begin their work, they also, And softly force the doors and the cash boxes In order to live some days and clothe their mistresses. Gather yourself, my soul in this grave moment, And close your ear to this roar. It is the hour where the pains of the diseased grow bitter! The somber Night takes them by the throat; they finish Their destiny and go towards the common abyss; The hospital fills with their sighs.-More than one Le Crepuscule Du Soir Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel; II vient comme un complice, a pas de loup; le ciel Se ferme lentement comme une grande alcove Et l'homme impatient se change en bete fauve. 0 soir, aimable soir, desire par celui Dont les bras, sans metir, peuvent dire: Aujourd'hui Nous avons travaille!-C'est le soir qui soulage Les esprits que devore ine douleur sauvage, Le savant obstine dont le front s' alourdit, Et l' ouvrier courbe qui regagne son lit. Cependent des demons malsains clans l' atmosphere S' eveillent lourdemont, comme des gens d' affaire, Et cognent en valets et l' auvent. A travers les lueurs que tourmente le vent La Prostitution s' allume dans les rues; Comme une fourmiliere elle ouvre ses issues; Partout elle se fraye un occulte chemin, Ainsi que l' ennemi qui tente un coup de main; Elle remue au sein de la cite de fange Comme un ver qui derobe a l'Homme ce qu'il mange. On entend ~a et la les cuisines siffler, Les theatres glapir, les orchestres ronfler; Les tables d'hote, dont le jeu fait deluces, S' emplissent de catins et d' escrocs, leurs complices, Et les voleurs, qui n' ont ni treve ni merci, Vont bientot commencer leur travail, eaux aussi, Et forer doucement les portes et les caisses Pour vivre quelques jours et vetir leurs maitresses. Recueille-toi, mon ame, en ce grave moment, Et ferme ton oreille a ce rugisseement. C' est l'heure ou les douleurs des malades s' aigrissent! La sombre Nuit les prend a la gorge; il finissent Leur destinee et vont versele gouffre commun; L'hopital se remplit des leurs soupirs.-Plus d' un Will not return to look for his evening soup, In the corner by the fire, in the evening, next to a loved soul. Ne viendra plus chercher la soupe parfumee, Au coin du feu, le soir, aupres d'une ame aimee. Yet most have never known The sweetness of the hearth and have not lived! Encore la plupart n'ont-ils jamais connu La douceur du foyer et ri ont jamais vecu! -Les Fleurs du Mal, p.277, Godine edition. - T wilight is the transition between day and night. We might imagine Baudelaire stopping on a busy city street to observe this transition in the passers-by, both those who are ending their labors and those who are beginning their night'~ work. Evening is welcomed differently by different people and these various approaches to the coming night are reflected in the confused and conflicting images of the poem. Our first image of evening is ominous. Evening is charming in that it puts us under a spell. It bewitches and transforms. Dimming light has the intoxicating power to make us speak and act with greater freedom. Quietly and slowly like a wolf, almost without our looking or noticing it, evening approaches and the light fades away. Evening is a hunter of men and transforms men into hunters. The friend and accomplice of criminals, it covers their work with its darkness. It assists men in their crimes and works its own special magic, giving them the courage to do what they would be ashamed to do in the light. It is as if a great lid is slowly closed over the world, trapping men in together without the watchful eye of the sun. But evening has another face. Baudelaire does not waste any words on a transition from one image of evening to another. He merely begins the next stanza as if his attention has abruptly turned from evening's sinister aspect to its comforting one. Evening is the greatest joy to those who must toil during the day. For those who have labored long, both physically and mentally, evening is the only time that is truly theirs. The day must be spent in earning a living; the night must be spent in sleeping. Only evening remains for them to enjoy the company of loved ones, a warm dinner, a quiet house. Evening is that moment right before sleep when we can revel in the comforts of home. Evening is the reward, the goal that scholar and workman have been striving for during long hours of tedious work. While this aspect of evening does exist, Baudelaire only cares to devote six lines to its description. In the next stanza he returns to the seedier side. He is most interested in those that welcome evening as a beginning to their work and particularly in the similarity of this evening beginning to its morning counterpart. In lines I I-I 3 he describes demons awakening like bats from their daytime slumber. Although we might imagine demons gleefully flying off to midnight revelry, Baudelaire describes them as no different from businessmen who must shake away their sleepiness and trudge to work. Evening is no different from morning in its form; only the kinds of workers vary. Knocking the shutters and awnings as they fly by is all in a night's work for demons. One image leads quickly to another. In lines I 4-20 we see how one word catalyzes another image to tangle and confuse what we picture. As the demons fly through the street, they stir up a wind that causes the gas lamps to flicker. From this image we are led to Prostitution kindling in the streets like those same flickering lamps. We picture women going to their separate posts below a street lamp, marking out their territory like ants with their scent. The image of the anthill in line I 0 portrays prostitution as an insidious force that infests the city. Like the workmen and the business-like demons, ant-like prostitutes march diligently to work. But they are workers of the underworld, and their paths are secret (line I 7). This path-clearing activity of Prostitution leads Baudelaire to associate the tunneling of ants with a secret attack on the city, which prostitution treacherously destroys from the inside. It opens the doorway to all crime and leads to a kind of urban decay. Like a worm that causes an apple to rot as it works its way to the core, Prostitution "moves to the bosom of the city of filth" (line I 9). Baudelaire's final image of Prostitution is that of a parasitic tapeworm (line 20) that lives off the city and weakens it morally. One image leads into another. It is almost impossible to separate them. Baudelaire is fascinated and revolted by the life that begins in the evening. It is both like and unlike the activity of those who work during the day. Instead of the force that creates the city with legitimate work, prostitutes, thieves, and gamblers destroy it. There is something pernicious in the underworld of the night. These images pile up one on top of the other and build to a climax. In line 2 I, approximately the middle of the poem, the noise is overpowering: hissing, shrieking, howling, and purring can be heard all around. We can imagine that as it gets darker the entertainment for the evening begins. Restaurants and cafes open, orchestras begin to play, people laugh and shout. Nighttime confusion fills the streets. These s~unds are all the more confused because of the growing darkness. Again Baudelaire sees a similarity between those who begin their work at night with those who begin during the day. In lines 25-28 he describes thieves who must go to work in order to make a living a clothe their mistresses, just as any businessman must provide for his family. I picture Baudelaire watching both the man returning to his hearth and the thief setting out on his �27 26 night's work. The thief, prostitute, swindler, and demon interest him more. Their world is bright and bewitching. Yet it is in the midst of this scene of evening activity that Baudelaire stops and speaks directly to his soul (line 29). This is a moral command to gather himself in the face of confusion and chaos. He rebukes himself for being drawn in by the evening's attractions. Evening, as we have seen, is filled with all kinds of pleasures that result in both good and evil. Both returning home after a day's labor and setting out for a nights sinful dissipation are the delights of the evening. It is this roar of the world that passes us each evening on the streets that Baudelaire wishes to close his ear to. He wants to hear what we cannot hear on the street. Just below the roar of the street is the sound of the sighs of the dying. This sound is horrifying, not fascinating. More than once Baudelaire has noticed that both those who find solace in the evening and those who make their living at night are workers. But there are those who do not work but wait. Evening is not just the time of universal pleasure, it is also the time when life most often comes to an end. In line 3 I Baudelaire speaks of the diseased who lie in forgotten corridors of hospitals that no one wishes to visit. Evening ushers in the night that leads them to oblivion. Baudelaire reminds us in lines 34-36 that many will not return to enjoy their evening meal and quiet time by the fire. The last terrifying couplet of the poem speaks of others yet, others who have no advocate and have no pleasure from evening. Baudelaire seems to consider living as the enjoyment of evening, whether its pleasures are a beginning or an end to work. What is so frightening about this last couplet is that the people Baudelaire has been describing, scholar, workman, gambler, and prostitute, are all in the minority. All the chaos and noise they create is small compared with the large number that have never known life or any kind of sweetness. The majority are those we do not see and do not want to see. We can easily moralize about the, corrupt nature of the city at night, but we would rather not think about the lost ones. These are the ones facing their last hours alone and in pain. They are led to the common abyss without having known the sweeter pleasures that evening offers. Evening is not only a beginning; it is also an ending. The first few lines of the poem can be seen in a new light after the last couplet. Night closes in not only as a cover over our wicked deeds but also as a coffin lid. It is wolf-like because it comes like a predator to pick off the weak and old among us. Baudelaire is gifted with the ability to paint a picture of what is before him in words. Yet the moral force of this poem is that he commands his soul to repel the attractive force of what is colorful and fascinating in the night. He focuses on sound, not sight. Our ear is shut to the bustling activity of the night and is directed to quiet murmurs. In this way we are led to consider a world not directly before our eyes. Evening is presented to us both as an end to the day's labors and as a beginning of the night's pleasures, but the final image of evening is the ultimate and lonely finish to sad and unnoticed lives. + Your Choice Was to Live: Ismene's Resistance to Her Family Megan Graff, AO I M Yhigh school literature teacher once asked our class who were the Antigones and who the Ismenes. I raised my hand with the former group, looked around and proudly labeled us as the Leaders: strong-willed, determined go-getters who were not afraid of sacrificing convention or taking risks to get what they wanted. The latter were the Followers: weak, indecisive, unable to remain firm under pressure and willing to sacrifice their principles for safety. I placed the sisters at two ends of a spectrum and characterized them accordingly: Strong vs. Weak, Daring vs. Cowardly, Heroine vs. Foil. As with most strictly dualistic partitions, this was an oversimplification. Experience and closer readings have shown me that Antigone is not to be admired in all things, nor is Ismene to be despised. More and more I suspect that Ismene is not the weak and passive character I initially believed her to be. The story of Antigone begins long before the play opens. Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene's father, was king of the city of Thebes until it was revealed that he had murdered his father and married his mother. Upon discovering this, Oedipus blinded himself and left Thebes in his brother/uncle's care until Oedipus' sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, were old enough to rule. At the beginning of Antigone, the audience discovers that Eteocles had stolen the rule of Thebes from his older brother. Polyneices in turn gathered Argive allies to invade Thebes and level it in revenge. The brothers met in battle and killed each other. Now Creon is once again in charge of the city and has issued an edict saying that, although Eteocles is to be buried with full funeral honors, Polyneices' body is to be left to rot. Antigone performs funeral rites for the outcast body and is captured. She is left in a rocky cell outside the city to die of exposure and eventual starvation. Creon's son Haemon, Antigone's betrothed, tries to rescue her, but arrives only to find that she has killed herself; he subsequently falls on his sword. Creon's wife Eurydice also kills herself when she hears the news, and Creon is left a broken man at the end of the play. Note that Ismene is not mentioned at all in this summary of Antigone. She could have been mentioned; she appears on stage two separate times and has more lines than Haemon. But she is not a source of action. Ismene causes nothing. This is not to say that she does nothing, but it is what she doesn't do that makes her stand out from the rest of her bloodline. Ismene does not participate in the family's doom. The tragic actions of the House of Laius have three aspects. The first is that the family brings death to those around them. Second, they act in opposition to or perversion of their natural roles. Finally, they act on impulse and out of emotion. The House of Laius seems to bring death wherever it goes. Oedipus kills his father Laius and the revelation of his true identity causes Jocasta, his wife/ mother, to kill hersel£ Antigone continues this course: Eteocles and Polyneices each bring about the other's death; Antigone's death causes Haemon's, which in turn causes Eurydice's death. Haemon and Antigone both recognize the nature of the curse, Haemon when he tells his father, "Then she must die, and in her death destroy another," Antigone when she cries to the memory of her own father, "Alas my brother, illstarred in your marriage, in your death you have undone my life!" 1 The only two relations of Oedipus left standing after this bloodbath are Ismene and Creon. Ismene is the only living descendant of Oedipus, for she has killed no one nor has she been killed, despite Creon. He at first wants to sentence her with Antigone: "[AntigoneJ and her kinsfolk shall not avoid a doom most dire; for I charge that other with a like share in the plotting of this burial." Yet he changes his mind, and Ismene is not drawn into death with Antigone after all. Somehow, the curse has passed her by. The second family characteristic is that no one fits into his/her proper role. The family's fulfillment of these roles is either twisted or perverted. Oedipus was the son of the woman to whom he was also husband. Eteocles and Polyneices fought and killed each other, reversing the ordinary role of brothers to support each other in war.2 It is Antigone, however, who most strongly exemplifies this inversion of �28 29 the proper role, especially in contrast to Ismene. Antigone's name in Greek is avti-yov'tl, against-descendant, a variation of which mighr be avti-yuvil, against-woman. Antigone is, indeed, against womanhood in many ways. She takes action herself and causes 0thers to center their actions around her in a manner more characteristic of Greek men than women. Creon even says of her: "Now verily I am no man, she is the man, if this victory shall rest with her and bring no penalty." Antigone contemptuously dismisses Ismene's objections, which are rooted in femininity. She argues with Creon and dares to confront men on their own terms. In Oedipus at Colonus1 Oedipus says, "these girls preserve me, these who are men, not women, in true service." 3 Oedipus may have considered both Antigone and Ismene to be doing the duty of men, but in truth, Ismene plays the part of a woman. She knows her duty and says that she would help bury Polyneices if it were not that her very nature as a woman prevents her from taking part in the action. She is aware of the futility of impossible tasks and reproves her sister for pursuing such with lack of judgment: "to act beyond nature has nothing in it of reason" (67-68). Unlike the rest of her family, Ismene is exactly what she should be. The third characteristic is this family's tendency toward hot-tempered impulsivity. As Antigone is being taken to her death, the Chorus tells her: You have rushed forward to the utmost verge of daring, and against that throne where Justice sits on high you have fallen, my daughter, with a grievous fall. She is not alone in her rashness. The Chorus continues: "But in this ordeal you are paying, perchance, for yo.ur father's sin." The sin they refer to is Oedipus' illstarred marriage. He, too, showed signs of imprudence. His killing of Laius, his marriage to Jocasta, his decree that the man causing the plague on Thebes must be immediately exiled: each of these actions was taken without any pause for reflection. Antigone shows a similar lack of consideration. Upon hearing of Creon's edict, she immediately begins forming plans to bury Polyneices which defy all self-preservation. She does not make any attempt to compromise-to talk to Creon, to bribe the guards. When Ismene refuses to help, instead of enlisting others to aid her, Antigone undertakes the rites herself When they are undone on Creon's orders, she goes again to cover the body and does not bother to hide herself; the guard reports that "she cried aloud with the sharp cry of a bird in its bitterness". She is not upset at being captured. In the opening dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, Antigone reveals that her devotion is to what is KaA.6v: good, noble, and beautiful. Ismene, instead, is focused on <j>pOV£<H<; and VOU<;: consideration, or judgment, and mind. Antigone acts from her heart, as Ismene points out when she says to her sister, "You have a warm heart for such cold things" (88). Ismene remains practical in thinking about the implications of her actions, considering their impact on her present situation instead of joining in Antigone's obsession with the thoughts and feelings of those in the underworld. While she does serve as the perfect dramatic foil for Antigone by playing the part of the chiding parent with whom no self-respecting rebel child would agree, it takes a kind of strength to retain one's mind in such a situation. Ismene is by her nature an uncharacteristic member of her family. By the end of the play, she is not seen as a member of the family at all. Ismene is completely dismissed from the minds of Antigone and the Chorus, so much so that it is taken for granted that Antigone is the last surviving descendant of the House of Laius. What has happened in this time to accomplish Ismene's complete alienation from her unfortunate family? The answer lies in the opening dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, in words we can read in English without hearing an untranslatable feature of Greek, its little-used dual person. The dual is used when two things are together in a special way, a matched pair of sorts. In line 13, Ismene refers to herself and Antigone as a dual and to their brothers as another dual. When she does set herself apart, as in line 39, she makes a special point of it by using the emphatic pronoun £yffi. Ismene, at least, believes that she and Antigone are bound together. Antigone has different ideas. While she starts out addressing the "shared sister head" of Ismene (1), I suspect that she may have been trying to wheedle her sister into agreement. In raging against Creon's proclamation, Antigone says, "They say the good Creon has proclaimed such things to you and to me, I say even to me .. ." (31-32). The last clause implies that it is one thing to issue such a proclamation to lsmene, but quite another for it to apply to Antigone as well. Aside from being rather rude to Ismene, the specification implies a partition between the sisters, that they act under different restrictions. Ismene continues to use the dual, this time in a possessive referring to Oedipus as "our hateful and infamous father." She also uses the dual to include Antigone in her statement that their nature requires them to bow to Creon's demand: But it is necessary to consider that we were indeed born [dual £<j>uµ£v J women; it is not for us to fight alongside men; and therefore for that reason we are led by those more powerful, and to hear and obey these things and even ones more grievous than these. ( 6 I -64) Without realizing it, Ismene has in this speech destroyed any chance she might have had to be linked with Antigone. She has refused to join her sister in burying Polyneices. From this point forward, neither sister uses the dual; rather, the speech is now peppered with the emphatic personal pronoun. Both of the following speeches are Ismene's: So then I [E')'IDJ am begging those below the earth to have understanding, as I am forced in these matters, for I will obey those who stand in authority; for to act beyond nature has nothing in it of reason. ( 65-68) I indeed [£yffi J do not do dishonorable things, yet I am by nature [£<j>uv; singular4] without means to act with force against the city. (78-79) Antigone rejects her sister after her refusal, using not only the first person pronoun but also the second person, even adding a µ£.v . . .OE construction to complete the separation: "You [<JU], for one [µ£v ], may use these things as a pretext; I [£')'ID], on the other hand [0£ ], will go to heap up a funeral for my dearest brother" (80-81). Ismene's alienation is almost complete. By choosing not to help Antigone, she cements the setting-apart that nature itself had begun. Now Antigone and even the Chorus deny Ismene a place in the family. Antigone claims to go alone and friendless to her death, ignoring Ismene. She presents herself to the Chorus as "the last daughter of the house of your kings". The Chorus says of Antigone: "that hope of which the light had been spread above the last root of the house of O edipus-that hope, in turn, is brought low". It is Antigone who is the "last root," while Ismene has disappeared from the minds of the characters. She is not mentioned, nor does she appear after she has left the stage the second time. At the end of the play, the Chorus comments compassionately on Creon's grief at having lost a wife and son to his pride, but Ismene's grief at having lost two brothers, a father, and a sister within a short time is not mentioned. Consideration of these things leads me to wonder which of the two sisters has the real strength. Is it Antigone, who dares her life and sacrifices her hope of a future to take care of the dead, who also confronts the ruler of her city with his flaws? Or is it Ismene, who endures with the flexible tenacity of a reed? I used to admire Antigone for her principles, for her fine drama in dying gloriously. But at seventeen, I had never seen the death of a family member. I had yet to observe the spirit that can resist the power of despair. I know now the courage required to continue living daily in the face of grief- and I know that I do not have it. My greater admiration goes to Ismene, who has been abandoned to fill the void left by her doomed family. It took more strength to live than to die. + Notes: I. Note on translation: translations that do not include line numbers are taken from the I 96 7 publication of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb's translation. Passages that include line numbers are the author's own class translations. 2. As, for example, in the case of Menelaus and Agamemnon. 3. Also the Jebb translation. 4. Contrast to the use of dual £<j>uµ£v in line 62. �30 31 MATH PRlZE, , 1997•, 98 Geometry Piroska Kopar, A99 1. Prove that the quad~ilateral so formed 2. Prove that the 4 triangles that are shaded on the figure are congruent. If we dissect each of the· triangles AEB, BFC, CGD, DHA above to three triangles as shown on the figure (just by shading in those little triangles). We get 12 new triangles. I say that these 12 are but three sets of congruent triangles; each set containing four triangles. For the triangles AJC, FMC, CGN, HAI all have one side that is half of the diagonal of the small square, and we already know from the previous proof that the angle denoted by S are equal, and that the angles marked by E are 45 degrees. Thus all these triangles are congruent. Similarly triangles EKB, BFL, OGO, HOP have one sided that is half the diagonal of the bigger square and two equal angles ~ and E. Each of the big triangles AEB, etc., then, is made up of three smaller triangles, two of which I have shown to be congruent with the corresponding two triangles of the other bigger triangles. Therefore the remaining, shaded triangles are congruent as well. Q.E.D. is a square. (Figure 1) First, let us draw in the diagonals of the squares on the sides of the parallelogram. In ~ach square the center of the square is where the diagonals cross each other. From the four sets of diagonals and from the four sides of the big quadrilateral figure (the one that results from the connecting the centers; ABCD on the figure) we get four triangles. If I can prove that four hypotenuses of these triangles are equal and that the angles that the four sides cut around the centers of the squares are right angles, I have proven that our quadrilateral ABCD_ is a square. I say that the four triangles descnbed above (AEB, BFC, CGD, DHA), are congruent, and hence their hypotenuses are equal. For let us take two of them that are not symmetrically situated around the parallelogram: triangle ABE and tri~gle ADH. Since their two sides are the half of the diagonals of the squares on the sides, AE = AH and E~ = HD. (Since the opposite sides are the half of the diagonals of the squares built upon them will also be equal.) ~ o~ we also know that the diagonal of a square cuts its nght angle into half a right angle. Therefore if we call the acute angle of the parallelogram a, angle AHO will be a+45+45; that is, a+ 90. But the obtuse angle of the parallelogram is 180 - a. Thus the angle AEB is 360 - (180 - a) - 45 - 45 =a+ 90. We now have triangles with two equal sides and one equal angle, so we can conclude that they are congruent. Similarly in the case of the other two triangles. It remains to be shown that the angles of this equal sided quadrilateral are each 90 d~grees. Since the four triangles are congruent, all their corresponding angles are equal. Thus BAE = OAH, ABE = ADH, AEB =AHO, ETC. Now since the diagonals of a square when crossing each other cut two right angles, (such as EAH), we can say that the angle c?mposed of EAI and HAI is a right angle. But HAI ts the same as DAH, which is equal to BAE, so the angle composed of DAE and EAB is also equal to a right angle. And similarly in the other three cases. . The quadrilateral thus constructed is therefore a square. Q.E.D. 3. Can the same square result from other parallelograms? !J so, from which parallelograms will it be constructed? !J not, why not? figure I Let us look at our first figure again. The area of the big square is composed of the following: + the area of the parallelogram: a·µ (since the shaded triangles are congruent, we can reposition them so that we substitute the two that are part of the parallelogram but not part of the square for the two that are part of the square but not part of the parallelogram) + twice the area of the isosceles triangle with base a and sides that are half of the diagonal of the bigger square: a/2 (because of their ~ongru­ ency we can substitute triangle HPO for DGO, and triangle BFL for BKE) + figure 2 twice the area of the isosceles triangle with base b and sides that are half of the diagonal of the small square: b/2 (we can substitute triangle HAI in for AJE, and triangle FMC for GCN) But a·µ can be written as abcoscj>, thus if we call the side of the big square c, we can say that: 2c =a+ b+ 2abcos<)> Using the law of cosines in the triangle AEB, where the two sides of the triangle are halves of the diagonals of the squares we can write: c = a+ b - 2abcos angle of AEB. And since the angle AEB is 360-45-cj>-9045= 180-<j> and since the cosine of (180-<j>) is the same as -cosf, we can now write the law of cosines thus: 2c= a+b+2abcos<j>. Now to find the parallelogram that will have the same square as the original one, we simply pick two sides and solve for the angle. This angle will tell us how to construct our new parallelogram. We have one restriction, however. When we look at the equation and the figure we see that a, b, and c, are sides of one triangle. Since we want to find a parallelogram that will give us the same square as the first parallelogram, (our c is already given), we must pick our sides a and b so that when added together, their sum will be greater than the length of the third side. Q.E.I. Corollary I From this it is evident that if any angle <)> is O; that is, if any angle between the sides is a right angle, the equality of the resulting square will depend only on the length of the sides. Hence rectangles will equal perimeters will yield the same square. Corollary 2 It is also obvious that if our original parallelogram is a square, the resulting aquare will be twice the original. 4. What figure results if the squares are drawn inward? Prove your claim. (Figure 2) I say that the resulting figure will be a square. For just as in the first case, if we can show that the triangles resulting from the diagonals of the inward squares are congruent and that the equal sides of the figure meet at right angles, we have proven what we wished to prove. The triarigles thus formed on the sides of the square are triarigles BCE, OCH, ADG, ABF. All of these have one side equal to the half of the diagonal the small square and one side equal to half of the diagonal of the big square. As in the case of Figure I , let us take two triangles that are not symmetrically situated, say triangle OCH arid OGA. Since angle AGB is 45 - a arid arigle DHC is 45 - p, if I can show that a arid p are equal, I have shown the congruence of these triarigles. Now angle AIH is a right arigle, because its sides are the perpendicular diagonals of the two big squares (arid it makes no difference that one diagonal belongs to one of the big squares arid the other one to the other, since we built these squares on parallel sides �33 32 M of the parallelogram). So the angles in the triangle HIK are a right angle, ~and y, while in triangle GHK the angles are a right angle a and y. ~ and a are therefore equal. And similarly with the other two triangles. · It remains to be shown that the angles of the equilateral figure ip the middle are equal to two right angles. Angle GOA is composed of a right angle (because of the crossing diagonals) and of angle ADH. Since the triangles GAD and HOC are congruent, angle GOA= angle HOC. Now the angle HOC is also composed of two angles; of angle ADH and ADC. Angle ADC therefore has to be a right angle and similarly with the other three angles of the quadrilateral. The quadrilateral so constructed is therefore a square. Q.E.D. 5. lfithout necessarily proving your cl.aim, state a problem about any triangle, rather than any parallelogram, with figures drawn outward, such that their centers when joined form an equil.ateral triangle. If on the sides of any triangle we draw equilateral triangles (similarly as in the case of the parallelogram when we drew squares), the centers of the triangles joined will also form an equilateral triangle. + c OMMENTARY Piroska Ko par, A 9 9 M y goal was to solve each step in a way that might enable us to see the proofas a single picture. In order to do this I was trying to keep the connection between steps very tight. I wanted to convey the simplic{ty ofthe proof, and the beaa(! arising from this simplicity, 'the way it appeared to me. To me the entire proof consists in the rotation and the repositioning ofa single triangle that is defined by halves of the diagonals ofthe squares built on the sides ofparallelograms, and the angle in between them (which varies depending on the construction.) I am always suspicious when we are faced with a .surprising mathematical result. How can a mathematical result be surprising? The way the system is set up (in this case Euclid's), these results are necessary and contained in the composingfigure.s, before we perform the construction. We have come up with a closed system that we believe we understand quite well, and we are stillfaced with surprises. I believe that if not in all, yet in most cases of Euclidean geometry, if we were only able to have a greater imagination, a greater ability to see things as one, the proofs could be reduced to a single picture is in our minds. I am veryfond ofexercises that help us .see at least a section ofthis geometry as a single picture, as a selfcontained entity I .saw this proofas such an exercise, and tried to show its .single picture. A T' H ·P R l zE ~ I 9 91- 98 Trigonometry Daniel Braithwaitet AO I Parts I and II A Let triangle ABC be right and isosceles with hypotenuse AC=6. Let F be the midpoint of AC, and place E on AC so that AE=2. Connect BF and BE, and draw the parallel to BC through E. Note that BF is perpendicular to AC. Then, triangle ADE is right and isosceles, similar to triangle ABC, and in particular tan angle DEA=l tan angle BED= DB/DE=DB/ DA= EC/ EA=2 tan angle DBE=l / tan angle BED= 1/ 2. Moreover, triangle BFC is right and isosceles, so that BF=3, and thus tan angle FBC= 1 tan angle EBF=l / 3 tan angle FEB= I/tan angle EBF=3. Therefore, arctan 1 +arctan 2+ arctan 3= angle DEA+ angle BED + angle FEB= n arctan 1 +arctan _ +arctan 1/3 = angle FBC + angle DBE + angle EBF =n/ 2 Part III For convenience, let a =n/7 throughout. Let triangle ABC be isosceles with base angles measuring 2a and legs of length 1. Let CD bisect angle BCA. Then angle ADC= 3a, so triangle ADC is isosceles and in particular DC = 1. 2 E F 3 B ~-----"'C Figure I A D B Figure2 A Figure3 A Draw perpendiculars to BC from D and A. Then, EC = cos a and FC = cos 2a, so that EF =cos a - cos2a. Draw the parallel BC through D. Then, DG = 2DH =2EF = 2cosa - 2cos 2a. Moreover, angle ADG = 2a, which subtracted from angle ADC =3a gives angle GDC =a, so that triangle GDC is isosceles. Thus GC = DG. Figure 4 A If we imagine the perpendicular drawn from C to AD, it becomes clear that AD =2cos3a. But AG=AD, so that 2cosa - 2cos2a+2cos3a=GC+AG=AC=l cos a - cos2a + cos3a= 1/ 2. Figures �34 35 COMMENTARY What is Trigonometry? Daniel Braithwaite, AO I P ropositions 4, 8, and 26 ofthe first book ofthe Elements state thatfrom the equality ofcertain corresponding parts oftwo triangles, equality ofthe remaining parts follows necessarily. For example, according to Proposition 26, if two triangles each have a 9 inch side lying between 30 degrees and 40 degrees angles, then the two triangles are in fact equal in every respect. Itfollows straightforwardly that in a singk triangk composed ofa 9 inch side between angks of30 and 40 degrees, the remainingparts are uniquely determined. That is to Figure 1 say, the measures ofthe remaining angk and two sides are not suhject to any variability. (This would not be so ifit were only known that the triangk had a 9 inch side bordering on a 30 degree angk - infinitely many different triangks fit this descnption). Well then, how large is that angk, and how long are those sides? The angle is easy: Since the angles ofa triangle together must sum 180 degrees (Proposition 1 32), it must be 180 degrees - 30 degrees 40 degrees = 110 degrees. It's not so clear how to figure out the sides. OJ course anyone couldjust draw the triangle, whip out a ruler, and measure them, but that's the wrong spirit. What's needed is a method of calculating the side lengths from the known side angles. Trigonometry is the solution to this problem. A precise account ofit took 2000 years to develop and is pretty complicated, Figure 2 but it was approximated by Ptolemy and can be imagined in Euclidean terms, as follows. With any acute angle, a right angle can be constructed, and the ratio ofthe side subtending that angle to the hypotenuse must be taken. In this way, a sort of table is made, associating acertain ratio to every acute angle. For example, the ratio BC.AC is matched with 17 degrees (figure 1) . This table is known as the sine function and is the heart of trigonometry. The sine function solves the earlierproblem: Given the triangle as described above, simply draw a perp endicular to AB through C (figure 2) . Obtain, from the sine function, the ratio corresponding to 40 degrees this is equal to this ratio CD:AC by its very definition. Then, since AC and the ratio CD.AC are known, CD can be calculated. Finally, the ratio CD, BC is the sine of 70 degrees, and since CD has been calculated, so can be BC. A similar process yields AB. But the missingpiece in this account is the determination ofthe sine function. How are those ratios that it associates to angks actually obtained? Not by making the tn'angk and measuring; that's still cheating. Finding a way, in ftgure I, to derive the ratio BC:ACfrom the measurement 17 degrees alone is what took 2000 years. (And in fact, because the sides are incommensurable, the calculation is an interminabk process). Much earlier, Ptolemy's table ofchords served the same role as the sine.function, but his ftgures were only approximate. Although certain ideas in Book II of the Elements bear a conceptual resemblance to the sine function, Euclid's geometry is essentially different from trigonometry. This is because problems ofmeasurement, from which trigonometry is born, are entirely absentfrom Euclid. Perplexing, then, that the definition ofthe sine is purely geometric. Tension has always existed in mathematics between its visihk and invisihk objects. The discipline treating thefirst is geometry. The discipline treating the second has no adequate name, but could be called calculation or algebra. The two might exist independently, but in fact measurement links them, and origi,ns oftrigonometry exemplify the oddity oftheir relation. + Lobachevski c c Not for me this gift this jewel whose quickened facets flicker with inconstant fire and flow like molten ice. Let go its mutable beauty and take up the gifts left br an ancient suitor: a claw, a rock, a shell, a bone. H/en~y Braithwaite, AGI �36 37 Striving For Harmony: A Reading of The Book of Job Michael Goodrum, AOO he Book of job is an experiential book. Because its premise is unreasonable (a blameless man has his family and possessions destroyed and is made to suffer "for no good reason," as God puts it (2:30)1), Job's suffering and the uncertainty regarding the nature of justice and wisdom that arises from it cannot be settled by the rational intellectual meditation of Plato or Aristotle. Greek philosophy does not apply: Job's troubles must be settled by experience. The people that populate the book bear witness to their experiences in order to resolve what is happening. For job's human inhabitants, the uncertainty that develops over the course of the book is relieved by God, the source of justice and wisdom. While the reader cannot witness the events of the book directly, and experiences Job's theophany second hand, the reader has a personal experience which draws him into the book's poetry and reaches beyond the mere examination of text. The reader must summon this experience to relieve his uncertainty regarding the questions that Job poses. The fundamental question for the reader is not "What is?," but rather, "What happened?)) In order for one to understand justice and wisdom, one must understand the experiences of those who witness Job's affliction, because each witness gives an account of wisdom, justice, and the nature of God. Experience in The Book of job is defined primarily in terms of seeing and hearing. The most compelling example of this is Job's final response to God: T I had heard You with my ears, But now I see You with my eyes; Therefore, I recant and relent, Being but dust and ashes. ( 42:5-6) Seeing is the most important of the two modes of experience, because seeing brings a thing into being in a much more substantial and convincing way than hearing can. Seeing God, Job has relief and resolution. In opposition, if a thing is obscured in dark- ness, its being is in doubt, as when Job curses the day of his birth, wishing that it had never existed: May May May May May May that day be darkness; God above have no concern for it; light not shine on it; darkness and deep gloom look after it; a pall lie over it; what blackens the day terrify it. (3:4-5) If the day of Job's birth is taken out of light into darkness, out of the realm of sight, it might never have existed, and thus Job might never have existed. But Job does exist, seeing and hearing, as do the rest of the witnesses to his affliction. By properly examining the seeing and hearing of the book's inhabitants, one can be led to an understanding of their experience, opening the door to an understanding of justice and wisdom. The book is framed with prose narration. The narrative prose guides the reader, telling of the dialogue between God and the Adversary, and relating the events in Job's life that give one a sense of who he is both before and after his affliction. Through the narration, one receives the four assertions that focus one's perception of the book more than any others. First, at the beginning of the book, we are told that Job is "blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil" ( 1: 1). The fact of Job's blamelessness is restated twice, by God, when he speaks to the Adversary ( 1:8, 2:3). Second, both the destruction of Job's community and his physical affliction, while effected by the Adversary, are carried out with God's permission: "See, he is in your power" (1:12, 2:6). God allows the Adversary to tear down the protective fence that He has built around Job and his household. Third, J~b is made to suffer "for no good reason" (2:30). Fourth, at the end of the book, God tells Job's comforters twice that He is incensed with them, "for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job" (42:7, 8). Without these crucial facts, The Book of job would be an entirely different, less compelling book. Unless it were established that Job is a blameless man, that God allows his suffering, that it is unreasonable, and that Job's speech about God is true, the questions regarding the nature of justice and wisdom.that one is presented with would not be so difficult to settle, because Job's experience and claims could be easily dismissed. There would be no way to discriminate between truth and falsity, making it convenient for the reader to join with one of Job's accusers in condemning him. After the prose prologue, seven days and nights of silence ensue, in which Job must be mulling over his dilemma. Job understands that there is no reasonable cause for his suffering (9:17). As a result, he is powerless: Job has nothing to repent for, there is no damage he has done to God that he can repair. It seems to Job that his suffering can end only if he ceases to exist. Suicide is not an option; Job is a created being, and his life is not his to take (12:10). Because he is blameless, Job will not "blaspheme God and die" (2:9), as his wife demands. When his possessions were destroyed and his children were murdered, Job responded by saying, "The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (1:21). Even when the things most precious to Job were taken from him, Job maintained his blamelessness. If Job were to blaspheme now, he would marginalize the value of his children, an impossibility for such a loving father (1:5). The only possibility left for Job is never to have existed. Job does not embrace the notion of nonbeing for its own sake; he makes his desire to live apparent (19:26-27). Rather, Job embraces the notion of non-being because he believes it is his only means of escape from suffering. The very fabric of creation must be altered for Job to be taken out of existence. God must uncreate Job and the time of his birth for Job and his suffering to cease from being. Job does not command God to do this, but rather wishes that it were done; by wishing he maintains his piety: Perish the day on which I was born, And the night it was announced, "A male has been conceived!" M ay that day be darkness ... Because it did not block my mother's womb, And hide trouble from my eyes. (3:3-4, IO) When God created the world, He saw that it was very good (Genesis I :3 l ). When Job asks God to alter the fabric of His creation, it is apparent that Job sees otherwise: "Why does He give light to the sufferer / And life to the bitter in spirit?" (3:20). Job questions God, asking for help; Job needs God to reconcile how the world, and Job's existence in it, is good (a notion that Job, as a blameless man is bound to accept), with the pain and bitterness that Job's existence has become to him. For this to come about, God must reconcile the good that He sees with the apparent evil that Job sees and feels. The notions of justice and wisdo~ hang in the balance of this questioning. After the curse, Job's three friends (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, the "comforters") speak in turn, and make several attempts to resolve Job's questions and assertions about justice and wisdom. Because the reader eventually knows that they do not speak the truth about God, no analysis of the truth of the testimony of the comforters is necessary. God makes it clear that they are untrue witnesses to the divine. The question, then, is not "Is their testimony true?;• but rather, "Where do they go wrong?" What makes their testimony untrue? This is a difficult question; the comforters are not liars who can be easily dismissed. Much of what they say is literally true within the proper context. The downfall of the comforters lies in the fact that they take literal truths and apply them recklessly to Job. Job's friends do not take his situation into account, and refuse to listen to him. In doing so, they rob the truth of its spirit, twisting it into falsehood. Eliphaz is the first of Job's friends to speak. In his part of the first "round" of comfort (Chapters 4- l 4 ), Eliphaz refers to three separate visual experiences. The first proclaims the fate of evil men: "As I have seen, those who plow evil / And sow mischief reap them. / They perish by a blast from God" ( 4:89). The second is of "thought-filled visions of the night" ( 4:13). The third regards foolish men: "I myself saw a fool who had struck roots; / Impulsively, I cursed his home" (5:3). Clearly, it is Eliphaz's sight that is primary to his experience, and it is his sight that leads him down the path of untrue testimony, as his "thought-filled visions of the night" show: A wind passed by me, Making the hair of my flesh bristle. It halted; its appearance was strange to me; A form loomed before my eyes; I heard a murmur, a voice, "Can mortals be acquitted by God? Can man be cleared by his Maker? �38 39 If he cannot trust His own servants, And casts reproach on His angels, How much less those who dwell in houses of clay, Whose origin is dust, Who are crushed like the moth, Shattered between daybreak and evening, Perishing forever, unnoticed. Their cord is pulled up And they die, and not with wisdom:' ( 4:15-21) Eliphaz, by using his vision of reproach to attack Job's questioning of God's methods, assumes that his vision is from God, that the form of strange appearance he sees is the Lord or one of His angels, although this is improbable. Man does not perish unnoticed, as the source of the vision would have it, because God is the "watcher of men" (7:20), and Job makes this clear in his reply to Eliphaz. God pays close attention to man, "inspect[ing] him every morning, / Examin[ing] him every minute" (7:18). The source of Eliphaz's vision is unknown. If God is the source of his vision, then God is intentionally misleading Eliphaz. Either way, Eliphaz's unreliable sight, his primary source of experience, is what makes him an untrue witness to the divine, calling into question all of his future visual references and the predictions that he generates from them. In his portion of the second round of comfort (Ch. 15-21), Eliphaz alludes to his vision (15:1416), makes the ironic assertion that Job's eyes have failed him (15:12), and carries on about what he claims to have seen regarding the fate of wicked men. Eliphaz has no right to make claims about the fate of others; only God can determine such things (12:10). Eliphaz is rationalizing the things he has seen in order to make them appear reasonable. Job responds to Eliphaz's dubious testimony by saying, "Surely mocking men keep me company, / And with their provocations I close my eyes" (17:2). Instead of offering Job consolation, Eliphaz, and the comforters in general, vex him with a rational world view that must disregard his suffering in order to be consistent, and Job will not bear witness to it. Having had his sight attacked, Ehphaz in the third and final round of comfort makes a full-out assault on Job, claiming that Job finds even God's sight questionable: "You [Job J say, 'What can God know?/ Can He govern through the dense cloud? / The clouds screen Him so He cannot see / As he moves about the circuit of heaven"' (22:13-14). Job does question God's sight, but only in incredulous disbelief (10:4). Job knows that his suffering is not made to continue by some fault in God's vision, but rather because he cannot see God, and thus does not know how to reach Him: But if I go East-He is not there; West-I still do not perceive Him; North-since He is concealed, I do not behold Him; South-He is hidden, and I cannot see Him. But He knows the way I take. (23:8-10) If only he knew where to look to find God, Job would have his questions settled. Eliphaz can offer Job no help in this regard: even if Eliphaz's vision were trustworthy, he would be of no use, because Eliphaz is not looking for God. Eliphaz has no reason to look for Him: when Eliphaz rationalizes about God's creation, he implicitly posits that God must be reasonable, which is untrue (2:30). In doing so, Eliphaz makes the erroneous claim that the only substantive difference between God and man is that God is immortal, while man is mortal. Because man's mortality is a barrier that he cannot overcome, Eliphaz sees no need to look for God; he has nothing to gain,by it. Bildad is the nex~ of Job's friends to speak. At no point does Bildad claim to have seen anything with his own eyes. What he understands has come only by the hearing of the ear via the reports of others. He discounts Job's vision and suffering, claiming that learning by report is the proper path to understanding, as he explains to Job in the first round: Ask the generation past, Study what their fathers have searched out -For we are of yesterday and know nothing; Our days on earth are a shadowSurely they will teach you and tell you, Speaking out of their understanding. (8:8-10) Bildad would have Job deny his experience-the divinely decreed suffering that he knows and the things he has seen-for the sake of the words of men long dead. For Job, this is impossible, as he says in reply: If I say, "I will forget my complaint; Abandon my sorrow and be diverted," I remain in dread of all my suffering; I know that You [God] will not acquit me. . (9:27-28) Job cannot divert himself from the Now, for the sake of studying the past of others, or for any other reason. The Now is consuming Job. He cannot reflect on the past until his suffering is resolved. An understanding of the generation past is not immediately relevant-Job must understand his own existence before he can account for the teachings of dead patriarchs, who are unable to defend themselves in the face of the comforters' misrepresentations of their understanding. The second round brings Bildad's most powerful speech. Job has been lamenting his future, wondering what will happen when he descends to Sheol, and Bildad angrily retorts with a litany of death and destruction, cataloging the terrors that befall wicked men: His progeny hunger; Disaster awaits his wife. The tendons under his skin are consumed... [TerrorJlodges in his desolate tent; Sulphur is strewn upon his home. His roots below dry up, And above, his branches wither. (18:12-13, 15-16) Job defends himself against this verbal abuse by asking "How long will you grieve my spirit, / And crush me with words?" (19:2). Relying on the "wisdom" of the ages as he does, Bildad can only speak of death. But Job would have life, as he exclaims: "l would behold God while still in my flesh, / I myself, not another, would behold Him" (19:26-27). Bildad continues to be irrelevant. His crush of words serves no pertinent purpose, because justice and wisdom are of no account to dead men. There is something eerie about Bildad's speech here, a sense that what Bildad is saying has been said before. It proves to be a reformulation of Eliphaz's statement about the happiness of ''The man whom God reproves" (5:17). Eliphaz was demanding that Job admit to sin to recover God's good graces (which would have reduced Job's relationship with God to the level of simple transactions, an absurd proposition given what has transpired), and promised Job a happy fate if he did so: You will know that all is well in your tent; When you visit your wife you will never fail. You will see that your offspring are many, Your descendants like the grass of the earth. (5:24-25) Claiming no visual experience of his own, Bildad is forced to rely on the report of Eliphaz. This proves to be Bildad's undoing as a viable witness to the divine. Bildad's third round speech is another reformulation of Eliphaz's words: How can man be in the right before God? How can one born of woman be cleared of guilt? Even the moon is not bright, . And the stars are not pure in His sight. (25:4-5) Bildad derives his words from the report Eliphaz gave of his "visions of the night." Looking through Eliphaz's eyes, Bildad is subject to Eliphaz's faulty vision and his consistent, convenient, unfitting world view; Bildad's testimony of the divine cannot help but be untrue. Zophar is the last of the comforters to speak. Zophar speaks only twice, and does not relate a personal experience of any sort. He does not rely on experience (and speaks of its fleeting and problematic nature (20:8)), but rather on wisdom, which he claims to possess: But would that God might speak, And talk to you Himself. He would tell you the secrets of wisdom, For there are many sides to sagacity. (II:5-6) Zophar presents himself as one who knows the secrets of wisdom. Does he have any basis for this claim? To understand this, one must have a definition of wisdom. Job, in Chapter Twenty-eight, supplies a definition, given by God: "He said to man, / 'See! Fear of the Lord is wisdom; /To shun evil is understanding"' (28:28). Zophar does not seem to fear the Lord. Zophar claims to be in a privileged position that precludes him from truly fearing the Lord. This limits Zophar's relationship with God, blinding Zophar to the truth about wisdom that sits in front of him. In reply, Job mocks Zophar, saying "Indeed you are the voice of the people, / And wisdom will die with you" (12:2). Job then refutes Zophar, stating that wisdom is God's alone: �41 40 Is wisdom in the aged And understanding in the long-lived? With Him are wisdom and courage; His are counsel and understanding. (12:12-13) Amendment XV, Gouache on Paperhoard, Corey Sebastian, A99 Given the definition of wisdom that God has supplied, and what the narrative frame tells us about Job, it is clear that Job is in possession of wisdom and understanding. Why then does he say that God is the sole possessor of wisdom? Because the wisdom that Job possesses is the part of wisdom that God has measured out for men, its beginning, and what Job seeks is wisdom in full, divine wisdom, and an understanding of divine justice. Zophar cannot supply this; only God can show the way to it. Since his first exchange with Eliphaz, Job has understood that the comforters do not consider him to be blameless and upright, and do not believe that God allows both the pure and the wicked to suffer. Thus Job tells Zophar to rely not on the testimony of men, but on the testimony of the rest of God's creation: "Ask the beasts, and they will teach you; / The birds of the sky, they will tell you, / Or speak to the earth, it will teach you" (12:7-8). Job has a sense of the world as a whole that reaches beyond the rational world of man, which the comforters are bound up in. Job has acquired this sense of things by taking notice of the wild and unreasonable ways of nature. Here Job is appealing to the comforters to look beyond their world, to bear witness to the testimony of nature, so they can understand that what is at stake lies far beyond their judgement. They fail to do this, and fail Job in the process. The testimony of God's creation will later play a crucial role in Job's experience of divine wisdom. In his second and final speech, Zophar himself casts doubt on his claims by telling Job that "A spirit out of my understanding makes me reply" (20:3). This sounds like something parallel to Eliphaz's experience, his vision from an unsubstantiated source. It raises further doubts about the nature of Zophar's testimony. How can he know that God is the source of his reply? Indeed, Zophar would have God "loose his burning anger at [the wicked man]" (20:23). But this does not happen, because as Job says, God cannot be instructed (21:22). Even if Zophar possesses the wisdom of men (which he does not)he cannot claim to have divine wisdom, and his witness to God is therefore untrue: "Of your replies only the perfidy remains" (21:34). After the comforters, who "would help with- out having the strength" (26:2) have finished speaking, Job presents his argument against God, unhindered by untrue accusations. The rational question that the comforters have been asking is "What sin did you commit that has caused God to punish you?" Both Job and the reader know that this is the wrong question to ask. The proper question is "Why have you allowed a blameless man to suffer?" In asking this question, Job lays bare the great problem of the book. As a blameless man, Job knows that God ts just, and yet he suffers. There is no way for Job to rationally reconcile his notion of justice with his experience; because the comforters can do no more than rationalize, they do not have the strength to help Job. Just how excruciating it is to exist in a world where God appears to be just and unjust in the same way at the same time, Job expresses with a fatal wish: "May [God] my enemy be as the wicked; / My assailant as the wrongdoer" (27:7). If God showed himself to be in the wrong, as the wicked are, the world would be a consistent, understandable and insufferable place, a place without hope. Job, whose sons were "marked for the sword" (27:14), is sharing in the portion of evil men, a portion that he believes is not rightfully his. Job challenges God to "weigh me on the scale of righteousness, / Let God ascertain my integrity" (31:6). Certain of his blamelessness and the just nature of his claim against God, Job demands punishment from Him, should Job be found to have committed sin: If l raised my hand against the fatherless, Looking to my supporters at the gate, May my arm drop off my shoulder, My forearm break off at the elbow. (31 :21-22) One must remember that Job has not lost faith in God. Job remembers that he is a part of God's creation: "In His hand is every living soul/ And the breath of all mankind" (12:10). Job recognizes that he is ultimately defenseless against the wrath of God. Job also recognizes that, troubling as the idea may be to him, God cannot be in the wrong, because God has allowed Job a measure of hope: "Shaddai has terrified me. / Yet I am not cut off by the darkness; / He has concealed the thick gloom from me" (23: 17). The world is not a hopeless place; God has given Job the will to live. This is very bewildering. While God is assaulting him, Job can see that God is also acting �43 42 benevolently toward him, adding strength to the notion that God's being is contradictory. What is happening? What does God intend Job to see, that he is 'concealing the thick gloom' from Job? Only God has the wisdom required to answer such a question, for it is "hidden from the eyes of all living" (28:2 I). Only God can see that this is the question that needs to be answered. This is why no human reason will suffice to comfort Job; this is why Job so desperately needs to present himself in God's court: "O that Shaddai would reply to my writ, / Or my accuser draw up a true bill!" ( 3 l :35). Having finished presenting his argument, Job waits quietly, looking for God. What he finds is Elihu. Elihu, the narration tells us, has been silently watching the proceedings, waiting patiently for Job and the comforters, his elders, to finish speaking. When they have done so, he rises to speak, "angry at Job because he thought himself right against God. He was angry as well at his three friends, because they could not reply, but merely condemned Job" (32:2-3). Elihu is the most problematic witness to the divine in The Book of Job. God does not make any statement about the nature of Elihu's testimony of him, as he does with Job and the comforters. There is, in fact, no interaction of any kind between Elihu and anyone else in the book, in spite of Elihu's attempts to engage the comforters and make Job answer him. God appears immediately after Elihu finishes speaking, but the narration makes it plain that God is addressing Job, not Elihu (38:1). What is the nature of Elihu's testimony of God? Is Elihu speaking the truth about Him? Job has asked for a hearing with God, and Elihu claims to be God's emissary: "If you QobJcan, answer me; / Argue against me, take your stand" (33:5). Whether or not Elihu is a messenger from God, Job cannot trust him, because Elihu misquotes Job at several points. The first instance of this occurs not long after Elihu begins speaking: I heard the words spoken [by Job], "I am guiltless, free from transgression; I am innocent, without iniquity. But He finds reasons to oppose me, Considers me His enemy:' (33:8-10) This is what Job actually said: How many are my iniquities and sins? Advise me of my transgression and sin. Why do You hide Your face, And treat me like an enemy? (13:23-24) Job proclaimed his innocence, but not at this point. Here, Job was asking God to grant him an audience, and cure Job of his ignorance should he have cominitted sin without knowing it. The most important discrepancy between what Job said and what Elihu here claims he said lies in the lines "But He finds reasons to oppose me / Considers me His enemy." God has not found reasons to oppose Job, as he told the Adversary (2:30). Job knows that God's actions are unreasonable, and he has said as much (9:17). Further, while God is treating Job like an unjust man would treat an enemy, and Job calls God his enemy (27:7), God does not consider Job to be His enemy. Job is God's servant, as He tells the comforters ( 42:7, 8). These are fine, yet crucial distinctions. Elihu, in his youthful arrogance, misrepresents both Job and God in one fell swoop, making his account of both human and divine testimony null and void. Elihu cannot be an emissary from God. Of course, just what it means to be God's servant is uncertain; perhaps one ought to give Elihu the benefit of the doubt with regard to his account of God. However, even if one pardons Elihu with regard to his representation of the particulars, one must convict Elihu of being untrue to God in his main assertion: "Let us decide for ourselves what is just;" he asks of Job and the comforters, "Let us know among ourselves what is good" (34:4). Though they disagree on almost every detail regarding justice, on this Job and the comforters agree: justice comes from God, not men. In addition, Job knows that if that part of justice bequeathed to men by God could bring resolution, Job would have the power to relieve his affliction on his own. There would be no reason for Job and the comforters to argue, no need for Job to have an audience with God. Everything that has taken place up to this point in the book would be moot, and need not have happened. Indeed, rendering the experiences of Job and the comforters nugatory is Elihu's intention: if he can do so, his own lack of experience will not be a factor, and he will be able to speak as an authority. Elihu is thwarted in this enterprise: God appears, making Elihu irrelevant. Who is this who darkens counsel, Speaking without knowledge? (38:2) , God questions Job from within a tempest, beginning the theophany. God is rebuking Job, not for sinning, but rather for asking God to alter the fabric of His world. If Job had sinned, he would not have been granted an audience with God: "[This J is my salvation: /That no impious man can come into His presence" (13:16). Job has not given an untrue account of God and His creation; he has not mistaken the relevance of the unreasonable and terrifying aspects of the world, as Elihu and the comforters have. Job's problem is that his vision is limited by his perspective as a suffering human being. In order to gain divine wisdom and understanding with regard to God's justice, the sense of the world as a whole that Job has must become more than just a sense: it must be known as a whole. In order for Job to know the world as a whole, he must see it 'as a whole. If Job is to see the world as a whole, and gain divine wisdom and an understanding of divine justice, he must undergo a shift in perspective, and see the world as God sees it, with divine vision. God allows Job this vision when He shows Job His creation, "draw[ing] mysteries out of darkness/ And bring[ing] obscurities to light" (12:22). When God appears to Job, He does not give Job a report of the world, but rather speaks it into being, as He did in the beginning (Genesis 1:1-31). The world is not physically recreated; God does not scale down His carefully measured creation so that it fits into a space that Job's unassisted eyes can take in. Instead, God communicates His perspective by means of an epiphany, so that Job can see as God sees, looking down on the whole, while still being a part of creation. This heightening of Job's vision must be what allows him to see God with his eyes. Because God communicates directly to Job, Elihu and the comforters are rightfully prevented from seeing God's creation as a whole. Because Elihu and the comforters did not look and listen p~operly, because they did not question God about his creation, they do not have the experience necessary to see things from God's perspective. Echoing Genesis, God brings the mysteries of creation to light gradually, moving from small to great, so that Job is prepared to face divine wisdom. God begins by showing Job how carefully He has measured the foundations of the earth, setting its limits (38:47). Job knows that he is a created being, and that God is greater than him, but in striving with God, Job has shown that he is unclear about his own limits. Earlier Job asked God, "Am I the sea or the Dragon, /That You have set a watch over me?" (7:12). Speaking of the sea, God begins his response to this question: ... I made breakers My limit for it, And set up its bar and doors, And said, "You may come so far and no farther; Here your surging waves will stop." (38:10-11) It is clear that Job is greater than the sea; Job has the breath of life, and is capable of looking beyond himself, unlike the sea. However, the notion that everything in God's world has, from His perspective, a wellmeasured place, is crucial to Job's new view of the world: his understanding of divine justice depends on it. These things will come into sharper focus when Leviathan, the Dragon, appears. Which path leads to where light dwells, And where is the place of darkness, That you may take it to its domain And know the way to its home? Surely you know, for you were born then, And the number of your years is many! (38:19-2I) Job does not know, and cannot give an answer. God is mocking Job. Not only is it impossible for Job to instruct God, it is folly for Job to request of Him that He remove a day from His creation when Job does not even know where light and darkness reside. God shows Job the rest of the non-living, elemental part of His creation (storms, constellations, etc.) so that Job can see that what he would have to contend with to remove his birth and its time from the world is far beyond his capacity as a human being. Next God presents a parade of animals to Job. The animals fall into two distinct classes: those that God has given men dominion over (Genesis l :28 ), and those that answer only to God. In the class that God has given men dominion over, the group of animals that are lesser creatures than Job, the two that are most important with respect to shifting Job's view of the world are the hind and the ostrich. Can you mark the time when the hinds calve? Can you count the months they must complete? Do you know the season they give birth, When they couch to bring forth their offspring, To deliver their young? (39:1-3) �45 44 God shows Job the hind to change Job's perception of birth. Job sees his birth as a bitter curse, the source of his pain and trouble. God shows the hind in the midst of calving, an image of tenderness. When He does this, God is commanding Job to look and see that the delivery of young, in which nature has its share of God's creative power, is not only good, but beautiful, even though it is painful. Through this Job sees that all of God's world is invested with an inherent measure of beauty and goodness, and that his own birth is intrinsically good. Of all of God's lesser creatures, the ostrich is the most vexing, for both Job and the reader. In his final speech, Job said that he had become "a co~p~­ ion to ostriches" (30:29). God presents the ostnch m an unsavory light: She leaves her eggs on the ground, Letting them warm in the dirt, Forgetting they may be crushed underfoot, Or trampled by a wild beast. Her young are cruelly abandoned as if they were not hers; Her labor is in vain for lack of concern. For God deprived her of wisdom, Gave her no share in understanding. (39:14-17) There are strong parallels here. Like the ostrich, Job has had his children trampled underfoot. Like the ostrich, Job believes himself to be without wisdom and understanding. But God has given Job a share of wisdom and understanding, albeit not the kind that Job seeks. And Job's children were not killed for.Job's lack of concern; there is no good reason for their death. Here God is showing Job that while the protective action that he took on behalf of his children (the sacrifices he made for them (I:5))is important, because it is the most important distinction between Job and the ostrich, Job's community will be preserved or destroyed according to God's wisdom alone, and not according to Job's will. Job's dependence on God is absolute. _ Job acknowledges his ignorance and lack of power when he complies with God's demand that he respond to the question that God is asking, namely, "Do you see where you belong in My world?": See, I am of small worth; what can I answer You? I clap my hand to my mouth. I have spoken once, and will not reply; Twice, and will do so no more. ( 40:4-5) At this point God asks Job, "Would you impugn My justice? /Would you condemn Me that you may be right?" ( 40:8). Job cannot c~n~em_n ~od as he earlier wished (27:7), because Gods JUSttee is unassailable: Job does not have the experience necessary to define either divine wisdom or divine justice. Their defmitions lie beyond the capacity of human speech, and they must be seen, to be ~own. . Job's response to Gods question was mconclusive, simply an active silence, which is why God-shows Job Behemoth, the first of His two great creatures . . Behemoth reveals to Job his place in the world, leavmg Job no doubt about where he belongs. Earlier, Job made it known to the comforters that he wanted God to kill him, citing his weakness as a reason for God to end Job's life: "What strength have I, that I should endure?/. .. Is my strength the strength of rock? / Is my flesh bronze"? (6:II, 12). Behemoth, "the first of God's works" ( 40:19), proves to be stronger, and thus greater than Job: "His bones are like tubes of b:onze, / His limbs like iron rods" ( 40: 18). Behemoth 1s the insurmountable hedge that lies in Job's path (3:23). Finally, God reveals to Job His greatest creature, Leviathan: See, any hope of capturing him must be disappointed; One is prostrated at the very sight of him. There is no one so fierce as to rouse him; W ho then can stand up to M e?... I will not be silent concerning him Or the praise of his martial exploits . . . Divine beings are in dread as he rears up; as he crashes down, they cringe. ( 41:1-2, 4, 17) The wisdom of men, the fear of the Lord, is made manifest in Leviathan. God has given Leviathan the freedom to inflict dread upon anything that crosses his path, even divine beings. God praises Leviathan's n:artial exploits; to God, Leviathan, who causes suffermg, is beautiful. Because he sees, for a fleeting moment, as God sees, Job can recognize this beauty. Seeing God's greatest creature Job has a glimpse of divine wisdom. Job understands that there is a place for terror and suffering in God's world, that it is a natural part of the fabric of God's creation. To call Job's suffering just or unjust would be folly; it is a reasonable distinction appropriate only to the world of men and the relationships that exist within it, and not to the whole of creation or to the relationship between man and God: its meaning crumbles in the face of Leviathan's awful presence. God's creation is far too great to be contained by the boundaries of such an easy conclusion. By creating an unreasonable world in which blameless men are allowed to suffer, in which the hind knows pain and the ostrich lacks understanding, God gives His creation a measure of freedom that would not be available in a logically consistent world which knew no suffering. Each creature in God's world is granted the freedom to be an individual, to act according to its own will and limitations. Seeing this, Job learns that he must continue to reach beyond the rational, because the world view that falls out of strict rationality is not really a view of the world. Rather, it is a vain attempt by man to create his own world, which must be incomplete and would not allow life to be lived fully, if it could be lived at all. To be fully human, and a true servant of God, Job must face the complexities and apparent contradictions of the world, not for the sake of reconciling and understanding them, but in order that he may appreciate their harsh beauty and strive to live in harmony with them. This striving is what makes life compelling. In this striving Job can achieve harmony with God. Job has been striving for harmony with God from the first. Now that he has seen his boundaries and knows the terms under which he must search for it, Job understands that his desire for a full explanation of divine wisdom and justice was improper: I know that You can do everything, That no plan is impossible for Yqu. Who is this who obscures counsel without knowledge? Indeed, I spoke without understanding Of things beyond me, which I did not know. Hear now, and I will speak; I will ask and You will inform me. I had heard you with my ears, but now I see you with my eyes; Therefore I recant and relent, Being but dust and ashes. (42:2-6) Job knows that his suffering was not unjust, and he now possesses the wisdom he needs to find his way in the world. Job reached out to God, and God touched him, giving Job a sense of awe and wonder at the greatness of His creation. Any further understanding of divine wisdom and justice is beyond Job; it belongs only to God. "Thus the Lord blessed the latter years of Job's life more than the former" (42:12). Having had a glimpse of divine wisdom, Job is a changed man. Before his suffering, Job was a man alone: he watched over his family with a cautious eye, but did not take part in it. A caring but aloof father, Job did not feast with his children at the houses of his sons, but made sacrifices on their behalf (1:4-5). After his affliction, Job understands that if he is to live in harmony with the world, he must live in harmony with his own community. Job must not be a distant spectator; rather, he must take an active role within his family. Job acknowledges this by holding a feast at his own house, where he is surrounded with and consoled by his family and foends. "[Job J had seven sons and three daughters. The first he named Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch" (42: I 3-I 4 ). Having seen the beauty of the hind in labor, Job knows that women, the bearers of children, are the handmaidens of God's creation, and as the curers of loneliness (Genesis 2:I 824 ), they are also the creators of human community. The beauty of his daughters serves as a visual reminder to Job of the exalted place God has given them in His world. With these things in mind, Job gives his daughters a share in his possessions along with their brothers ( 42:15). When he gives his daughters estates, Job relinquishes his control over their lives and care, granting each of them the freedom to fmd their own way in the world. "So Job died old and contented" ( 42: I 7). + Thanks to Ms. Nancy &henauer-advisor, mentor, trusted friend. Notes: I. The Book of Job. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, I 980. References are to chapter and verse. �46 SE N IOR EssAY PaizE, Understanding the Mythical Nature of the Wilderness and its Role in Isaac McCaslin's Repudiation in "The Bear" Aaron Pease, A98 T Sarajevo, I 997, Vada Mosavaat, AOO he Bear," by William Faulkner, contains mythical elements. Both the bear, Old Ben, and the wilderness in which he lives become larger than hfe. They are not merely personified, but raised to a level which seems more than human. Their grandeur is contrasted to the triviality and smallness of the human stage and its passions, prides, and tragedies. It seems at first that it is only in their presence that man can become fully human. However, the continuing development of this story, along with the themes and issues dealt with in "The Old People" and "Delta Autumn," reveals an underlying complexity which muddles the purity of our expectations, and forces us to question how we have understood the myth. It is not that the myth becomes diminished in our sight but that it must share our vision with other themes. It seems necessary, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the novella, to examine carefully the mythical elements and their effect on young Isaac McCaslin, the sensitive boy for whom the myth has the most impact. We must then examine Isaac's repudiation, and how that one decision and its aftermath affects our reading of his youthful encounter with Old Ben. The bear is described in three ways. He is a mortal being who will one day die. He is a legend, the stuff not of tall tales but the measured, deliberate stories delivered in a serious, almost disbelieving tone which guarantees the listener that the apparently incredible conclusion is not hyperbole. Finally, the bear is "epitome;' "phantom," and "apotheosis out of the old wild life:'l He is an anachronism, from an old dead time when all our land was wilderness and man was merely another creature slinking through the woods. How can we link these three descriptions? To what form can we fit them so that the three-sided figure will give us a complete picture? The story leaves us in no doubt that the bear is a mortal being. Boon kills him with the aid of Lion. However, Old Ben has such a hold on the minds of the characters, especially Isaac, that it is fair to ask whether the grandeur of the bear is a human construction, a foisting of nobility upon an irrational beast from some sort of psychological need, or rather the inspired chronicling of an actual being who incites man to wonder, awe, and a dread of his fragility? The question arises from Isaac's realization in Chapter One that the bear which had: run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember and which therefore must have existed in the listening and the dreams of his cousin and Major de Spain ... before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal and that they . .. had no actual intention of slaying it, not because it could not be slain but because so far they had no actual hope of being able to. (p.192) 2 This seems to combine all three elements mentioned before confusedly: mortal, legend, and apotheosis. This bear, this mortal being, has been present in the preconscious minds of the ten year old Isaac McCaslin, his 26 year old cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, and the elderly (or at least middleaged) Major de Spain. If this is due merely to the recounting of Old Ben's exploits by the hunters who vainly sought him, then the bear must have been living at least 60 years, at least twice a normal lifespan. This seems to suggest that the bear is really the stuff of legends and fables, an unattainable goal that every generation of hunters needs: a cunning, almost human creature who consistently outwits his pursuers. Perhaps we must investigate further the notion of its being an anachronism out of an old dead time. We must take seriously the possibility that the bear, though a mortal being, may possess slightly more than mortal powers, as if aided by gods. First let us try to see with more precision how the bear "runs in the listening and looms in the dreams" of the hunters. The first seems relatively simple. From their earliest childhood, in the company of their elders, gathered around the fire in the libraries of town houses or trophy rooms of plantations, they have heard the best of all listening, stories of Old Ben. They give him a name like a man's because he has foiled their best attempts to catch him. Using clever- �48 ness or brute force when necessary, he has earned himself a place among humans, if not for his power of reasoning than for proving how ineffective the best human plans can be. These stories seem to be a constant; that is, the same stories never seem to grow old upon retelling and perhaps even become more vigorous and robust each time they are repeated. Why are they the best of all listening? The first answer that comes to mind is that they are about the wilderness, but that begs the question. Let us instead grant that because they are of the wilderness, they have the best of all settings. What is the appeal of the bear? The earlier suggestion, that the bear represents the unattainable goal, the almost human creature who outwits his pursuers, seems to fit. But again we must ask, why do hunters need this unattainable goal? What does this fact tell us about human nature in general and especially in the postReconstruction South in 1877? Perhaps we can generalize to say that any story, to be a story, needs an element of wonder. It must contain a motive, action, or being which defies our understanding or categorization. Even if the story has as pedestrian a purpose as imparting a moral lesson, it is often portrayed in a fanciful setting with magical characters. Perhaps the story is offering an explanation of something incomprehensible which stuns our intellects. If this is so, then the bear not only satisfies a requirement of storytelling but the need of the listener as well. This may be where the second part, the looming in the dreams, comes in. At first glance this seems to have a simple explanation. After a night of listening to stories about Old Ben, the children go to bed and dream of him. Some nights they have nightmares, in which he chases them through the dark wood; other nights they are hunting him and bring him to bay. They assuredly daydream about him while going about the humdrum business of school. Yet the phrasing seems to indicate more. The use of "looms" in this story is strange; it has an ominous connotation yet does not fully convey danger. Rather, the "looming" indicates an everpresence which never fully steps out of the shadow of subconsciousness, so that its motives or effect are never clear. Is it fair to speculate that the bear may be a part of human nature? The hold Old Ben has on the hunters suggests that the hunt is not just the vain pursuit of that which refuses to submit to humanity, but that it may also be a chase after a part of man which he has lost through the course of history. In this sense 49 the attributes of Old Ben are not alien to human nature, but may actually be essential to being a human. The looming in the dreams seems to locate the bear in the minds of the listeners. He seizes their imagination, but it seems he is merely ascending a throne already prepared for him. What then is the nature of the bear? With the previous analysis we are in danger of reducing him to an abstraction. He is first of all big, too big for the hunters and all their accessories, even for the country which was his constricting territory. In the first instance the bigness seems to deal with sheer massiveness; the dogs and bullets are ineffectual, the horses are too slow. But how is Old Ben too big for man? and for the country? The bigness in relation to man see:i;ns not a mere ratio of physical size. Man, with his reason, has reached up to the stars and comprehended their motions; he has set into motion a chain of events which will lead to him surveying the earth from the vantage point of the moon. Yet Old Ben is too big for man. Does this mean man cannot comprehend him? If so, this story is a critique of modern man in contrast with the sublime character of Old Ben. Man certainly cannot corner this quarry. Is this a figurative way of saying that he is beyond the scope of man's comprehension? To hunt is to seek out. Certainly when we use our discursive reason we are seeking out something, whether it be Truth, Beauty, or Euler's e. The fact that Old Ben eludes his pursuers apparently not by cunning or guile but merely by sheer bigness seems to place him among the objects which cannot be grasped by our reason. Our reason can bump against these objects, but cannot embrace them or define their boundaries. If it could, it would be able to cut them up into parts and render them easily analyzable. Old Ben is also too big for the country, the backdrop against which his drama is played out. This certainly includes the wilderness, but it also must include the surrounding farms, mills, and plantations. As these are the works of man, it is no surprise that he is too big (or merely very disproportional) for them, even though they are steadily reducing the extent of the wilderness. Yet is this bigness one of appetite, that Old Ben cannot coexist with the creations of man, because they demand the same sustenance and there isn't enough for the two of them? Or is it one of right, where two opposing claims to the land must clash for supremacy? If it is the first, then it is the wilderness we are talking about. It provides the deer and berries as well as bed and home for Old Ben. Likewise it provides the raw material for the ever expanding plantations and mills which daily become more efficient and productive. Therefore it seems natural that these two opposing force~ should fight over the same territory. The legend of Old Ben chronicles the devestation he wreaks upon the livestock and stored food of the farms that lie on the fringe of the wilderness. Are these simply the forays of a bear whose habitat is being steadily diminished and thus needs to carry off pigs and calves and rifle the corncribs because the wilderness no longer can feed him? Is it the revenge of the wilderness upon the encroaching farms, a grim reminder that their holdings are mere scratches in the surface of the large and fecund earth? In either case we are forced to see that more than just the land is at stake; the values these opposing forces represent lie at the heart of the conflict. The bear is characterized as having the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive. Yet it is the locomotive which is the crowning industrial achievement of the men who have turned the land into mills and farms. This comparison gives one a sense of the bear's power but also buttresses the reader's suspicion: that despite the characterization of the farms and other signs of civilization and industry which surround the wilderness as puny gnawings and hackings, it is this smallness which will prevail and the great wilderness which will disappear.Two visions claim the land, both powerful and seemingly inexorable, but one which is big, the other which is puny. This description seems more qualitative then quantitative. The wilderness, however much it diminishes, will always be big, and the commercial land, no matter how extensive, will always be puny. Let us try to understand further how the bear stands as the "apotheosis" of the old wild life which lives on in the wilderness. The old wild life is presumably emblematic of the time when the Chickasaw warriors, Sam Fathers's ancestors on his father's side, roamed the forest, which was unsullied by farms and mills. Not only was the land pristine and untrammelled, but the values of the people who used it kept it that way. It was not until the white man arrived that the thought of ownership of the land was introduced to the wild and free men, and they succumbed to the notion as if it were a disease to which they had no immunity. Perhaps Old Ben represents the old wild life in the freedom that he possesses. His is not merely the freedom from capture but the freedom to take what he pleases. It seems that the people who lived in that older time could claim a greater degree of freedom than the people nowadays. Although they lived together in tribes, they were not bound by others to till the soil or work a mill. They lived by hunting, and while it is unrealistic to suppos e their existence was utopian, they had readily accessible to them the experience of the wilderness. Perhaps their vices and passions were muted by its "soaring and sombre solitude" (I 7 4 ); its presence served to ennoble them just as we see Old Ben ennobling McCaslin, Major de Spain, etc. They were not tainted by the urge to dispossess and own, and they could do as they pleased within the framework of the wilderness and be happy. Old Ben epitomizes this life not only because he is one with the wilderness and possesses all of its virtues, but because he can dispossess and subjugate man, who in this new time has become the ultimate dispossessor and subjugator. He dispossesses man of his property, and subjugates man's will and imagination to emulation of him. How can we understand the bear in relation to the wilderness? If the bear is big, then the presence of the wilderness is even bigger: "tremendous, attentive, impartial, omniscient" (p. I 7 4 ), and "the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it" (p.I 94). The bear is always in action, the protagonist of stories, the infiltrator of dreams, brazen and huge. The wilderness is immobility and sentience. Yet one cannot be found without the other. Isaac, upon hearing of Old Ben, divines the wilderness; likewise, on first hearing the sounds of the dogs reluctantly following Old Ben's scent, it is not Old Ben who is ahead of them but the wilderness. And it is the wilderness, not Old Ben, who lightly pats the bitch for her temerity. Should we think of the bear as a personification of the wilderness or as a metaphor for it? Old Ben is definitely a part of the wilderness, but it is also clear that man's encroachment upon the wilderness has been slowed by the presence of Old Ben. He discourages squatters and farmers from living too close to the · wilderness. He also holds the hunters in his power, and their hunting of him serves to keep the wilderness intact a little while longer. He carries an appeal to the men, who despite their fragility and smallness in juxtaposition to the wilderness, also hold the wilderness in a life or death grip. They hunt Old Ben, but they hunt him according to the rules of the wilderness. They are not the squatters and sharecroppers who impinge on the wilderness and are at the mercy of Old Ben. They do not want revenge; they could easily get rid of Old �• 50 Ben by setting the Big Woods afire or selling it off to a lumber company. They keep pure the hunter-hunted relationship, and imitate Old Ben when hunting him. They apparently have an unspoken agreement with Old Ben which both have kept in good faith. In this sense Old Ben appears as a mediator between the wilderness and the men who hunt Old Ben and so unwittingly preserve it. The wilderness not only inspires awe, but abhorrence and fear. Perhaps most men are not comfortable with the ahnost palpable presence of the wilderness. In any case, its immobility and brooding sentience are much harder for man to appreciate or contemplate, and the active, roaming figure of Old Ben is much easier to understand. Motion is a common characteristic of those things that we can comprehend, while supreme immobility is often predicated of God, the Unknowable. Further, not only is the bear a moving figure, but through the hunt man is also able to be in motion, as our reason is always in motion when seeking out the truth. It appears that the presence of the wilderness, which only Isaac and Sam Fathers seem to appreciate fully, must rely on its manifestation within the bear to affect the rest of the hunters. This seems to support the idea that Old Ben is a metaphor for the wilderness. The freedom that he so aggressively asserts and revels in, is perhaps parallel to the "soaring and sombre solitude" of the wilderness, where man can experience an inner freedom which, uncluttered by small and puny desires and hopes, can expand his soul in contemplation of the mysteries of the wilderness. What are the mysteries of the wilderness? The wilderness is composed of myriad life. Yet each part is somehow joined together to create a single presence which seems to possess a soul or at least an intellect. Perhaps it is akin to a rapidly vibrating string which gives an impression of solidity within the diameter of its vibration. The change of seasons, the growth of plants and trees, the passing of the sun and rain, run together to form a seamless, timeless whole which extends beyond the senses. It is forever adding to itself, not only with the physical growth, but with the many lives which have quitted physical existence. For it is here that Sam Fathers sees the majestic buck who apparently is the incarnation of his grandfather, Issetibeha, and Isaac sees the snake who is Old Carothers. Here Isaac believes Sam, Lion, and Old Ben to live on, not dead but translated into the myriad life of the wilderness and thus into its soul. Here there is no death, only a natural transition to become a part of SI the wilderness's presence. Isaac's observation when standing in the cane brake that the woods are exactly the way they were when the Chickasaw warriors roamed it is not a wish or a supposition but a fact. There doesn't seem even to be any such thing as sin or punishment for sin within the wilderness. The noble Issetibeha lives on, just as vile Old Carothers, who has done more than most to bring on the ruin of the wilderness. Somehow the constant renewing of life which characterizes the wilderness has even revived Old Carothers, although the wilderness is not completely lacking in a sense of justice. Old Carothers is a snake, and harmful only to those who do not know the wilderness. One could even argue that the brooding sentience of the wilderness contemplates things much bigger than itself and thus to it man's evils appear trivial and fleeting. The presence of the wilderness profoundly affects Isaac. While composed of the "myriad life which printed the dark mold of these secret and sunless spaces with delicate fairy tracks... which watched him from beyond every twig and leaf" (p. 313), the effect on Isaac is almost always one of solitude and loneliness. How can we reconcile these two experiences? Man's natural desire to know forces him to try to understand the wilderness and the awe it inspires within him. However, the wilderness is disproportionately big, not just in comparison to his physical size but with regards to the smallness of his intellect. He can find no analogies or comparisons to which he can make a ratio to its massiveness. Therefore man comes to feel loneliness and solitude because none of his concepts are adequate to accompany him into this contemplation. He becomes aware, rather, of its presence which he perceives, though not just through the senses. It impresses upon him a sense of being which does not fill him but which rather reminds him of the being he possesses. That is why the boy, to whom Isaac is compared, recognizes the existence of love and passion from entering the presence of a woman (p.195). He is filled with an emptiness and a temporary despair because his life is so empty of the fullness which the woman has experienced in loving and being the beloved. However, this emptiness, once it is recognized, gives him hope that one day it can be filled, that the realization of emptiness is better than never knowing how much he could lack. He desires to know of the men she has loved or who have loved her, of their excellence and their deeds which made them deserving of her. In short, he seeks to create an imagined life which will provide him with a model of emulation so that he too will one day be worthy to love that woman. The wilderness contains the memories of untold eras and peoples and beasts. It stands over man, who to prolong his short life's memory can merely construct edifices and monuments which will barely outlive him. These too pale in comparison with the wilderness, which had stood for milennia before the white man even thought to seek out a New World. Its presence implies a history which contains greater deeds, nobler men, and more horrific monsters than anything the white man has heard of or imagined. Yet it stands silent, brooding, sentient, as if contemplating something else, something even bigger than itself (perhaps its own fate). Yet the wilderness is vulnerable. It cannot resist the puny gnawings and hackings, which, multiplied a thousandfold, steadily diminish it. This indicates that it is somehow subservient to man, that it must depend on man for its current existence. It is man who for now, as slave of the modern profit driven world, holds power of life or death over it, albeit ambiguously because he is not its master. Only recently has the wilderness become threatened. Most men live outside of the wilderness and have no regular experience of it. It seems that the experience is key, whether simply with the wilderness or as mediated through the chase of Old Ben. Without any experience, there seems to be nothing which can give man a sense of a presence outside of him. It seems analogous to a cathedral, which is designed to give one a sense of the majesty of God. However, a cathedral is man-made and filled with symbols which lead one to see the cathedral itself as a symbol. It even contains pictures or statues of the God who inspired it. In the wilderness, its natural symbolism, if it possesses one at all, is inaccessible to man and points to a God or Principle even more awe-inspiring than itself Considering the presence it has, and its effect, it might as well be considered an end in itself The wilderness is doomed, and Old Ben is a mortal being and so must die. It is Old Ben's death which spells the beginning of the end of the wilderness. After Old Ben there is nothing to keep men from transforming the wilderness into raw material for their mills, homes, and farms. But the manner in which Old Ben is brought down points toward a deepening complexity which suggests to the reader that his death is not the tragedy it might at first seem to be. What is needed is a dog who can hold Old Ben at bay. In what seems an incredible piece of luck they find the dog in the wilderness. He is wild, more fearsome than a wolf because he doesn't care enough about men to be afraid of them. He possesses "a cold and almost impersonal malignance like some natural force." His hide is blue-tinted and similar to the color of metal, so that he seems to be like a bullet in silent pursuit when fired at his target. He is employed by the hunters in the hunt for Old Ben, but they do not own him. He seems similar to the machines and technologies that man employs for his own ends but which take on a life of their own and come to dominate man, their creator. The day comes that is inevitable once Lion has been found. It will be when, as Isaac realizes, "Even he [Old BenJ don't want it to last any longer" (p.204). It is like a festival. Both townspeople and the poorest sharecroppers have come to witness it. They process into the woods, which to the first is merely foreign, and to the other both foreign and antagonistic. They are led by a dog whose blue hide infers not just "courage and all else that went to make up the will and desire to pursue and kill but endurance, the will and desire to endure beyond all imaginable limits of flesh to overtake and slay" (p.22 7). Soon after, Lion finally brings Old Ben to bay. The dogs mill about uncertainly, but Lion does not hesitate. He attacks and jumps for Old Ben's throat; Old Ben catches him in an embrace and falls backward. It seems that even Lion is not enough, until Boon leaps to his rescue and buries his knife deep in Old Ben's neck. Old Ben is at last brought down both by a dog who cares for nothing and the man who loves him. It was also an act of redemption, for previously Lion brought Old Ben to bay and Boon missed him five times with his pump gun. Old Ben seems to embrace his fate by embracing Lion. Turning at bay is a the symbolic gesture of defeat. There is nowhere (or no reason) to run, nowhere to hide, and while his ability to fend off the . dogs alone makes the kill a dicey proposition, it plays into the hands of the hunters, who prefer an unmoving target. It is a tactic out of the old wild life, where once the chase has ended and the fight has begun, the beast with the most courage and endurance will win out. It has no place in the modern, levelling world of machines and the mere fact that it is resorted to spells doom for Old Ben. However, Old Ben is not brought down by bullets. He is killed by Boon, who risks life and limb �52 53 I I to save Lion. In effect it is an act of love that brings down Old Ben, a man's love for a dog that is not even his. Perhaps this is why Isaac knows that he will not grieve when Old Ben dies. How are we to understand Isaac McCaslin against this backdrop? From his earlie~t d~ys the be ~r 1 has "run in his listening and loomed m his dreams. It is he who, before he is ten, believes that the hunters who each fall set off to hunt Old Ben do not even intend to kill him. Instead, he perceives that their failed hunts are not futile but are celebrations of the "old bear's furious immortality" (p.I86). It is Isaac, more than anyone else, who gives the hunt a mythical symbolism and meaning. What are the factors which lead Isaac McCaslin to see things in this way? It is Sam Fathers who undertakes to teach young Isaac the ways of the hunt. He creates for Isaac that mystical world where the past seems more real than the present, where the Chickasaw warriors roam the woods as if they had never left it. In the child's imagination the small copses and creek beds and wooded ravines which adjoin the farms and fields become the pristine land which existed before the white man's invasion. His farm and his family's other holdings seem to him as insubstantial as the faded page on which is recorded his legal claim to the land. We don't know the truth of what Sam Fathers relates to Isaac. He has never known the Indian peoples from whom he is descended; he doesn't even remember his father's face. However, he fashions a world out of recollections he has never had. Certainly then they are coming from his imagination. As memories they may be false, but as a myth or story with a moral they are not mere lies. Or perhaps they reflect what Sam Fathers wishes could be the case. He is training Isaac to become a hunter, a man, but also to become part of the bigger world to which the wilderness is the entrance. The world Sam Fathers creates captures Isaac's imagination completely, not just because he is a boy and likes to hear stories about Indians and hunting, but also because it relays to him a moral system and way of life which is vastly different from the one he lives in. It conveys to him a nobility, a sense both of right and privilege but also humility in the face of that which with one is entrusted. He absorbs so much of this way of life that it is the past which seems real and the present which usurps. The ideals of the past are the true ones, not the ones which have brought with them the harsh life of the plantation. Isaac's values are those of the hunter. They are humility, sufferance, endurance and pride. The pride only exists because of the previous three. It is virtuous i and gracious, and prideful not by accompl_shment ~ut by association. So the world that Isaac believes he lives in, where the present is tenuous and is always in danger of sliding back into the past, is supported by the existence of the bear. He has foiled the best attempts of the men who control the present as he knows it: plantations, farms, and mills which dominate the land and the people who work them. He has plagued them since even before he was born, so that the bear has loomed in their dreams or run in their listening since even before they could remember, just as with Isaac. He has made their innovations and domestications look silly and useless. But even though he is too. big, so that everyone is small in comparison, the men who hunt him ennoble themselves by doing so. They are drawn back by Old Ben into the past to participate in that "ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter" (p.I84). Each November or June they travel to the Big Woods, back into the past, and return emptyhanded. But that is the way it should be, according to Isaac, for Old Ben is their ticket into that ancient, brooding world. But Isaac is a believer. He has faith in Sam Fathers, in the stories he is told. He believes that the wilderness is alive and sentient, and that the deer that Sam Fathers calls Grandfather really is a reincarnation of the man who has been dead for I 00 years. It is the bear who confirms his faith, makes the stories more real than even his imagination can make them because Old Ben is real. He enters the wilderness and soon encounters the bear. He has inherited the bear and the wi.lderness as the stuff of legend, as the phantom who time and again glides through the ring of hounds and bullets because they are not enough. But the bear is alive, and faith cannot exist without the hope of its dispelling. That is why Isaac must see Old Ben, to affirm the fear that he hears in the voices of the hounds, that he himself feels when he sees the mark of its trap-ruined paw. He will be scared, because there is no helping it. The massiveness of the bear, coupled with the grandeur of the wilderness, cannot bu~ reduce him to a state of fear and awe. But he will not be afraid, he will not be seized by the irrational fear of a coward, who must lash out at the object of his fear. The fear will possess him but will not drive him mad, because there is no necessary reason to be afraid of what is bigger than you. But Isaac can't just walk out and see Old Ben. He must become a woodsman, he must learn from Sam how to hum and read trails and sign. Even further, he must remove himself completely from the world of plantations and mills and progress. His search for Old Ben is futile until he leaves off not only the gun but also his watch and compass. None of the other hunters would have dared to leave without a gun. To them the wilderness is still dangerous and uncertain, and they would require protection and a means to take advantage of an opportunity to hunt. When he finally finds Old Ben, or rather, Old Ben reveals himself, he is no longer a hunter, part of that art which brings man so close to nature yet still remains intrinsically antagonistic. Old Ben moves across the glade and into the glare and then stops and looks at him again. He fades back into the woods, not as if he slipped back but as if the wilderness closed around him like a curtain, like the host were being placed back in the tabernacle after being displayed to the faithful. And so the appearance of Lion should have caused Isaac to hate and fear him. He has seen the bear, even jumped it once with the fyce, but he knows he will never shoot at it. He knew this the first time he ever felt the presence of Old Ben. Isaac knows now that the hunters don't kill Old Ben not because they are celebrating his furious freedom but because they have no hope or chance to. But with Lion things will be different. He is the dog to run down Old Ben, and Isaac accepts it, and even feels privileged to be a part of it. He feels a sense of fatality about what is going on; he feels as if it is the beginning of the end of something big. "He would be humble and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too" (p.2 I 7). Is this the code of the hunter? Earlier hunting is described as "the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules ·which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter." It is a game of life and death. It requires strict rules because the hunter can easily become the hunted and the field upon which they play can be just as dangerous as the wild animals they hunt within it. And when Sam marks Isaac with the blood of the deer in ''The Old People," which consecrates and links him to the halfIndian chief irrevocably, it absolves him not of love and pity for the things he slays but weakness and regret, which would prevent him from being a man's hunter. It is this voiding of regret which seems odd, as regret is a wish to change the past and to Isaac it is the past which is always mingled in with the present and which the present is always trying to subvert it. Isaac has immersed himself into the life of the wilderness more than any other of the hunters. He transforms their hunts into "pageant-rites," celebrations of the bear they try to slay but cannot because he is too big for them. He is not content to merely be a hunter; he voids all the laws of that "ancient and unremitting contest" so that he can see Old Ben, so that he can fill himself with the presence and mystery of the wilderness. He seeks the meaning behind things; whereas, the other men are content to see the wilderness through the medium of hunting, having killed and been marked but still in some sense antagonistic. It is Isaac who sees "the two of them, shadowy in the limbo &om which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it" (p.I95). Yet he does not mourn Old Ben's passing, even though he knows it sets into motion events which will mark the end of something, presumably the wilderness, as the story seems to indicate. Does the absolution of regret which marks him as a hunter prevent him from properly mourning Old Ben? Does the code of the hunter include some sort of quietism which fails to do what is necessary to prevent the wilderness's passing? Or does the code base itself upon a bigger perspective, on a knowledge of the wilderness as mentioned before, so that death is not tragic, even though the death contains a significance beyond itself? The hunt, as has been mentioned before, is a deadly serious game. It involves the virtues of humility, pride, and endurance. It rewards the ability to submit oneself to the dictates and hardships of the wilderness, and because these are followed and endured, the pride follows, which is a virtuous selfrespect and a respect for all that lives, even if what lives will someday be brought down by the hunter's gun. There can be no regret because the hunter's code pushes two contradictory messages: the one which demands an appreciation, respect, and even love for all life, and the other which demands a steady aim, a sure hand, and no remorse as the trigger is pulled. The hunter loves the life he spills. But he spills it nonetheless, and he seems to have firmly entrenched in him the notion that everything must die someday. It seems almost cynical. At the very least it seems not to be a fitting end to the story of the bear. He dies with no objections from Isaac, and one wonders if the code of the hunter, the code of the wilderness which Sam Fathers inculcates into Isaac, and which Isaac accepts �54 I I I joyfully and humbly, is too perfect, too complete a code, so that the boy becomes a man too soon, before he can fully appreciate the tenacious loves, desires, and thoughts of a child. Five years after the death of Old Ben we witness a second death, a death which signifies the beginning of the end of the white male McCaslins. Isaac is 21, and at the age when his inheritance gives him, the huge farm and former plantation which McCaslin Edmonds has caretaken until this time. But Isaac refuses it, and the reader is swept into the crux of the story, the fourth chapter which flows like a river through the middle of the story. It chronicles both Isaac's arguments for his repudiation of the land and a litany of wrongs which he has inherited and which powerfully affect his reasoning. The seamlessness and the turbidity of the grammatical structure, in which sentences run through paragraphs and even pages, gives us a structural wilderness through whose ragged and continuous underbrush the reader must uncover the flowers of his relinquishment. The motives and experiences twist and turn around and through each other like brambles, so that time and place seem to take second place to the powerful pulls of the psyche which order and rank them according to its peculiar criteria. The argument begins simply enough. It is the land that is in question. According to Isaac he does not own it, nor did his grandfather Old Carothers, nor even the Indians who sold it to him. As he has been taught by Sam Fathers, the land is owned by no one, and Sam is echoed in the Bible, where it is chronicled that God made the earth to be held in common, to be shared and enjoyed by everyone. Ownership is an illusion, because the very idea that the land is something that can be bought or sold renders invalid the actual buying and selling. He who buys land buys nothing, because the land cannot be owned. The men who bought the land, brought in slaves to work and have as proof of their ownership of a commodity which brings them money, are deluding themselves. They have no more claim to the land than the drifter who spends the night on it and then moves on. McCaslin's retort is that nevertheless the land is owned. Isaac's reasoning is based on an ideal of the land not borne out in practice. In practice, there are men who claim to own the land and still more who believe them. Even granting the illusoriness of legal claims, it is men like Old Carothers who have seized the land in defiance of whatever principle to the contrary and kept it and made something of it, not 55 only for themselve but for their descendants. In practice, then, Isaac is forced to repudiate the land, while in theory he has nothing to relinquish. It is Isaac who first refers to the Bible, and it is McCaslin who first creates the historical link between them and the Garden of Eden. It is a series of dispossessions starting when God first exiled man from Eden. Man has successively invaded and taken back the land he may or may not have a claim to, so that the history of man seems to be the ebb and flow of a confused, meandering tide. And if God intended that the world be held in common and shared in peace, then where has he been during the sordid history of man, displacing his neighbor and being displaced in return? Isaac's answer: He has been dispossessed. The history of man has been the history of the displacement of God. God has not merely stood by, ignorant or impotent, and watched the people who claimed to be His believers carry out horrible acts of injustice and slavery, often in His name. Rather the history of dispossession and wasting that seems to characterize the history of man is a removing of the simple virtues which God has ordained will preserve his creation and lead to Him. The discovery of America was allowed by God because it is here that redemption is possible, where "a nation of people could be founded in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to another." God permits his laws to be broken, for someone like Old Carothers to own and keep the land in the eyes of man because the white man, even before he began to divide the land into parcels and demarcations, has cursed the land. The white man is needed to break his own curse, which he has brought to the New World. And it seems that the land must be allowed to degenerate into a model of the old world, so that out of the rubble man will create for himself, one man will stand back and cry, "What have we done?" The seeds of the old world's corrupt and worthless twilight, which the white man has fled, have been brought to the New World like a disease. The wild men who inhabit the land have no defense against it and succumb to it (witness Ikemotubbe's ruthlessness upon his return from New Orleans); therefore it seems it is necessary for the white man to destroy the curse he has brought. This process is unfolding through the line of Old Carothers's descendants. Old Carothers was the carrier of the curse, and the subsequent generations have been slowly undoing the curse, as the dictates of the times have allowed. McCaslin misunderstands the curse interpretation that Isaac is explaining and mentions the sons of Ham, the descendants of Noah who are cursed to serve the descendants of Ham's brothers. It was commonly thought that the sons of Ham were the black people, and was often argued by those with a vested interest in a Biblical justification of slavery. Isaac argues that the Bible is a complex work and sometimes says things which are not literally true. Notwithstanding the considerable interpretation and moral myopia demanded by the conclusion McCaslin reaches, the Bible does employ symbols and myths to convey truth to man. The Bible must be read by the heart, not by the reason, and only a true heart can navigate the complex web of the Bible. The message God wants to be conveyed is simple, too simple for the complex and driven human heart. It must be explained by complex and driven men whose hearts are filled with lust and passion and hate, to men whose hearts are likewise filled with lust and passion. Truth must survive the medium of humanity's condition before it can reside in the human heart. This argument by Isaac seems to be key to his character. He maintains both that truth is simple and that truth is complex. The heart already knows truth, but it must be filtered through the complex passions which drive the heart. The Bible, which is God's Word, is a huge, sprawling pseudo-historical spiritual work out of which both the most commonsense and the most delusional beliefs have been taken. It has been written by the driving passions of the human heart, for the driving passions of the human heart. But for Isaac, the truth is simple. His notion comes to the fore when McCaslin reads to him Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which McCaslin believes explains the nature of truth. The closing lines of the second stanza, "She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!," which is addressed to the young lovers frozen on the side of an antique vase, is symbolic of truth and man's relation to it. Truth is unchanging, and even if we cannot grasp it, we are destined, through courage, love, honor, pity, and pride, to confusedly seek it out. McCaslin is prompted to reflection on this poem by the story of Isaac risking his life to save the little fyce which was going to attack Old Ben. Not only does he not shoot Old Ben, but he drops his gun when he rushes to within ten feet of Old Ben to save the hysterically courageous fyce. McCaslin cannot understand why Isaac didn't shoot, and then the poem springs to mind and helps him understand. What insight does McCaslin have into Isaac's behavior which the poem helps bring to light? The poem celebrates the feeling of timelessness and youth which the urn inspires. The scene depicted on the urn is irrevocable; but it forever engages in the viewer not only a sense of eternal bliss but also a desire to construct a world which can produce a scene such as this. Who are the lovers? What city have they come from? What god is being sacrificed to? These details are not of historical interest; past answers are not important. What is important is that the viewer is drawn into the scene, experiences its immediacy, yet is also aware that it continually renews itself. The youthful lovers will always be youthful. In a sense the scene has a past and a present but not a future. That frozen moment speaks not of fulfillment but of the beauty of desire. In a story we might require some sort of resolution, while in this scene we instead prize the motion that is implied in the stillness. The suitor is forever courting while the beloved is forever coy. How can we link this to Isaac and his experience with the bear? We know very early on that Old Ben means much more to Isaac than a mortal being should. Old Ben is something he inherits from his elders, and which he knows first through stories and then in dreams. His first experience of Old Ben's mortality is one of awe, and he knows that he will never fire upon Old Ben. Therefore, when he surprises Old Ben and the fyce amazingly brings him to bay, we have frozen in an instant of time the boy juxtaposed against the bear, looming as he looms in Isaac's dreams. Isaac is aware of Old Ben's mortality and the hunter's code which voids all regrets towards slain prey. Yet the immensity of the bear, both literal and figurative, impresses upon him a sense of preservation. The hunt is not a real attempt to kill Old Ben; rather it is a framework within which the bear is revealed in all his grandeur. The "yearly pageant-rite of the old bear's furious immortality" must go on. Isaac knows the bear will someday die, but it will not be him who brings the hunt to a close. Isaac preserves a tradition, one which preserves both Old Ben and the celebration of his life. One wonders if this is analogous to the preservation of the urn, so that its message can inform subsequent generations. The urn can have no effect if there is either no one to appreciate its beauty and if it becomes cracked or ruined from mishandling or neglect. This is what McCaslin apprehends, that the truth of the bear is �56 preserved only in the experience of him. Truth covers all things which touch the heart, so that the things we do for truth are manifested in our virtues. Isaac is led by his heart to save the fyce, to throw down the gun in abnegation of technology, to refuse to shoot Old Ben even when he holds the gun. It all happens so fast, that reasoning doesn't seem to play a part. It seems to be a direct apprehension of truth which man only is confusedly aware of, a sense of something bigger than himself which prompts him to action, bypassing the normal acts or ratiocination and deliberation. This is an example of the simplicity of truth, an impetus to direct action which seems to be the right thing to do. The complexity comes into play in the evaluation of the consequences of the human action. For example, Boon's killing of Old Ben to save Lion's life is another example of truth acting directly on a human heart. We do not fault Boon for his impulsive, courageous action. It is an act of love, and the worst we can say is that Old Ben died a worthy death at the hands of love. Yet the consequences of Old Ben's death are not all good. His death insures the death of the wilderness, as the Big Bottom is soon sold to a lumber company. The almost ritualized hunts are no more, and the men who perhaps unwittingly preserved the wilderness now have little to no connection with its presence. Likewise we can see Isaac's repudiation in this light. It seems an inherently simple act, a refusal to take over what has been destined for him because what he will own was not only founded upon injustice, but still employs it in its seemingly inexorable expansion. Yet Isaac admits to himself that even his own motives will be forever incomprehensible to him. Further, the consequences of his decision insure that he will be derided by society, even by his wife, and that he will have no heir to carry on his return to purity. The possible psychological harm that his separation from society can cause him is also unknown. What is known is only that his motives are unknown even to him and that his decision can perhaps be regarded as impetuous or incomplete. It seems important then to try to understand the complex factors which molded the young Isaac McCaslin's heart and mind. It seems that Isaac is trying to escape his grandfather, Old Carothers, by escaping his legacy. This includes the plantation that he will inherit. But even more devestating is the inheritance of the state of affairs upon the plantation. Some of the slaves that Old Carothers owned bear the same blood which runs 57 through Isaac McCaslin. It is not evident to Isaac until he investigates the ledgers which have chronicled the lives dwelling upon the plantation. His investigations reveal not only that Old Carothers impregnated a slave, who bore him a daughter, but that Carothers also impregnated this daughter, who bore a son as she died in childbirth. That very same day the mother, Eunice, walked into a creek and drowned herself In both cases the children went unacknowledged by their father. They were slaves, and thus property. However, when Old Carothers died he left in his will a monetary legacy which was to be bequeathed to the son, Terrel, upon his reaching the age of 2I. This posthumous, cowardly acknowledgement is another aspect of the legacy of Old Carothers. His twin sons do not participate in his excesses; upon his death they move out of the "tremendous abortive embryo" which is the grandiose, half-finished mansion Old Carothers was building, and into a modest house they build for themselves. They set themselves to undoing the evils their father perpetrated. They begin to free their slaves, and they move the ones they have into the mansion, with the unspoken agreement that what they do at night is their business if they are all behind the door in the morning. They also expand the monetary legacy to each of Terrel's three children. It is Isaac who takes it upon himself to insure that the legacies are bequeathed. The oldest child, Jim, one day runs away and is never heard from again. Isaac pursues him with the money but never catches up with him. He is also forced to seek out the second child, Fonsiba, who marries a Negro carpetbagger whose educated demeanor and sense of protocol belie his foolishness and inability to provide for her. Isaac finds her and makes sure that the legacy will keep her from ever starving. Finally, it is Lucas, the youngest, who seeks Isaac out and takes command not only of his portion but Jim's as well. It seems that guilt drives Isaac to this duty. It also seems that this responsibility, while virtuously carried out by Isaac, is not a lifelong trust, but a feeble means of rectifying a purposeful flaunting of power. The trust is money, the literal coin of the realm which the plantation ( and perhaps even more importantly, the commissary) employs. It can do nothing to actually raise these third-white Negroes to a status commensurate with humanity in general: with Jim it is ineffectual, with Fonsiba it enables her not to live as a beast, and with Lucas, his acceptance of it links him to his grandfather in more than just parentage. It is Lucas's special burden (as the reader witnesses in "The Fire and the Hearth") that he must fight the white man's obsession for miserliness and hoarding. The backdrop against which this drama is played out is the post-Reconstruction South. Isaac was too young to remember the Reconstruction and the devestation it wrought on the land. On the one hand there were newly freed Negroes with no previous experience of freedom and a tendency to misuse it just as the white man was prone to misuse his license. On the other hand there were the defeated Southerners, bitter and defiant, who were charged with the task of rebuilding their homes and lives and cities. Thirdly there were the carpetbaggers, whose rapaciousness was unbounded. At first entering the South under the banner of freedom, it is they who are soon fighting with the blacks over the limited number of jobs and acres of land. In a few generations they will be actively trying to subvert the blacks' freedom under the white hoods of the Klu Klux Klan. Through this all the plantation and commissary plug on, following the pattern of the seasons, the harvests and plantings, holding all who work the land in thrall. The black ex-slaves', now sharecroppers', lot has changed little since before the War. They are still beholding to the white man to sell them their farming supplies and to buy his cotton at prices not only the white man knows to be fair or not. Isaac's repudiation is the refusal to become part of this machine; the machine not just of the farm and commissary but the bigger machine of the South. The economy-driven exigencies of this life are repulsive to him. They make of the people, not just the workers but also the owners and overseers as well, means to the end of profit. There is no presence beyond man which can force him to contemplation and awe. Instead the land, which has been transformed by man, translated, if you will, into a force which has quickly grown beyond any man's control, so much so that it is referred to as a curse. Perhaps it contains within it the beginnings of sin, the desire to establish what is mine and what is thine, and then to take what is other and make it one's own. In any event, it proved too big even for Buck and Buddy, whose attempts at reparation were ineffectual in stopping the onslaught of the white man's curse upon the land. But Isaac breaks free from more than the plantation. He acknowledges not only that he is free of the "two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on" (p.245), but that he is also free: the frail and iron thread strong as truth and impervious as evil and longer than life itself and reaching beyond record and patrimony both to join him to the lusts and passions, the hopes and dreams and griefs, of bones whose names while still fleshed and capable even old Carothers' grandfather had never heard. (p.286) What is this thread Faulkner is speaking of? It seems to be the thread of human nature which binds all men however different, together. The attributes which are , tied together by this thread seem to be very similar to the components of the heart's driving complexity mentioned earlier. The mention of the past at first has the effect of linking Isaac to the wild and free men who first inhabited the land. But how is he free of them if his decision has been in emulation of them? Rather, it seems that the past is significant in providing a scope, a historical survey, through which has passed a single strain which has been broken by Isaac McCaslin. What is the significance of Isaac being free from this thread? How does it bear on the fact that he is forever childless, spurned by his wife, and believed even by his friends to have just given up? In effect he is rejecting society, by refusing to accept their established traditions of inheritance and property ownership. He marries, and thus enters society through its conventions, but he still manages to live amidst society but not of or in it. His wife cannot accept this, constantly being held in contempt even by the blacks, for example Lucas, who have witnessed his decision. She sleeps with him one final time, knowing he will never move onto the farm, and then becomes as remote to him. Isaac acknowledges that the wilderness will always be his mistress and wife. It is the communion with the wilderness which means the most to him. Old Ben and Lion and Sam are gone, but their spirits live on within the wilderness. He journeys back to the woods, not merely to hunt, and not merely to mourn their deaths, but also to celebrate their continued presence, albeit translated, within the wilderness. It is here that he almost steps upon the snake whom he calls "Grandfather." In recognizing Old Carothers in the snake, he is acknowledging Sam Fathers's influence. This buttresses the fact that their is no parallel �58 I I I mystery in the supposedly tamed and ordered land which can compare to the experience of the presence of the wilderness. This is what Isaac chooses over the farm and the conventions of society. He chooses a world which is fast disappearing before the onslaught of the modern world and its machinelike farms and mills. It is a world where silence and solitude reign supreme, where man is confronted with a sense of his own fragility and powerlessness. This experience seems only to be available in the tamed and ordered land in something like death; whereas, in the wilderness this confrontation is followed by an awareness of life, both of one's own and of the life of the wilderness. Given this, how can we understand the apparent contradiction which is voiced most aptly by Roth Edmonds while addressing Isaac in "Delta Autumn": "Where have you been all the time you were dead?" (p.329). The contradiction of purity versus compromise stems from the perception that society has of Isaac. To them he has quit, he has forsaken what was rightly his, and he has failed to carry on his name to the next generation. While the opinions of society in general are often mean-spirited and narrow, the reader has several questions of his own which parallel these opinions. Why doesn't Isaac sell the land he inherits and buy back part of the wilderness? Why doesn't he assume control of the farm and make it a model of justice and equity? Why does he not regret the fact that he will never have a son to mark as Sam Fathers did him? How can his ideals and concern for the wilderness outlive him? These questions refer to the moral tradition with which Isaac was raised. He learned a nobility, a pride in oneself for having the humility to accept unchangeable conditions, and the endurance and sufferance to outlast them. However, this moral code seemed inundated with a sense of fatality that may often accompany nobility. This was due to the fact that the hunter had to embrace a contradiction: he loved the land and the creatures which inhabited it, yet he also killed some of those creatures. This carries with it a responsibility (not to overhunt, for example), but it still does not take away the fact that the hunter kills what he loves. Isaac early on feels part of something big and privileged to participate in it, but he never feels the impetus to try and change what to him is the established order. Thus, when Isaac inherits the land, he not only takes seriously the idea that the land is no one's, and should properly be held in common, but he is also 59 overcome by the evils that have been perpetrated on the farm. The blacks are basically still slaves, and some of them are living evidence of the white man's license. If he were to assume ownership and then sell it, he would merely be passing the farm and all its evils on to someone else, who more than likely would continue to perpetuate these evils. The refusal is key, a deliberate forsaking of the established mores of society. He cannot forsake his ideals to save them. Likewise accepting ownership of the land to become a wise and generous landlord would be futile. The farm, the solvent and ever increasing machine which binds people to the land for the duration of their lives, would snap him up into its jaws in a second. No matter how hard he tries, he would be bound to the land as well, constrained to make others work, to raise or lower p~ices according to the dictates of the economy, and to sell and buy from cheats, skinflints, and harsh overseers. He would become a cog in the machine no matter how pure his intentions were. Lastly, Isaac has no son. He tries to break free of his blood, from the specter of his grandfather as manifested in the farm which becomes in minutia a model of the South. In so doing he alienates himself from the society of man, not just the tainted, corrupt, profit driven society, but also from the political life of man, of families, friendship, stewardship, and civic responsibility. In freeing himsel£ he means to free his descendants; but this freeing instead insures that he will have no descendants. It seems that we cannot separate man's passions and desires from the arena in which they are played out. To love is a glorious thing, but the very nature of love involves another person and one cannot love without compromise and negogiation, which are governed or at least overseen by the society of man. Isaac frees himself from love and responsibility; he becomes "father to no one and uncle to half the county" (p.286). Who is Isaac McCaslin? Is h e a visionary or a failure? It is through his eyes that the reader experiences both the wilderness and the bear. Both fragile-in that they are mortal-yet their presence is anything but. They reduce man to weakness and fragility, but also incite him to wonder and awe. They are not gods, not even in the Olympian sense, but huge, sentient beings who make man aware of the bigness of creation whose origins or causes are unknown. Their brooding inattentiveness or furious grasping of freedom leads man to contemplation not just of themselves but of the drama of which they are a part. It is Isaac who sees that they are doomed, not just because they are mortal but because there seems to be a higher, remote and mysterious plan in which man's role is so miniscule he seems almost a spectator. It is Isaac who also sees their sublimity and grandeur, and who brings them to life for us, so that we can be awed by them as well. If, as he says, he is "an Isaac born into a later life than Abraham's and repudiating immolation: fatherless and therefore safe declining the altar" (p.270), then why does he flee? Does the sacrifice entail entering into society, fathering children to carry on his name, and teaching them how to respect and love the wilderness and the life it contains? In order to save the wilderness must he enter into the mazed complexity of the human heart, where his ideals and beliefs may become muddled, confused, or bent? Or is he analogous to John Brown, that one silence among the moiling and yapping of humanity (p.272), that defiance of society's contradiction, that causes God to turn his face back to the South? Because, as in "Delta Autumn" (p.337), he is content to see the wilderness die with him, is he instead similar to Uncle Hubert, who bestows a legacy to the next generation yet bankrupts it within his own lifetime? For we see the fullness of Isaac's youth, his love affair with the wilderness and his message of hope to the oppressed blacks, yet we also see him in "Delta Autumn," where the granddaughter of James Beauchamp (also his distant cousin) asks him, "Old man, have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew or heard or even felt about love?" (p.346 ). He cannot recognize love any longer. She also accuses Isaac of spoiling the Edmondses by giving them the farm that they are not entitled to. Isaac possesses the same type of insight which John Brown possessed. However, John Brown's decision spurred him to an action: an attempt to subvert society. Isaac's decision, while itself an act, leads him to inaction, at least within society. He is ignored by society, and ignores it in turn. He believes he will find peace in his decision, because he will not have the responsibilities that society will place upon him as a prominent landowner, and which will inevitably corrupt him. However, his decision insures that the McCaslin curse will live on at the (now) Edmonds plantation. Even with his repudiation, he still must bequeath the feeble monetary salve which cannot bandage the gaping would of McCaslin rapaciousness. He is still beholden to society and its evils, regardless of his rejection of it. Since he has rejected society, and yet has not removed himself completely from it, must we see him as a failure? For his repudiation has also guaranteed that he will have no son, and thus no one to mark as Sam did him. Does he thus appear to be like Uncle Hubert, who bankrupted his own legacy? The answer is no. We owe much to Isaac for his refusal to be "tainted" by the modern world. His love for the wilderness and the life within it are important not only because they are values held in poor esteem today, but also because his spiritual understanding of them challenges the self-absorbed modern man to experience and acknowledge the being outside of himself Isaac's failure to enact a unity between the wilderness and the modern, profit-driven world is tragic but understandable, because this schism still exists today. Although one cannot ever truly escape society, it serves to define the nature of the conflict as it did with Lucas Beauchamp and Sam Fathers. His failure to completely remove himself from society serves to remind us how important it is, and Isaac's purity in the face of it reveals to us how decrepit and in need of reform it has become. The wilderness will die with him because he was the only one pure enough to truly see it as it is. The lack of such a purity, both in the now extinct wilderness, and in ourselves, will make our own search for truth through the labyrinthine passions of our heart that much more difficult. He has not bankrupted the legacy, for we are the children who, by reading about him, have been marked with his heritage. + Notes: I . Go Down1 Moses1 Vintage International Press. 2 . All citations from same edition as previous. �60 6I Freedom and Limitation: The Understanding in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Todd Pytel, A99 I I I have only one experience, the elements of which can always be compared to each other according to certain fundamental relations. Immanuel Kant uses this simple reflection to bind together his philosophy of the powers and limitations of human understanding in his Critique ef Pure Reason. This, according to Kant, allows us to steer through the dangerous strait between skepticism, the view that reason can know nothing with certainty, and fanaticism, the opposing view that reason has no limits (BI28). Just how such a reflection does this is explained in the Transcendental Deduction. In this section, Kant attempts to prove that all incoming sensible intuition must always be subject to the conditions of one possible experience. These conditions have an intimate connection to the categories, a priori concepts that Kant discovers through reflection upon the table of logical judgments.1 A reasonable first reading of this very difficult section might lead to the following summary: all appearances are shaped by original apperception into harmony with the categories, otherwise they would not form parts of one unified experience. Thus the categories seem to be innate predispositions that determine the one and only way that we can view the world. Such a view seems consonant with Kant's description of the transcendental unity of apperception as a condition for all cognition as well as his description of the categories as concepts which correspond to the forms of thought. But a few important passages reveal that Kant views the categories in a different way. At the end of the first edition's transcendental deduction he remarks, "If we got the concepts [the categories J from ourselves, then they w~uld lack objective validity" (A I 29 ).2 This statement ts not obviously in conflict with the view of categories as predispositions. Kant has already ruled out any knowledge of the things-in-themselves. Thus, "objective validity" certainly does not refer to those things. We might indeed believe that "objective validity" is only our view of the unity of experience caused by the categories as predispositions. However, he decided in the second edition's version of the Deduction to expand the statement considerably. After ruling out the possibility of abstracting the categories from experience, he restates his view, "that the categories contain the bases, on the part of the understanding, of the possibility of all experience as such" (BI 6 7). But then he proposes and rejects a third possible view as a "middle course" between the above two views. This "middle course" holds that: [T]he categories are neither se]f-thought a priori first principles of our cognition, nor again are drawn from experience, but are subjective predispositions for thinking that are implanted in us and given to us simultaneously with our existence. (BI67) Kant dismisses this view, which is exactly the one most easily carried away from the Deduction, by noting that the "categories would in that case lack the necessity which belongs essentially to the concept of them." (BI 68) In the case of causality: I could then not say that the effect is connected with the cause in the object (i.e., connected with it necessarily), but could say only that I am so equipped that I cannot think this presentation otherwise than as thus connected. And this is just what the skeptic most longs to hear. (BI68) Clearly, we now have a problem. Kant consistently portrays the unity of apperception as a conditio_n of possible experience. In that case, the understandmg seems passive, merely processing the data in unalte~able forms of thought prescribed by original appercept1on. But in this passage, Kant clearly rejects as unsatisfactory the view that the categories are any sort of passive or subjective predispositions. Instead, they are "selfthought" first principles, which seem to allow the understanding a more active role in relation to appearances. Precisely how are the categories and the transcendental unity related in order to condition incoming appearances while retaining an active understanding? What does it mean for the categories to be "selfthought" and still have a claim to objective validity? And what is the philosophical importance of the distinction that Kant hopes to draw? What, then, do we mean when we talk about an object corresponding to, and hence also distinct from, cognition? We can easily see that this object must be thought only as something as such = x. For, after all, outside our cognition we have nothing that we could contrast with this cognition as something corresponding to it. (AI04-I05) I. The Transcendental Object = x If we are to reject characterizing the categories as subjective and passive predispositions, then we must immediately rule out looking solely to the understanding for their source. But where dse can we look if we wish to retain their character as concepts which are somehow related to the forms of judgment? One of Kant's earliest definitions of the categories points to a solution. He says that the categories "are concepts of an object as such whereby the object's intuition is regarded as determined in terms of one of the logical junctions in judging" (A95). Just how to read "an object as such" is unclear. If we were to take it as "any object" (that is, one of a number of potential objects), then the sentence would mean that the intuition of the particular object presented to me is unified according to certain preset functions (forms of thought) expressed by the categories. Unfortunately, this is the same as saying that the categories are predispositions. Instead, what if "an object as such" refers not to one of many objects, but instead to one original object, like a blueprint which specifies what any possible object must look like? An "object as such" would then be like a "form of an object." Such a reading solves some problems while introducing others. If the categories are concepts of some original object that the understanding has access to, then we have succeeded in moving the source of the categories outside of the understanding, provided that this object is in some way distinct from the understanding. According to this view, the categories would be derived from the understanding's analysis of an original object logically prior to any specific object of experience. But what role would such an object play in the process of synthesizing the manifold of intuition? And how would the understanding's access to one original object be practically different than a subjective predisposition? To answer these questions, we must turn to the Transcendental Deduction, and particularly to Kant's discussion of the "synthesis of recognition in the concept" (AI03-I IO). He remarks there that we should clarify what we mean by an "object of presentations," asking. Kant again uses a peculiar locution, "something as such," similar to the "object as such" at A95. Here, he uses the phrase to denote an object removed as far as possible from our cognitions. This "something as such x" (I will henceforth call it the general object, to avoid confusion with other specific Kantian terms) is not a thing-in-itself A thing-in-itself is never an object of our understanding, since it must be perceived before it reaches the understanding. Once it has been perceived, it is an appearance, by definition no longer the thing-in-itself. With the general "x," however, we are dealing with an object present to the undtrstanding prior to any actual experience. Thus, it "corresponds to" cognition because all objects require cognition. However, it remains "distinct from" cognition because it is not an object given in cognition. An object given by cognition would be a specific concept, such as unity or causality. Hence, this general object seems to occupy some sort of limbo between an actual, specific concept and the thing-in-itself which is never present to the understanding. It is still unclear, however, how such a strange thing would fit into the actual process of cognition that Kant has described. = II. Synthesis and Cognition To approach this problem, we should briefly recall Kant's discussion of synthesis in general, introduced just before the categories at A77-80. There, he divides the synthesis of the manifold, "cognition," into three necessary components: intuition, imagination, and unification (A79). Any cognition must begin by receiving some sensible intuition, be it empirical sensation or an a priori intuition of space or time. But a mere intuition is never used by the understanding. Instead, it is taken up by the imagination, which acts as an intermediary. This mediation by the imagination creates several problems of its own. Most significantly, it appears that imagination plays its own role in shaping cognition alongside that of the general object. This would lead at least to a complication, if not to a �T 63 62 conflict, in the process of cognition. But, these problems can be solved only after we understand the role of the general object. So, let us pass by for the moment the difficulties involved with the imagination and try to explain as well as possible how the general object acts in the unification of a sensible manifold. Assuming, then, that the imagination has produced an image for the understanding, the rem~ining step is the unification of the produced manifold. This unification is later explained as dependent on the schemata, which are rules for assembling the manifold in a certain way. The role of the schemata is most easily understood in the context of the unification by empirical concepts, as opposed to the unification by the categories, which rely on the more subtle transcendental schemata. In this simpler case, Kant explains how the schemata provide the concept with true universality as follows: Even less is an object of experience or an image thereof ever adequate to the empirical concept; rather, that concept always refers directly to the schema of imagination, this schema being a rule for determining our intuition in accordance with such and such a general concept. (A I 4 I) I I Later, Kant will use the a priori intuition of time to explain the transcendental schemata (that is, the ones corresponding to the categories) in a similar way. Thus, we may safely say, in general, that the understanding unifies the manifold presented to it by applying a certain rule. This rule, in turn, points to a corresponding concept. A concrete example may help to illustrate this view of cognition. Let us choose an empirical concept as an example, since its components do not involve the complexities of the transcendental schemata. Accordingly, let us suppose that we have the concept of "dog," which is defined by a schema that assembles, in a determinate way, the three elements "fur," "barks," and "four-legs." The process of cognition would then run as follows. First, sensibility receives intuitions. These intuitions have not yet been presented to the understanding, and thus I am not consciously aware of them. Then, the' imagination takes up these intuitions and presents them to the understanding as the elements "fiur," "b arks," an d "£ 10ur-1 "L ast1 t he egs. y, understanding finds that the schema corresponding to "dog" applies to the given arrangement of elements. In other words, the particular elements, and their relations to one another, actually present are the same as the elements af,ld relations that the understanding finds in the schema corresponding to "dog." Accordingly, the given appearance is unified and cognized as "dog." With this simplified example in mind, we are prepared for Kant's view of the general object in cognition. In a discussion about cognizing a triangle, he remarks that: [W]hen we think of a triangle as an object, we do so by being conscious of the assembly of three straight lines according to a rule whereby such an intuition can always be exhibited. Now this unity ef the rule determines all that is mani-. fold, and limits it to conditions that make possible the unity of apperception. And the concept of this unity is the presentation of the object = x, i.e., the object that I think through the mentioned predicates of a triangle. (AIOS-106) The first sentence here sounds almost exactly like the unification in synthesis outlined above, except that he has not yet introduced the technical term "schema" for the determining rule. How, then, does the rule, or schema, relate to the general object? The second sentence of the passage describes the effect of the "unity of the rule:' What does Kant mean by saying that the schema is unified? I believe, in light of the adjective "this," that the "unity" refers back to the previous sentence's assertion that, according to this rule, such an intuition could always be exhibited. A concept, by its very nature, is universal. It refers, through a schema, to one thing in various circumstances. "Such an intuition" can be assembled in the same way regardless of the situation. If it could not, then it would not be "one such" intuition but several. One concept would refer to two essentially different things, which would be absurd. The next part of the sentence explains the effect of a schema that links one concept to one object in different situations. Kant states that the unity of the rule "determines all that is manifold." That is, the rule places several disparate appearances into a determined, fixed order with certain definite relationships present to our mind. In the dog example, the rule would change three unconnected . e1 ements ( "b arks," "£ 10ur-1 " "fu r ") mto t h ree e1 egs, ements connected in a system ("barks + four-legs + fur"). But at this point, the elements, though related, are not considered as one thing. The fmal part of the sentence, "[The unity of the rule J limits [all that is manifold] to conditions that make possible the unity of apperception," brings back the question of the imagination's production of rule-governedness. Let us pass it by for the moment, for only with hindsight can we understand how the rule makes possible the unity of apperception while still not inhibiting the active role of the understanding. Kant's last sentence in the quotation above (AIOS-106) gives us the key to understanding the role of the general object in cognition. Here, Kant introduces another new phrase, "the concept of the unity." By this I believe him to mean the concept that corresponds to the elements connected by the rule, e.g. the "dog" that corresponds to the "barks + four-legs + fur." How, then, is "dog" a "presentation of the object = x," that is, the general object? Now, we will soon see that "dog," being empirical, is not simply a presentation of the general object. In fact, only the categories are direct determinations of "x," while "dog" would be a composite of those fundamental categorial determinations. But let us follow the dog for the sake of simplicity. To resume, Kant says that the concept of the unity is thought "through the mentioned predicates." I take this to mean that some of the characteristics present in the indeterminate object = x are determined and presented to the understanding by the application of ~he rule to the given appearances. A specific concept, then, is a determination of the general object= x. Kant will later reaffirm the presence of the general object in all cognition, saying that: The pure concept of this transcendental object (which object is actually always the same, = x, in all our cognitions) is what is able to provide all our empirical concepts in general with reference to an object, i.e., with objective reality." ( AI09-I IO) Thus, the general object = x is always present in cognition and is determined (that is, made into a specific concept) by the understanding's application of a schema to the appearances. If we read between the lines here, we can see that the notion of a general object becoming a specific one is implied by Kant's description of the object as "= x." The process of synthesis is, in many ways, analogous to the process of solving an algebraic equation. The numbers given in an equation, e.g. "3 + 2 sin30°," correspond to the manifold ,of intuition presented to the understanding. If we add "= x" to the end of "3 + 2 sin30°," then we say that the left side is equal to "x:' This "x," by itself equal to any possible number, is limited to only one number when it is placed in the equation. This number can be found by calculating the values on the left side and finding their relation to one another. Then, of course, the right side is no longer "=x"; instead, it is equal to "4." The general "x" has been reduced to the specific number in a way similar to the determination of the general object = x in all cognition of objects. This analogy, taken together with Kant's discussion of the categories as "concepts of an object as such" (quoted above, from A95), takes us a great distance towards solving our original problem: explaining how the categories are not simply predispositions of the understanding. The categories are not characteristics of the understanding, but are rather the concepts that the understanding fmds presented to it by the general object = x. Given a set of appearances "equal" to, i.e. organized by, the general object "x," and given the characteristics, the categories, that the understanding discovers a priori in that object, the understanding can solve the equation, determining the manifold in a certain manner, expressed by the schema. But there seems to be a significant departure from the algebraic analogy when the origin of the categories is considered. In an algebraic equation, we say that we solve for x "in terms of" the other elements of the equation. All of the order and relation in the equation comes from the side of the equation with the numbers and relations. This is similar to cognition insofar as we determine one specific concept from the presented manifold. But for a priori cognitions, the manifold can only be determined in twelve ways (one for each category). Since these categories are the concepts of the . general object, it seems that the unknown "x" is exerting some influence on the given manifold, unlike the algebraic example, where the "x" is entirely determined by the other side of the equation. But then do both sides of the "equation" of cognition play a significant part in organizing the sensible manifold. That is, is there only one ordering of the manifold, by the unknown "x"? Or is the manifold already arranged when it is presented and then rearranged? These questions will be examined shortly when we look at the imagination, but in either case we now have a sense of what Kant means when he says that the categories are "self-thought." Even though the �64 65 general object = x, and thus the categories as. t~at object's characteristics, are present in all cogmtton, the understanding is not, in its nature, limited to them. If a different general object "= y," utterly unlike our familiar "x," were presented to the understanding, then the understanding could find new categories that would apply to any appearances set equal to that "y." We shall soon see that the fact that we have only one experience shows that we have only one general object, with the familiar categories derived in the Metaphysical Deduction. But this singular experience of the understanding does not detract from its nature as an active, unlimited power of the mind. Once we have traced the source of the categories to the general object = x, however, we may then ask where that object comes from, and what it really means to say that the categories are objectively valid. These questions bring us at last to apperception and imagination. ID. Apperception and Imagination I I In our discussion of the object= x, we have heard almost nothing of one of Kant's central terms: apperception. If the act of cognition is in so~e way like solving an equation, how does appercept10n affect it? And from where does that apperception's transcendental unity arise? It will be important first to clear up exactly what sort of thing apperception is. On one hand, Kant's connection of it to self-consciousness might make it sound something like an "ego." But its relation to the categories makes it sound more like a thought process. Then again, its name might suggest that it is a power or capacity like perception.Two of Kant's statements help to clarify this confusion. He says first that "in original apperception everything must nec~ssaril~ conform to the conditions of the thoroughgomg umty of self-consciousness" (AI I2). Shortly afterwards, he remarks that "nothing can enter cognition without doing so by means of this original apperception" (AI 13-114). The use of the preposition "in" and especially the prepositional phrase "by means of" point to the last of the above alterna~ives: that apperception is a power or capacity. We might say that things are given to the understanding "through" apperception in the same way we speak of an intuition passing "through" sensibility. Furthermore, the second sentence quoted above leads to the defmition of apperception in terms of the algebraic analogy to cognition. It states that all things must enter cognitioh through apperception. But what does it mean to enter cognition but to set the entering appearances equal to the general object = x? Thus, we can say, in terms of our analogy, that apperception is the power of applying x" to a given set of appearances. Though this power is a necessary component ?f the human mind, it is distinct from the understanding, which is the power of fmding rules (AI26-I27). The power of this definition is that it immediately reveals the source both of the categories and the transcendental unity of apperception. The categories are the characteristics of the object = x, present to the understanding prior to all cognition. The transcendental unity of apperception is the unity produced by the constancy of this object in all cognitions. Sinc.e the object is constant, the categories must apply to all p.ossible cognition, that is, all possible experience. And if all possible experience can be cognized accord~g to the same concepts, that experience is unified. Fmally, this definition of apperception clarifies Kant's distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. The categories are objectively valid because they stem from apperception, which is a power outside the unde~stand­ ing. But because the human mind deals only with . appearances, the categories can never have ~ s~urce m the thing-in-itself. The most that can be said is that they originate in apperception, ~hich is no.t part of our active power of understandmg. T~e ev~dence ~or such a view and its philosophical ramificat10ns will be taken up shortly. . The last of Kant's terms that plays an tmportant role in ordering cognitions is imagination. He often ascribes to it an active power to synthesize the manifold. For example, he states that: a= [P]erceptions need to be given a combination that in sense itself they cannot have. Hence there is in us an active power to synthesize this manifold. This power we call imagination; and the act that it performs directly on perception (AI20-I2I) I call apprehension. If it is simply true that the imagination arranges intuitions before the understanding unifies them, then two distinct arrangements are taking place, one by the . imagination and one by the general object. Such a pair of arrangements would be troubling. How would the two work together? Would the ~ategories be ~f~ected? And even if that could be explamed, wouldn t it seem like a needlessly complicated theory? Such questions, reasonable as they seem, rest upon a false separation of the arrangement by the imagination and the application of the general object through apperception. The two are, in fact, the same act. The basic function of the imagination "is to bring the manifold of intuition to an . image; hence it must beforehand take the impressions up into its activity, i.e., apprehend them" (AI2I). To change intuitions into an image is to present them to the understanding. But the understanding only deals with images to be cognized into an object. This cognition, moreover, is the process of applying "= x" to appearances. It is thus absurd to say that the imagination's presentation is truly separable from the application of the general object, because such a presentation would then somehow be present to the understanding even though it was not an object of cognition. I believe that Kant refers to this yoking of imagination and apperception when he states that: The mind could not possibly think its own identity... if it did not have present to it the identity of its act-the act that subjects all synthesis of apprehension ... to a transcendental unity, and thereby first makes possible the coherence of those presentations according to a priori rules. (AI08-I09) The identity of the mind's act must refer to the single general object = x that is present in, and is the essential act of, all cognition. This identity subjects the synthesis of apprehension (that is, the synthesis and arrangement of the manifold by the imagination) to a coherence of rules. Hence, while the imagination and apperception are two subtly different powers, they are bound within a single act, the imagination's presentation of the manifold to the understanding through the "equation" of that manifold with the general object presented by apperception. IY. Conclusion This description of the categories as characteristics of "general object = x" gives us the beginning of a path through the Transcendental Deduction. We have shown that Kant believes the categories to be concepts of the general object, the presentation of which is the power of apperception and the beginning of cognition. This power is distinct from the understanding. Because of this, we know that the understanding is not limited in its nature and that the categories are not subjective predispositions. Instead, they are "self-thought" concepts that the understanding fmds in the general object prior to all cognition. But for all this, questions still remain. What evidence does Kant have for considering apperception to be distinct from the understanding? And what importance could such a distinction possibly have for a system of philosophy? Kant gives us no clear answer for these questions, but we can draw some inferences from the remarks that end the Deduction in the second edition. He states that, if the categories were subjective predispositions: [T]hen all our insight, achieved through the supposed objective validity of our judgments, is nothing but sheer illusion; and there would also be no lack of people who would not concede this subjective necessity (which must be felt) in themselves. At the very least one could not quarrel with anyone about something that rests merely on the way in which his self as subject is organized. (B168-I69) The last sentence, while holding the false hypothesis that the categories are part of the understanding, reveals Kant's view that it is the understanding that we properly call the "self." Since he is in fact rejecting the attribution of the categories to the understanding, i.e. the particular individual, should we infer that he believes that the origin of the categories in apperception makes them common to all human beings? It seems impossible to fmd any direct, conclusive evidence for such a view. But if we accept the theory we have sketched out from the Deduction, a cer ain plausibility is revealed. Let us take for granted, then, that there is a general object = x which is the same in all cognition. This object would have, as explained above, an active power to arrange the manifold of intuition. But it would also be static, insofar as the object presented is always the same. Now, it seems likely that such a constant power would never originate in the understanding, which is both active and varied, in that the understanding finds different rules to govern different appearances that are presented to it. Instead, we might speculate that apperception has a physical source. After all, we expect physical bodies to behave in constant, predictable ways just as we believe apperception to act. Apperception, as well as the categories that it entails, might then be linked to the phys- �66 67 ical structure of the thinking mind. This connection would make Kant's philosophy compatible with the ever-mounting scientific evidence for an understanding of thought as a chemical or biological process. In addition, this view gives some suggestion that the categories are common to all human beings, since we believe that we are essentially physically identical to other men. Thus, Kant's doctrine is both consistent with our knowledge of the physical world and suggestive of common modes of thought among mankind. Implications other than that are more difficult to sketch out. From a practical, individual perspective I can see no difference between a "subjective" predisposition and the constancy of the general object. In either case, the understanding is forced to cognize an object in a way which is not at all determined by the thing-in-itself. But Kant has concerns apart from questions of practical objective validity. By keeping the source of the categories outside of the understanding, Kant is keeping in mind what he considers the three necessary problems in philosophy: God, freedom, and immortality (Bxxx ), all of which bear on moral questions. Speaking of freedom and morality, he states: All I need for morality is that freedom does not contradict itself and hence can at least be thought ..... [AJll I need is that freedom in my act puts no obstacle whatever in the way of the natural mechanism that governs the same act. (Bxxix-xxx) I I The categories as predispositions of the understanding would be just this sort of obstacle. For how could any sort of freedom (empirical or transcendental) be maintained if the understanding, by its very nature, were confined to twelve distinct forms of thought and no more? The importance of this freedom is amplified when we consider with it the above suggestion that apperception is the same for all men. If man's mind is essentially free, and his apperception identical to that of others, we have the foundation for a rational ethics that applies to all men. Such an ethics might well be different than previous systems, since Kant accepts that all phenomena, including actions, are governed by cause and effect in the empirical world. But it is a beginning nonetheless. The separation of understanding and apperception has similar ramifications for religious faith and immortality. Kant certainly acknowledges the possibility of faith, even if, according to the Transcendental Dialectic, such faith cannot be obtained rationally. But by separating apperception from the understanding (that is, the self), Kant preserves the possibility of a truly transcendent afterlife. If my self, and not my apperception, lives on after death, then the afterlife would be completely beyond any earthly experience. Thus, Kant's doctrine saves him from a possible contradiction between his philosophy and personal faith. All of these considerations must have been at work in Kant's mind as he formulated his doctrine in the Transcendental Deduction. Though certainly subtle and difficult, the argument in the D eduction fulfills his goal of discovering both the limitations and the strengths of human understanding. Although, the understanding can never reach the things-in-themselves, it can at least realize the possibility of both a rational ethics and a transcendent immortality. Perhaps this lack of an extreme view causes some to label Kant as tedious. But he himself believes his work to be an exciting challenge, envisioning it as a safe passage between the "dangerous cliffs" of skepticism and fanaticism. And if we are to be impressed by Odysseus' passage between Scylla and Charybdis, or the achievement of Aristotle's virtuous mean between vices, we must indeed be impressed by both the depth and moderation of Kant's thought in the Critique ef Pure Reason. + Notes: I. I do not treat here the important question of how the categores as concepts relate to judgment as form. Such a topic would be more suitable for an examination of the Metaphysical Deduction. 2. All quotations are taken from Werner Pluhar's translation of the Critique (Hackett Publishing, I 996). All emphasis in quotations is Kant's. I have omitted the translator's braketing for simplicity. Thus, any bracketed insertions in quotations are my own. 3. We must remember that here, as elsewhere, Kant is speaking of logical, and not temporal, priority. I do not believe he would maintain that we are conscious of a general object before any specific object has been cognized. For a similar statement related to the forms of sensibility, se B 349. Aries, France, Vada Mossavat, AOO �69 68 JUNIOR Sympathy EssAY PRIZE,, and Selfishness in George Eliot's Middlemarcb Deborah Carlos, A99 n my essay this year I would like to examine one of the major themes in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, the relationship between compassion for others and self-interest, and the way in which they each influence human actions and beliefs. Eliot illustrates the complex relation between the two, both within one person and between individuals, primarily through her depiction of two unhappy marriages. The unions of Dorothea Brooke and Edward Casaubon, and Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Viney, are defined by the conflict of expectations that each has of the married state. These different expectations are the products of selfish inclinations, in which. the purpose of marriage is to achieve some other social or professional end, in which the spouse does not have any real · interest. (This is very different from the purpose that marriage has for the Garths and their daughter Mary, to live and raise a family with a partner worthy of love and respect, who returns such feelings.) Each makes the mistake of not looking for the real character of the future partner during courtship, but instead projects onto the person the ideal that is in his or her own mind. Marital strife soon disabuses them of these ideals, and the characters begin manifesting either compassionate or selfish behavior towards each other. Dorothea and Lydgate first repress and then sacrifice any interests of their own that displease their spouses, while Casaubon and Rosamond seek ways to assert themselves even more, without much consideration for the pain they cause. The idea of ardency is closely connected to Eliot's portrait of the relationship between compassion and selfishness, because both Dorothea and Lydgate have ardent natures, while Casaubon and Rosamond do not. Eliot defines ardency in the Prelude, in which she describes another ardent nature, Saint Theresa of Avila, the sixteenth century Spanish nun who reformed the Carmelite religious order. Theresa is portrayed as a passionate, idealistic woman with two intimat~ly related central desires: to accomplish a deed of clear unportance in the world, and to devote herself to an object worthy of all the serious thought and intense emotion she can expend on it, and would in return offer her the I I I possibility of self-transcendence. The latter desire is expressed at the end of the first paragr~ph of .the book: "some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile selfdespair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self" ( vii).1 The former is made explicit a few. sentences later, where Eliot specifies "a constant unfoldmg of far-resonant action" as the defming characteristic of an "epic" life, which a nature such as Theresa's "demanded". Eliot goes on to say that Theresa fulfilled her desires within the framework of the Catholic Church, which provided a "coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul" (viii). It is interesting that Eliot names the social conditions in which Theresa lived, dominated by the Church, as the source of the knowledge, in the form of religious faith, that was essential to her achievements, both in spirit and in action. Religion seems to be the only thing Eliot thinks can provide an endlessly fulfilling goal, with ideas ge~­ eral enough to be considered all embracing and .specific enough to guide one's own actions in everyd.ay life.' !he assurance of how actions can be matched with religious or moral beliefs, and of the positive consequences of those actions, is especially secure if one lives within a religious community, and not in the outside world. This social "medium", in which a woman like Theresa or Antigone could perform "ardent deeds" ( 8 ~ I) i~ lacking in the modern world, for Eliot early V~cto~ian England. In this society, the Anglican Church is either itself seen as an avenue for worldly success (by the money-minded manufacturer Mr. Viney) or as .a s~urce of justification for worldly success (by the. puntan.ic~l banker Mr. Bulstrode). This early emphasis on rehg10n in Eliot's discussion of ardency makes her later use of the word for Lydgate's enthusiasm for medic~e s~em. odd, but it is still appropriate, since he seeks m his science "the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good" (143) and is "ambitious of a wider effect. .. fired with the possibility that he might... make a link in the chain of discovery" ( 145). However Lydgate is called ardent only in reference to his work, and Eliot slyly remarks that "his intellectual ardour did not penetrate to his feeling and judgment about furniture or women" (149). In both Dorothea and Lydgate, the search for self-transcendence takes the form of the quest for the social good, both seeing the need for reform in different areas, with Lydgate obviously focused on medical practices. This tendency, in addition to the different role that religion plays for them, is a striking difference between their manifestations of ardency and Theresa's. Religious principles do not seem to concern Lydgate at all, while Dorothea is interested in them for the moral guidance they can provide for her actions. Eliot gives no indication that Theresa was ever interested in "social good," and the reformation of an order of nuns is not a mission that would result in making very many people in the world happier. This discrepancy is due to an emphasis on different aspects of Christianity on the part of Dorothea and Theresa, with Dorothea concerned with helping her neighbors in this world (i.e., building better cottages for the tenant farmers) and Theresa concerned with people living up to the moral requirements of a life of devotion. These two aspects are also contrasted in the different styles of the two clergymen nominated to be chaplain of the new hospital, Reverend Tyke and Reverend Camden Farebrother. Tyke is "methodistical" (183), strict, austere, and very concerned with the proper interpretation of religious doctrine, assuming that morality necessarily attends such concern. Farebrother, on the other hand, believes that the Church is the wrong vocation for him, and is very aware of his own inner conflicts relating to religious teaching, for example, about gambling, which he practices purely for the money. Since he sees himself as unfit to dispense hardand-fast rules of right conduct, he concentrates on offering solace and comfort to the suffering, and he is very well prepared to do this. Farebrother has the ability, which Dorothea develops, after a long struggle, to use "vivid sympathetic experience" as "acquired knowledge" (764), an ability resulting in feelings of non-judgmental compassion for people who are, he realizes, subject to the same passions and sorrows as he himself is. However, Farebrother has already paid a large price in personal happiness in return for this compassionate knowledge. He tells Lydgate, who has just cast the tie-breaking vote to give the chaplain's office to Tyke: The world has been too strong for me, I know ... But then I am not a mighty man ... shall never be a man of renown. The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable, but Prodicus makes it easy work for the hero, as if first resolves were enough. Another story says that he came to hold the distaff and at last wore the Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolve might keep a man right if everybody else's resolve helped (184-5) him. Eliot comments: " ... he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure". While Eliot does not explicitly say how Farebrother believes he has failed, she emphasizes his dislike of Tyke's sponsor Mr. Bulstrode, and the dogmatic religious hypocrisy that the banker uses his influence to spread. Perhaps Farebrother would like to oppose Bulstrode and others like him, even attempt to reform certain practices of Anglican Church, as Lydgate would like to reform the medical profession, but realizes that he does not have the strength or means to do so. While Eliot uses Farebrother to say that the world tends to make martyrs of great-spirited individuals, she also maintains that these great-spirited individuals often contribute to their own suffering. The Prelude includes the story of Theresa and her brother, while still children, leaving their home "to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors" (vii), showing that Theresa eagerly would have tried to accomplish a great act by getting herself murdered if she had not found less dangerous means. Likewise, Dorothea is "enamored of intensity and greatness and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it" (IO). Even Lydgate, with his well-focused ardency, is not free from such a tendency, as he shows in his admiration of persecuted physicians from the past, like Vesalius, who was forced to steal bones to study anatomy and "died rather miserably" ( 443). The very desire for self-transcendence, the opening up of the mind and emotions to experience things beyond the reach of the self, devalues the worth of the self, since such desire assumes that the perspective of a single person is too small for the most all-encompassing thought or feeling. This is a view that Eliot supports when she writes: "Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self" ( 407). Yet she does not seem to think that self-transcendence �71 70 which would lead to seeing beyond the speck of self is achieved very well simply through self-sacrifice, on a large or small scale. The tendency towards martyrdom is just as much a fault in the ardent nature as the tendency never to think of anything other than oneself is in the selfish nature, since neither leads to the practice . of much actual good in the world. It would seem that the desire and capacity for self-transcendence inherent in the ardent individual would lend itself to compassion. However, while no one is born compassionate, it does seem to be a quality that develops earlier and to a greater .extent in some people than in others. We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling-an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects-that he had an equivalent center of self whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (208) I I But ardency is not required for compassion, even compassion involving self-sacrifice, as we see, again, in the character of Farebrother. He willingly gives up his courtship of Mary Garth when he learns that she and Fred Viney are in love, certainly a compassionate act, and a painful sacrifice. His motives are a mixture of resignation-Mary has told him that she could never love anyone else like she loves Fred-and genuine concern for the well being and happiness of both. Now, he could have tried to put Mary's claim to the test, and Eliot does hint that, if Mary were to love another man, it would be Farebrother. Being able to respect a man's character is essential to Mary's affection, and she already respects Farebrother greatly: she thinks he is "the cleverest man in her narrow circle" ( 503). This is an estimation that her mother, whom Mary strongly resembles in personality and taste, also made of her father Caleb (546), and we know where that led. But while Farebrother is not passionate or idealistic enough to be ardent, he has magnanimity enough to renounce any intention of proposing to Mary with his dignity and his sense of self intact. A revealing difference between Farebrother's more sophisticated compassion for Fred and Mary and Dorothea and Lydgate's raw pity for their spouses is in the view taken of the objects of compassion in each case. The idea of Casaubon and Rosamond as weak creatures requiring special care seems to be essential for inspiring compassion in Dorothea and Lydgate, while Farebrother respects Fred and Mary, although he worries about Fred's bad habits and lack of maturity. After Dorothea restrains an especially fierce outburst of anger, "she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature" ( 4 I 6 ). Lydgate thinks, while comforting a tearful Rosamond, after her meeting with Dorothea, "he had chosen this fragile creature and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully" (775). Such attitudes would seem offensive, if Casaubon and Rosamond were not as pathetic as they are. But the question remains, what does the presence of such an attitude indicate about compassion? Are there two different kinds of compassion, one judgmental and one not, or are these just different stages in the development of sympathetic feeling in a person? It seems useful to examine the main characters more closely in their relations with each other, and a good place to start is with their expectations before marriage, since the disappointment on all sides is largely due to these. For Dorothea, Casaubon's chief attractions are his extensive classical education, and his status as a clergyman, which she takes as evidence of profound religious faith and therefore certain knowledge of right action. She is "a girl whose notions about marriage took their color entirely fi-om an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life" (29). She accepts Casaubon with the intention of helping him complete his life's work, The Key to All Mythologies) believing that in return she will receive the education, in both universal truths and how to apply them, that she feels is necessary to be sure of accomplishing anything worthwhile. "I should learn everything then;' she said to herself. ..." I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by. And then I should know what to do when I got older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here-now-in England. I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.... " (30-1 ). This last comment emphasizes the importance of social context for ardent deeds. The understanding, appreciation, and practice of art, such as the paintings and statues that Dorothea sees in Rome, requires a social context analogous to that required for the understanding, appreciation and practice of ardency. Without it, not only do those who are inclined to make art not know how to go about it, they do not properly understand their own desire to do it, or the worth of anything that they might produce. But art still retains a confused power, even over those who are ignorant, as is seen in Dorothea: At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescoes and rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe .... I feel myself in the presence of some higher life than my own. But when I begin to examine the pictures one by one, the life goes out of them or else is something violent and strange to me .... I am seeing so much at once and not understanding half of it.... It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine. . . (203) Before she learns to use her emotions and experience as a guide for her actions, there seems to be a parallel between Dorothea's approach to art and her approach to life in general. Only the perception of a whole, vast because it encompasses many individual things, unified through special knowledge, can move her to great feelings. She may wish to see the grandeur in a single painting, but she cannot. By the end of the novel, Dorothea has begun to feel that her own life and her actions can be fine, despite her lack of sure knowledge of why it would be so. Casaubon's motives for selecting Dorothea as a wife are equally revealing of his character. He had always intended to marry someday, but never fell in love with any woman, and apparently was sufficiently absorbed by his scholarly pursuits not to notice that many years were passing without a wedding. Dorothea fits his prudent standards for a suitable wife for a man like himself: "a blooming young lady-the younger the better, because more educable and submissive-of a rank equal to his own, of religious principles, virtu- ous disposition, and good understanding" (272). In fact, he believes that he has found even more in Dorothea, a woman who also displays a strong admiration for his intellectual goals and achievements, and who can help him conquer the persistent demon of self-doubt. However, Casaubon falsely believes that because Dorothea is a woman, she cannot or at least will not dare form opinions of her own. Since Casaubon himself will determine her opinion of him, her admiration will be complete, eternal and unquestioning, and serve as the self-confidence that he sorely lacks. He has no idea whatsoever that his wife has rigorous expectations of him, that he will be "a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint" (26). Consid~ring the utter lack of connection he feels between his life, even the living world in general, and his learning, he is singularly unsuited to teach Dorothea how to put theoretic principles into action, even if he had the desire to teach any to her in the first place: "such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a useless embalmment of knowledge" (194). The very idea of teaching anyone anything would probably frighten him into paralysis, since it would require exposing himself to examination and ridicule, the student-teacher relationship by nature inviting mutual evaluation by both parties. Casaubon is so "nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a powerful mind" (272) that he refuses to hire a secretary, for fear that some insolent young man (perhaps reminiscent of Will Ladislaw) would secretly, or not so secretly, think his mind not powerful. This fear is certainly the product of a hidden suspicion that he himself has, but will not admit, and he, "like the rest of us, fel how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out" ( 407). Lydgate shares the opinion that a wife should always be an uncritical admirer of her husband. Eliot, with sarcastic exaggeration, says he sees "his superior knowledge and mental force" as a "shrine to consult on all occasions" (567). However, he is young, self-assured and ardent in his profession, and needs no outside inspiration to urge him on after his goals. He is also so far from appreciating a woman with ambition and ideas of her own, that he observes upon first meeting Dorothea: "She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet �72 73 I I laughs for bird-notes and blue eyes for a heaven" (95). Rosamond captures his interest because she fits so perfectly his conception of the ideal woman: beautiful, charming and sympathetic, someone with "that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous" (2 62). Indeed Eliot emphasizes how much Lydgate's attraction to her comes from this absorption of the popular image of womanhood, in which beauty means virtue, "the complexities of love and marriage ... being su~jects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial conversation of men" (162). His opinion that Rosamond will make a perfect wife is only reinforced by the sense of knowledge of women's nature that he took from his experience with the French actress Madame Laure when he was a medical student in Paris. At that time, he seems to have had an even less complicated conception of the ideal woman: all that Laure needs to attract him is her automatically virtuous beauty and silence, which he sees as "melancholy radiance" ( 151 ). The course of this ill-starred romance runs parallel to Lydgate's later involvement with Rosamond. He falls in love from afar with a beautiful woman, indulges a fantasy of her perfection while having no intention of ever becoming involved with her, then impetuously decides to propose under the impression that she suffers from some grief and needs a comforter. (To be fair to Lydgate in his youth, Laure is married when he first becomes enamored of her, so pursuing a relationship would be against his better judgment.) Fortunately for him, Laure is not interested in remarrying after her husband's death, and she cures Lydgate's ill-conceived ideal by confessing that she killed Monsieur Laure because she was tired of him. Lydgate realizes he has been a fool, but he is too tender-hearted to become bitter, and vows in the future to get to know a woman's character more thoroughly before asking to marry her, "entertaining no expectations but such as were justified beforehand" (152). His disappointment is severe when he realizes that, while Rosamond is beautiful, charming and sensitive (and not a murderess) she is not sympathetic, towards him or anyone else. Of the four, Rosamond's motives for marrying Lydgate seem to be the most shallow, since the benefits she seeks in marriage are entirely concerned with appearance. For her, Lydgate's chief attractions are his aristocratic family, the fact that he's not from Middlemarch, and his potential to provide money and material things. However, Rosamond is not merely mercenary; if she were, she could simply marry the rich young tradesman Ned Plymdale, but she wants a husband who is wealthy and well-mannered and handsome. In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero or of his serious business in the world; of course he had a profession and was clever as well as sufficiently handsome, but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which... presented marriage as a prospect of .. . getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people. . . . ( l 64). Rosamond, like Casaubon, is chiefly interested in how she is perceived by others, with some differences that seem mostly due to her gender. Of course she must be constantly concerned with her physical appearance, while the good Reverend can blissfully ignore his moles, because beauty in a woman is by its nature virtuous, but is not so in man. Whatever natural inclination to selfconsciousness may be in Rosamond has been greatly enhanced by her education at Mrs. Lemon's school, which has trained her to be "adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man" (263). She is scrupulous about not showing any "unbecoming knowledge" (262), in fact all she needs to know in order to determine the best way to act is "what her audience liked" (159). In contrast to Dorothea's simplicity and lack of concern for appearances in general, Rosamond has "that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity" ( 4 l 9) which requires having "an audience in her own consciousness" (159). One of the reasons she is so fond of Lydgate is her belief that he will, with the discriminating taste of a man whose uncle is a baronet, appreciate her far more than any of the provincial young men of Middlemarch possibly could. Thus the stage is set for intense marital strife between the Casaubons and the Lydgates, which provides a good showcase for the conflict between self-centeredness and compassion. It is easy to categorize Casaubon and Rosamond as selfish, and Dorothea and Lydgate as compassionate, if misguided, and 0is seems to be an accurate appraisal. However, for Ehot, self-centeredness is quite ordinary, and seems to be the natural result of being only one person with a single point-of-view, as every individual is: Your pier-glass... made to be rubbed by a housemaid will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a center of illumination, and lo, the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun .... These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person (258) now absent. . . . Rosamond is slyly given as an example of a "person now absent," but this "parable" does not seem to refer exclusively to such exceptional egoism as hers. But while it may be natural to perceive the events that happen around us, not only directly to us but also to our neighbors and our business rivals, in relation to ourselves, it is a limited view that leads to unnecessary bitterness and grief. The self-centered individual has scant resources for recovering from misfortune, because it is a direct blow to the ego, or the sense of the self. The compassionate individual knows that the concentricity is an illusion, and this knowledge helps protect the self from being crushed if the candle is blown out and the scratches are revealed as random and chaotic. When Will Ladislaw makes Rosamond aware that she is not the object of love for all the men who know her, as she is naive and selfish enough to believe, she feels close to "losing her sense of identity" (755). The illusion that because she is beautiful, amiable, and refined, she is therefore the proper object of love for any man is the foundation for her idea of herself. She indulges the fan tasy that Will is in love with her, or at least as much in love with her as with Dorothea, until he rudely shatters it. During an early conversation, when Rosamond asks Will what men think about when with Mrs. Casaubon, meaning what qualities does she have, Will responds simply "Herself" (422). Rosamond does not appreciate this answer. The exceptional thing about Casaubon and Rosamond is not that they are selfish, but the degree to which they are. Their preoccupation with how others see them, which in Rosamond leads to vanity and in Casaubon, to crippling self-doubt, is a symptom of their defmition of themselves solely in terms of outward requirements. Casaubon fails to experience joy in marriage because "the deeper he went in domesticity, the more did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety predominate over any other satisfaction" (274). Unfortunately for him, Dorothea is not a woman satisfied by meeting outward requirements, but inward. Casaubon does not have any feeling for the importance of these outward requirements apart from his own reputation, but both he and Rosamond share a need to be beyond blame in any situation. One gets the impression that if doing the opposite were not considered proper and expected in their respective cases, and afforded opportunity for praise, then Rosamond would feel no qualms about yelling at her husband and Casaubon would have left Will as an illiterate in some orphanage. Such reliance upon the judgments of others for the determination of one's actions and opinions betrays the absence of a solid, independent sense of self, although such a lack seems paradoxical in the two most self-centered characters in the book. Is compassion conducive to such a sense of self? Do Dorothea and Lydgate display more of such a sense before or after their marriage trials? Dorothea and Lydgate both respond initially to the discovery that their marriages are not what they had hoped for with self-accusation, frustration, despair and anger. Indeed, most of the effort that Dorothea and Lydgate expend in repressing their feelings is focused on their anger, that most accusatory of emotions, and most offensive to their spouses, who wish to avoid accusation. Anger is also exceedingly difficult to reconcile with compassion, especially if it is perceived to be just anger. After her very first quarrel with Casaubon during their honeymoon in Rome, Dorothea is already determined not to let anger guide her actions, and so she goes to the Vatican museum with her husband, rather than stay to sulk in her room. "However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness" (I 99). This argument started when Dorothea asked her husband when he planned to start actually writing his book, seeing that he had acquired literally volumes of notes. The anger she expresses on this occasion is tempered from the start by a guilty awareness of her own selfishness in wanting more from Casaubon, namely the opportunity finally to put her ardency to use by helping him with his great work: "what she inwardly called her selfishness" (196). Given her view of her marriage as a "state of higher duties" ( 42) in which all obligations take precedence over her personal desires, she is bound to see any preoccupation with her own needs as selfish. Her honeymoon is a time of great pain and confusion for Dorothea, and she fmds it hard to maintain her previous dedication to the high ends of life in the face of the daily struggle to under- �74 stand and cope with a husband who is not at all interested in her concerns. "And by a sad contradiction Dorothea's ideas and resolves seemed like melting ice floating in the warm flood of which they had been but another form. She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation ... "(195). This remark is very revealing, because it emphasizes the paradox that Dorothea, a woman of intense emotions, should distrust her feelings so. Here, her need for principle and knowledge, which she disassociates from passion, comes from the very intensity of her emotions, and is only at base another form of them. This may indeed be a paradox inherent in any ardent nature, and is worth further consideration in another essay. The second quarrel between Dorothea and Casaubon, after they have returned to Lowick, is even more interesting. The occasion this time is the arrival of two letters from Will Ladislaw, who had become friends with Dorothea in Rome, and in one of them requests permission to visit. Before she even reads the correspondence, Casaubon announces his intention of prohibiting his cousin from coming, and implies that Dorothea will be upset by this. "This gratuitous defense of himself against selfish complaint on her part" (275) when she has not even made any complaint, is too much for her to endure silently. Dorothea is so angry for several reasons, not all of which she admits to herself: she would like to see Will, regardless of whether she is really in love with him at this point; she would voluntarily hide her pain at not being allowed to do so to spare Casaubon grief; she thinks it unfair for him to restrict both herself and Will from a harmless mutual pleasure; and she is sensitive to the charge of selfishness. It is not so easy for her to conquer her anger this time, and she allows it to come through silently in the fierce energy she expends on copying a Latin text, even after expressing it vocally to her husband. However, she soon receives a powerful check to her indignation when Casaubon has an apparently agitation-induced fit of "bodily distress" (277), and Lydgate diagnoses heart trouble. Dorothea feels intense remorse and guilt, and becomes aware with depressing certainty that Casaubon, who never made progress with his book when he was healthy, will surely never finish it now that there is the additional obstacle of illness. Casaubon's attack is a turning-point in the marriage for her, for two reasons. It sets her on the road to that peculiar pity which she will come to 75 feel so thoroughly for him, which casts him as a small, weak creature requiring her protection. It also draws her ardent energy away from his work, since she is given a new task by Lydgate, that of guarding her husband's health. The strife between Dorothea and Casaubon is paralleled with Lydgate and Rosamond, and there is even an incident where Lydgate is called upon to repress his anger and show compassion for Rosamond when her health is endangered, although she suffers no lasting ill-effects. Rosamond suffers a miscarriage after going horseback riding, and this disobedience is especially provoking for Lydgate, since she ignores both his authority as a husband and his judgment as a doctor, for the sake of riding in the company of his cousin Captain Lydgate, who, as the son of a baronet, is ev.en more charming than the nephew of one. The question of authority in marriage is complex in Middlemarch, because of the desire to rule that Eliot attributes to an ardent nature. While Dorothea does not expect to be able to command her husband, since everything she has ever learned about marriage tells her that this is not proper or possible for a wife, she does expect to have some influence over him, assuming he will listen when her arguments are reasonable or her pleas for the sake of some good. She has "the ardent woman's need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul" (351). (She even says, in response to Will's remark that he will never do anything that he knows she disapproves of, "I shall have a little kingdom then, where I shall give laws" (357). Lydgate expects to have full authority over his wife, willing of course to follow her discretion in matters where she may know better than he, for example, flower-arranging or (more seriously) tact. But when it comes to asserting his will after he learns that "Rosamond's quiet, elusive obstinacy... would not allow any assertion of power to be final" ( 640), he cannot do it. The question at stake is whether they will stay in Middlemarch and ride out the town's disapproval of his involvement with Bulstrode and the death of Raffles, or leave. Rosamond has wanted to leave since marrying and move to a place that will give her more social cachet, like London. However, Lydgate feels that doing so would be cowardly, an acceptance of the shame that ignorant, gossiping neighbors want to put on him for all kinds of imaginary offenses that bear no resemblance to what actually occurred. But he agrees to leave, sacrificing his pride and, most damaging of all, the last remnants of his sense of independence, and with it all the ardent energy upon which hinged his hopes of scientific discovery and a truly great medical career. He does this for Rosamond's sake, because he is painfully aware of how much her happiness depends, not on him, how he feels and what he accomplishes, as he wishes it did, but on the societal benefits she would receive from marriage to a prosperous, aristocratic doctor. This sacrifice is perhaps attributable not so much to his compassion for her in her suffering, but to the self-doubt as to his capacity for greatness, that arise from both his role in Raffles' death and his inability to assert himself with his own wife. While Dorothea does not sacrifice anything as definite as professional ambition for Casaubon's sake, she is prepared to give up something just as vital to her: her personal freedom. Casaubon's illness is just the beginning of the final process of "more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty" ( 196), culminating in her readiness to agree to the promise he wants from her to carry out his wishes after his death. During a conversation with Will following Casaubon's attack, she shows how her feelings toward her husband are changing. When Will disparages Casaubon's abilities, she is "not immediately indignant, as she had been on a like occasion in Rome ... now when she looked steadily at her husband's failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness" (355). However, Will sees another side of Dorothea's growing compassion for her husband: he has "the unutterable contentment of perceiving-what Dorothea was hardly conscious of-that she was traveling into the remoteness of pure pity and loyalty towards her husband" (357). This remoteness seems to crystallize during a later incident, which occurs after Lydgate finally tells Casaubon himself that he suffers from "fatty degeneration of the heart" (412) and he is struck with the certainty that · he will die, sooner rather than later, and will not be able to complete his life's work. Dorothea, realizing what has occurred, wishes to comfort him, but is completely and unceremoniously rebuffed. She is used to his coldness, but his complete lack of response-not even acknowledging her to tell her to leave him alone-triggers the most intense anger she has ever felt, and her sense of his injustice and self-absorption leaves no room for pity. [S]he saw her own and her husband's solitude-how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him. If he had drawn her towards him, she would never have surveyed him-never have said 'Is he worth living for?' but would have felt him simply a part of her own life. Now she said 'It is his fault, not mine' ... pity was overthrown .... She was able enough to estimate him-she who waited on his glances with trembling and shut her best soul in prison ... that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, ( 4 I 5) some women begin to hate. However, Dorothea is not a woman to let her anger coalesce into lasting hatred. It is characteristic of her to want to con&ont her husband openly, although surprising in this scene, simply because she has learned to repress herself so well in dealing with him: "she believed now that she could not see him again without telling him the truth about her feeling.... He might wonder and be hurt at her message. It was good that he should wonder and be hurt." It is uncertain what Dorothea thinks will come of such confrontation, whether she imagines that informing Casaubon that he is selfish will somehow shock him out of being so, or establish that he has forfeited his authority over her, and that she will no longer obey him. Maybe she does not expect to have any influence on him, but simply must release her emotion, no matter how much pain that might cause him. However, she loses her chance when he sequesters himself in the library for the evening, and she has time to reflect on the grief that Lydgate's news must cause him. "The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire a resolved submission when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself ... It cost her a litany of pictured sorrows and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows, but the resolved submission did come" (416 ). Pity, as for a weak or wounded being, has become her predominant feeling for her husband, and seems to leave her as separated from him as any hatred would have, while compassion such as Farebrother's both requires and leads to a sense of communion. Since Casaubon has shut Dorothea out, and her own nature recoils from hating him, such pity seems to be her only option. Both Casaubon and Rosamond dislike being pitied, although Rosamond does not seem to mind having someone feel sympathy for her when she is distressed, especially when the sympathizer is a handsome man, or when such feeling assists her having her own way. However, the idea that anyone would pity her I I �76 AIRBORNE instead of admiring her, perfection of womanhood that she is, offends her. But Casaubon has an intense hatred of all compassion because he sees any such feeling as criticism. Eliot explains his reaction to Dorothea's efforts to please him: To his suspicious interpretation Dorothea's silence ... was a suppressed rebellion; a remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a self-approved effort of forbearance. (407) I I I While it is an effort for Dorothea to be so kind to him, what is beyond Casaubon's comprehension is that she is trying to make him happy, not corning up with excuses to gloat over her superior magnanimous soul. Again, Eliot claims that this trait of Casaubon's is but an excessive form of an ordinary human quality, pride: "Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of exalting" ( 406). Lydgate also scorns the compassion of others, as is shown in his rejection of Mr. Farebrother's offer of help as he descends deeper and deeper into debt. However, he does not do so out of fear that Farebrother will think less of him for needing aid, but because he is used to thinking of himself as Farebrother's benefactor because of his role in obtaining the living at Lowick for the clergyman, and he is reluctant to reverse this relationship. He is also aware that since Farebrother is not a wealthy man, he cannot provide any financial assistance, which is what he feels he really requires, only spiritual assistance, and, at this point, Lydgate is still determined to bear his problems alone. Even Dorothea is "habitually controlled by pride on her own account" (189) and is not easily induced to describe her distress to others. In Middl.emarch, the exaltation of the self through isolation leads to a conception of the self that is indeed exalted, but only within the narrow confines of an individual perception, and which cannot survive "under the varying experiments of time" (vii). Casaubon is pitiable because, although he exalts himself in an attempt to be great and accomplish great things, he is doomed to failure, because the very act of exaltation destroys his ability to care about anything outside of himself Eliot says of him: It is an uneasy lot at best. .. to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self-never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted. (274) makes in her marriage and from her later experience with Will and Rosamond. One is to trust that her own emotions and past experiences are sufficient to guide her actions towards the good in her very non-epic life, and the other is to focus her compassionate impulses. During her honeymoon, Dorothea tells Will that "It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it" (216), and Will calls this a "fanaticism of sympathy". Eliot would seem to agree: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all Rosamond, for all her inflexibility, does not escape with her egoism intact: she has "her dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself and. critical of others" irreparably damaged. She continues to act as though she still lived inside it, because she lacks the understanding, energy and courage to change. However, she manages what Casaubon never could, to accept Dorothea's compassion gratefully, without resentment or fear. She always thinks well of Dorothea, despite the fact that Lydgate often compares her unfavorably to Mrs. Ladislaw, an offense that Rosamond would not have born without resentment before. It is difficult to compare the fates of Dorothea and Lydgate, because Casaubon dies before she can give him her promise to let the rest of her life be determined by his wishes posthumously. And it is certainly a narrow escape. But Lydgate never seems to advance beyond the stage where he sees himself as superior to the people he must show compassion towards-whether his patients or his wife-and the consideration that this is so because of lack of opportunity does not change the fact. The last words we hear from him in the Finale are bitter and show that his relationship with Rosamond has not changed over the years: he calls his wife his basil plant, because "basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains" (808). Bitterness is often accompanied by a feeling of inherent superiority, although with the recognition that such superiority has been put to no good use, usually through the fault of someone else. But Dorothea, like Farebrother, comes to see that she is not better than the people for whom she feels compassion are. Her ardent nature, her desire for knowledge and noble deeds, does not exempt her from the frailties and accidents that befall all human beings, and it sometimes even makes it more difficult for her to cope with them. However, Dorothea has gained two important insights, from the mistakes she ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity. (191) . In Middlemarch, there is no concrete answer to the question of how to properly balance compassion and selfishness in one's life. Indeed, it is Eliot's contention that this is an issue that cannot be resolved by a book or a body of knowledge, and all individuals must sort it out as best they can, given their own natures and the peculiar circumstances of their lives. This is not to say, however, that a book cannot be of some help, by examining dilemmas and offering insights into the subject. This is the case with Dorothea and her struggle to do good: the realizations that she comes to are valid for the majority of non-ardent people as well, and can be of use for those people, like Farebrother, who, while they may not want to change the world, do want to do some good in it.+ Alicia Potee, A02 like a keychain decades old, last year somersaults amid change in my pocketoutdated, collecting dust. they say time works in circles, and I'm trying to agree. but still, there lies a single dead second, when chariots turn to rust, when the carousel loses momentum, when the very last nickel is spent. the revolution stops (an empty alarm) flat broke, as if on cue. hanging stillborn in soundlessness, these hollow horses propel me past a string of pitch-dark midnights, (in pieces) like a loveletter or a twenty-ton sledgehammer crashing through bone thin air �... 79 78 Gone West Eva T. H. Brann, Tutor I n 1995 I wrote about the Western High Noon in these pages, roused thereto partly by the incredulity of people who can't believe in Westerns as a creditable genre, partly by the good ideas I got from undergraduate and alumni seminars, but above all by my own affection for that movie and for some others close to it in time. The fact is-or so it seems to me-that what I think of as classical Westerns are very finely and thoughtfully made, as are their literary counterparts, and together they make an admirable and lovable and thought-provoking genre. But though I'm probably preaching partly to the choir and partly to the unconvertible, I've got something more to say. One thing I like about these Western movies is that they constitute about as American a genre as you can find. As such it both redeems and complements the gangster movie, its all-American counterpart, which has a sort of depraved purity all of its own. As Robert Warshow says in the article we read together in one seminar, "The Movie Chronicle: The Westerner" (1954, in "The Immediate Experience, Atheneum, New York 1979), both genres are melancholic, even tragic. But the Westerner's tragedy is that he is a man of virtue who is called on to exercise the craft of killing, while the doom of the perfectly corrupt gangster is "the outrageous presumption of his demands:' Another appealing feature is that Western prose and Western scripts are so simply and straightforwardly written and so pungently flavored with Western idiom. And they are well researched in what the German call "realia"-detail, say, about techniques of horse-breaking or the supplies found in chuck wagons; a reader who takes pleasure in the paraphernalia of various lives can trust classical Western movie-makers and writers for the facts. The reason is that they think of themselves not only as yarn-tellers but as affectionate chroniclers and accepting memorialistsyou might say, anti-revisionist historians-of a bygone era and a geographically remote place. It is a cherished fact to me that Shane, a book I have grown to love over five readings, was written by Jack Schaefer in Norfolk, Virginia, when he had never been west of Toledo. To be sure, he, like other writers of the West, eventually drifted toward the land of his imagination and settled in Santa Fe (where one of our tutors, Tom Harris, sold him his own house). Yet a third factor that draws me is the temporal backdrop of those movies and books that touch me especially. They were made or written during or shortly after the Second World War-my war, the war 'of my particular childhood-and that fact has subtly seeped into them. Of course the war that dominates them from within is the Civil War-our war, the war of our common imagination-largely because the Western hero is so often a defeated and displaced Confederate officer who bears a melancholy burden of loss from way back. **** For all these and more reasons I proposed to the alumni in charge that we should devote a week of their 1996 summer program to watching, reading, and discussing Westerns. I got some grave looks-Plato or Jane Austen were evidently felt to be more in character. But we did it, and it was delightful and illuminating. I was joined in leading the seminars by a colleague from Santa Fe, Mr. Krishnan Venkatesh, and by an Annapolis alumnus, Jim Sorrentino, both more knowledgeable aficionados than mysel£ Mr. Venka esh added Uriforgiven (1992, director and lead Clint Eastwood) to my choices, to good effect as I will tell. I chose a list of three, all made within five years just after the Second World War. Red River, I 948; director Howard Hawks; John Wayne, Montgomery Clift; dramatic date, 1850-65. High Noon, 1952; director Fred Zimmerman; Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly; dramatic date, late in the century (a tattered poster on the sheriff's wall says: "War declared;' perhaps an old Civil War memento or possibly a proclamation of the Spanish American War). Shane, 1953; director George Stevens; Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Brandon de Wilde; dramatic date, 1889. The truth is that I haven't watched much of the later work in this huge and irrepressible genre, neither the TV series that damped movie production for a while in the fifties, nor the spaghetti Westerns produced later in Italy. For a while everyone I ran into told me of a different best Western ever, and I realized how little I had seen. But even I knew that there were other candidates galore even just for this time frame, especially The Gunfighter (1950) as well as Rio Bravo (1959), made by Howard Hawks as a tough response to some supposedly discernible whiny liberalism in High Noon-search me. One bonus of this project was that in the weeks before I met the alumni I got to do as a smug duty what I otherwise do as a guilty pleasure. In fact our president, Chris Nelson, had me over more than once to watch selections from his large Western video library. It turns out that there is so much to see and think about in these movies-little but telling things-that watching in couch potato passivity is out of the question; on yet one more viewing of High Noon, I saw and had pointed out to me a lot I missed in the earlier Energeia article. For example, at his marriage his bride says the conventional "I do;' but Marshal Will Kane, who is governed by a Kantian sense of duty, says "I will." By a Kantian sense of duty I mean one in which the rational will asserts itself over mere wishes; in the ballad of the movie, "Do not forsake me, oh my darling," which expresses Will's heart, the need to kill the outlaw Frank Miller who has come to avenge himself on Will is immediately related to his desire for a peaceful future with his young wife, but in his thinking as just-resigned marshal he does his death-courting duty. Red River, too, is full of nice observables: As Caesar once crossed the Rubicon, the "Ruddy River" that is the boundary between Gaul and Italy, to win a political empire, so the movie begins with Tom Dunston crossing the Red River into Texas with three cows to build a cattle empire. And it ends with an addition to the Dunston brand, D::::s signifying Dunston and the Red River's curving banks. Tom adds 1y,1 (~~M) for Mat Garth, his son in spirit, neatly sigmfymg both the northerly recrossing of the river, now with a herd of nine thousand head, and the adoption of Garth as a Dunston. And so on, detail by detail. · But there are of course also larger elements worth attending to. Movies, being cooperative and commercial enterprises, are particularly apt to reflect, whether purposefully or accidentally, current society (by which phrase I here mean such opinions and per- spectives as people have in large part because others have them). Warshow points out, however, that the classic Western hero is concerned with timeless person_al questions of individual honor, not with solving social problems. Nonetheless, both Red River and High Noon do bear intimations of the time. Red River, which is a fiction about the historical opening of the Chisholm Trail, over which huge cattle drives from Texas to the new railroad at Abeline, Kansas, could be accomplished, is brim full of the boundless energy and human naivete of postwar America, the maturing effects of war on young veterans, and an aversion to tyranny. Thus the chorus for this drama, Groot the Cook (Walter Brennan), keeps a journal in which we glimpse the word "tyrant" used of an increasingly hard-driving Dunston. Again, in the later High Noon some of the social cowardice of the McCarthy era comes out; I've been told that the director meant the town's name, Ha~eY,"i~e, to call Hollywood to mind and to decry the mc1p1ent unheroic conformism of the fifties. . . But allusions to current society are only faint whiffs m these two high classical Westerns. In Shane and Utiforgiven, on the other hand, the times are powerfully at work. Uriforgiven, whose great reviews may actually be taken to prove my point, is a thoroughly postmodern creation and plays to postmodern sensibilities: a slasher movie gussied up with bottomless moral ambiguity. It is filmed alternately with very beautiful long shots and very ugly tight shots. My sense of the close-up ugliness, particularly of faces, was confirmed by our ~u~us Tom Stern (SF69), who was in charge of the hghtmg of the set. (I wish there was a gore tax-so many hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by the industry for every bottle of ketchup, or whatever, expended.) The movie appears to be built on a systematic subversion of classical Western conventions. Peopleto begin with, a woman-are slashed about the face, kicked and beaten when they are down, shot in cold blood by the "hero"; women are terrorized and manhandled, while the whores put out a contract on their attacker. Real Westerners are photographed mostly at a decent middle distance; the heroes wait for the other man to draw first and only then drill him with a neat bloodless hole; they help opponents up after a fair pugilistic ballet, keep their hands off the women, who, especially if experienced, have hearts of gold and low expectations; and above all, though the naive old Western contained plenty of the melancholy of sad �;y; •' 81 80 choices, it never ended in such bleak irresolution as does Uriforgiven: The hired assassin simply picks up and leaves, as is emphasized in the end credits when his figure appears at the upper right at his wife's grave and is quite suddenly simply gone from the screen. These latter-day revisionist Westerns have pretensions to realism, but you don't get real by just inverting the given myths; you get ugly. The new terror is no realer than the old types. But ugly as Uriforgiven is, it gives a brilliant lesson in the postmodern perversion of a classic genre. The movie Shane, too, bears the marks of its contemporary society, albeit seen through the happy haze of the fifties. To observe how the intrusion of social life modifies the pure Western genre, one need only compare the novel Shane with the movie script. Schaefer's sharply-honed mythical poignancy is everywhere muffled in the movie to achieve a comfortable romantic family tale: "Beautiful Dreamer" is the theme song. In seminar and in dinner conversations we collected a score of evidently deliberate changes-transfers of speeches, transposals of events, and the likeall to the same effect. Let me mention just a few of the most telling ones. The first set of these has to do with exploiting the nature of the moving medium to achieve certain effects, the others seem less determined by the contingencies of movie-making than by a systematic desire to tone things down. First, then, is the fact that in the book the story is told retrospectively by the adult Bob, Joe and Marian Starrett's son. The boy Bob is somewhat older than the renamed Joey of the movie. Both facts, the new age and the new name, serve to make the boy, movingly played by de Wilder (who sadly died young), more his parents' son-in the book there is a tension as Bob's love is fixed on the stranger. But the main defusing comes from the fact that all four, the elder Starretts, Joey, and Shane, are seen by the camera in one and the same visual plane externally and panoramically-just as it periodically pans the Tetons that form the spectacular backdrop to the farm and the town only in the movie-while in the novel, Shane, seen through the boy's eyes, looms larger and darker as an inner vision and no gratuitously glorious scenery intrudes its spectacle. In a famous early essay on the nature of the cinema (a word that is, I can't help noting, just Greek for movie) the art historian Erwin Panowsky observes that the moving medium not only temporalizes spacemeaning that it moves through space in time, but also spatializes time-meaning that in moving pictures the ..... intense psychic internalities need to be spread out to view in external action. And that is exactly what the movie does to the novel, in numerous other instances besides the shifting of the narrative source: For example, whereas in the book, Shane, wanting to keep Starrett out of the final gunfight, deftly lays him out cold with a sideswipe of his pistol butt, in the movie there is a prolonged and nearly equal tussle. Joey is here as elsewhere seen watching with a boy's absorption, but the concentrated worship that young Bob bestows on the man of myth is damped as the watcher is watched. Classical Westerns are in black and white and so, one might say, is the novel. Some members of the seminar argued that color is the medium of fantasy, and that may well be, but so much the more do~s it seem to me that black and white is the medium of the mythical imagination. Shane is a good instance. Schaefer's Shane is, except for his final departure, always seen from the front, and Bob notices that he takes care, like a hunted and haunted man, always to sit with his back to a wall; there is something at once candid and shadowy about him. When Bob first sees him riding into their valley he appears dressed in dark clothes that have a kind of formidable elegance-and he is, strangely, gunless. Alan Ladd, a soft-faced golden boy, is first tracked by the camera from behind, riding out of the mountains wearing a beige buckskin shirt and his gunbelt-a considerably less ominous figure, who continues to move through the movie with uninhibited grace. The color makes for a prettier but less poignant scene. The relation of Stevens' Shane to the Starretts is considerably toned down from the tensions Schaefer's Shane brings with him. It is accomplished in dozens of little modifications. A Fourth of July festivity is introduced into the movie-the social dimension-at which Shane dances with Marian in candidly innocent elegance, Joe watching with pleasure. Joe and Shane fight side by side-in companionable equality-when Shane is reluctantly forced into a fistfight in the saloon; in the book Shane fights alone. The wonderful stump scene in which Shane, in gratitude for trust shown by Starrett, attacks with an axe a huge stump, a symbol of nature's recalcitrance to landclearing, is fraught with danger in the book. One at a time both Joe and Shane get under the stump, each putting his life in the other's hands, and when Mari~ gets so intensely involved that she burns h~r apple ~ie, Shane recognizes the equivalence of rebakmg the pie and battling to conquer offending nature: "That's the best bit of stump I ever tasted!' In the movie the stump scene comes right away and is merely a friendly axe-flailing match. Altogether, Jean Arthur's Marian is more sappily feminine than Schaefer's, and more coyly romantic about Shane. In the novel it's Joe Starrett who warns Bob not to become too attached to Shane because one day he'll drift away, and Marian who spiritedly refuses to leave the farm once Shane is gone; in the movie it's the other way around. The relation to the cattle baron who is trying to drive out the farmers-"nesters" as they were derogatively called-is also softened. Fletcher in the book is mostly absent and acts through agents. Renamed Ryker in the movie, he appears in person to give a long, rather persuasive speech about the rights of the cattlemen who were there first and about the necessity of maintaining the open range. As it happens, Schaefer was deeply sympathetic to the cattle and cowboy world and wrote movingly of its passing in his long novel Monte Walsh. But the book Shane, although set in 1889 when the rising homesteaders were fully embattled with the waning cattlemen, eschews the social problem, or rather turns it into a moral standoff between bad henchmen and frightened farmers. Jack Palance as Stark Wilson makes a marvelously cold and conscienceless hired gun, but the movie, by making Shane bright and Wilson dark, loses the fmely detailed antithetical brotherhood of Shane the gunfighter and Wilson the gunman. Shane, who had hoped to put his gun away altogether, thinks one gun is all a good man needs, Wilson packs two; Shane goes by a mysterious single name, Wilson boasts a scary given name; Shane is distinguished in his dress, Wilson is a dude; Shane inspires awe, Wilson spreads terror; and, finally, Wilson is fast on the draw but Shane is faster. The movie Shane is thus a soft, though lovable, fantasy, while the novel is a classical Western. So perhaps the time has come to say what I mean by "classical." Winckelmann (I 717 - I 7 68), the first historian of Greek art, gave a famous characterization of antique classicism: "Noble simplicity, silent grandeur"-"simplicity" in the sense of naivete, "silent" in the sense of quietly reserved. Speaking more generally, one might say that works in the classical mode are never sui generis, one of a kind, by the deliberate creative intent of the maker. What is classical is not only classy individually but belongs to a class, a genre, and tries for the perfection of its type, for the consummate realization of its codes and conventions in a particular individual, be it god or hero, horse or weapon, on Olympus or in the American West. Let me mention here that in our I 996 field trip to Western movie locations near Santa Fe, the genre character of the Western was reinforced-if it needed reinforcement-by the fact that these magical movie ghost towns are resurrected over and over for new productions with small changes, a paint job, a new sign. Tomes could be (and probably have been) written about the utilitarian unreality of these charming wooden sets, with their realistic rendition of the peculiarly American propensity for homespun reminiscences of classicism. It is not so absurd to look for this classicism in the Western, whether in novels like Shane and Monte Walsh or in movies like Red River and High Noon. These works certainly have moral simplicity as opposed, say, to the raucously realized sophistication of Uriforgiven. The heroes try for nobility within their human type and the movie-maker does not revel in saleable bloodyminded baseness. If the hero fails he fails grandly, playing out the Western counterpart of the Greek tragic flaw: He is in an unresolvable moral dilemma where human viability demands one thing, such as running away or shooting first, and his unambivalent code of honor another, such as putting himself in harm's way and waiting out the villain's first draw. But simple isn't stupid. The classical Westerner is mentally acute and observant, a characteristic the directors honor by the intelligent detailing of his world. In particular, the Westerner, be he cowboy or lawman, is supremely competent-just the myth-making best: the best horse-breaker, the best rider on the trail, the most self-sufficient loner, the best leader of a posse, the best eradicator of varmints and badmen. His closest classical counterpart is Heracles who won his place in myth by a special competence for the work to be done: ridding the world of monsters, animal and human. To my mind, a central feature of the ideal Westerner is a sort of speaking laconicism. These heroes are not so much taciturn as quiet, silent from reserve, self-sufficiency, and bashfulness before their own excellence. They are, to be sure, also finely expressive, but more in body-language and action that in words (and this is why the Western type is made to be depicted in moving pictures). Their words are few and at crucial moments insufficient-that is a part of their pathos. Thus in Red River it is Groot the comic chorus who is loquacious. Tom and Mat never say quite enough to each other. Thus in High Noon Will cannot �82 83 explain his unbending resolution. He can articulate one part of it, what Kant would call the maxim of his action, the rule determined in accordance with experience and foresight; he briefly indicates thoughts along these lines: "This is not a private feud for me to fight out on the open plains; the town must be the place where the destroyers of civil life must themselves be destroyed; even if the judge has decamped, taking with his the American flag, we must prevent the community from returning to the state of nature." But he can't express that other element of duty that has to do with what Kant calls the practical reason, a person's capacity for willing freely in accordance with his self-conception. Will is too reserved to speak readily of his innermost self in its integrity. That is why Will's moral inarticulateness is winning to the heart rather than irritating to the mind. I cannot keep from pointing out a fact germane to this college. We live by Socrates' continual injunction to his partners in conversation: "Try to tell me ... :• Perhaps in this lies the crux of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy: Heroes of poetry are often nobly silent; participants in philosophy try to tell-it's a different sort of nobility. Shane too is silent. Not only are his communications, both in book and movie, mostly gestural, but, although his rare speech is elegant, discerning, and courtly, there is a great silence about him, about him and his past. Little is revealed of his origins except that he is, as are so many Westerners, from the South, from Tennessee. But his coming is mysterious: He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane. Recall that "going West" is an idiom for dying, and indeed Shane goes off into oblivion-and for Bob into myth. The cause of his great silence is, the book reveals (and the movie obscures), not so much that he has killed and is hunted but that he knows something unspeakable about himself: He is a man of virtue who truly lights up only in violence; violence is his fate, his dark forbidden glory and trouble. Jim Sorrentino pointed out that his name differs from "shame" only in a stroke. His teaching to young Bob, that a gun is only a tool, as good as the man who uses it, has the pathos of a self-exonerating half-truth. A man has to be preeminently good to turn a gun into a tool for living; he needs the most finely-honed reflexes, the speediest judgment, and the most steadfast virtue. And even then, it's a mighty strange tool. Shane and Kane then share the laconic nobility of the classical Westerner, and yet the genre permits them to be deeply different. Will, the quondam marshal and shopkeeper-to-be, acts from the disillusioned but unbudgeable will to do his duty as he construes it; Shane, the solitary gunfighter temporarily turned farmer's hired hand and friend, acts out of his nature because "he is Shane"-a phrase several times repeated in the novel. Their modes of action are to each other as willed character is to fated being. So finally Shane has the greater pathos .and the more mythical status. (High Noon is often referred to as the first psychological Western, and though this seems to me a misnomer-" characteriological" would be more apt-the description does intimate a slight decline from classical purity; this was, I suppose, the motive for Hawk's remake of the Cooper character in Rio Bravo.) Shane is a savior who takes on the burden of evil for his adopted family. When he has gone, he is said still to be "all around us and in us;' and perhaps not subject to ordinary mortality. Schaefer took account of this aspect of his hero by writing in a letter (April 18, 1975) that his Shane does in fact qualify as a savior, but not as a Christian one; he is more universal, "more an alpha primate male fulfilling his genetically ingrained obligation to his kind" (Shane: The Critical Edition, edited by James C. Work, 1984, p. 352). Well, I don't know about alpha primates and genetic obligations, but the drift is that Shane acts from his very being, a mythical being. A myth is, as Giambattista Vico put it in a deep paradox, a "particular universal." Therefore myths are the natural material for any classical mode, for, as I ventured to say above, the classical seems to be the intersection of the uniquely best with the perfectly generic. That, incidentally, also seems to be the reason why classical works always arise within a genre, that is, within the collection of respectable attempts to realize the givens that frame the path to this particular sort of perfection. And the Western is the genre of genres. I must say that to me America seems lucky to have a genre that has such myths and such classical moments. And yet there is no getting around the fact that the West is gone, a fact that gives current nonrevisionist Westerns an elegiac tinge. The highly spe- cialized competencies and peculiar virtues of the Westerner seem to be well past their date of expiration; even the lanky Anglo-Saxon rawhide types in which they were embodied are rarities nowadays. So we might ask: Why open oneself to such myths? For several reasons. One is that the passing of a pattern of virtue is not so set a thing. The world at large may find the Western virtues outdated because the callings to which they pertained have lapsed--cowboy, homesteader, gunfighter, marshal. But the world is wrong, I think. Self-reliance and self-sufficiency, a lonely sense of duty, laconic competence, courtesy to the opposite sex, slow-forged human bonds, deep-seated love of a landscape and its figures, are ever-resurrectable virtues. It is just when they seem to have lost their place in the world in general that particular people will go looking to remake a place for them. Then, as the cause for being receptive to these local fictions will be a moral longing, so the effect might be to give it some definition. But above all, it seems to me imaginatively sound that we should stay in touch with our past via myths. Now novels and movies, being entertainments enjoyed in receptive leisure and re-read or reviewed at pleasure, are pretty nearly the best we moderns can do by way of participating in the reenactment of myth. One might, to be sure, argue that figures like Dunston, Garth, and Kane are more composite idealizations than mythical beings because they represent the once-in-a-while, scattered excellences and flaws of the factual type compacted into one larger-than-life character. But Shane surely has this additional mark of a bona fide myth: Although when pressed for a model, Schaefer said that it was his father, the Shane we know comes, a being at once uniquely himself and the perfection of his type, from a region beyond, from "the heart of the great glowing West." And when his work is accomplished, that is where he goes. + ode to my mug Eve Gibson, A99 ode to my mug unexpected birthday present peace offering natural handmade massaged clay scored and slipped arched love blue beautiful unexpected mug. i love the way you feel in my large hands the way you feel on my lower lip. mug of love better than a hug useful, practical, no one knows how much the mug is private love not public like embrace or kiss when i hold my mug i am holding my unexpected token of love. LISTENING FOR PLANETS Alicia Potee, A02 suspended in an echo, spotlights fall on Saturn: how you straighten stockings with a beat like blues (piano-banging teeth, like keys beneath trance-stricken fingers), all your jazz-joints splitting plaster, cracking walls like paper pulse-sheet music to your breath. Still rhythmless, i sway to match the wreath of resin you call skin. it's soundless ... dull. i'm hearing you (a woman moving-slick, just barely frictionless), and in this pit of indigo, i sense my hips can hear you too. they dream of turning thin blood thick, snapping elastic veins with one curved hitthat cosmic chord, still ringing in my ears. �84 THREE HUSBANDS Alicia Potee, A02 I. the fighter II. the lover III. the doubting saint he was a high school football star with a taste for red meat, curvy brunettes, cocktail waitresseshad a right hook with the sting of an ex-con. he once drew back his throwing arm to the catcalls of three grown men, bloodied them all in a single swing before treating himself to a beer. for him, one touchdown was never enough. the thrill was in · the tackle. a lady's man since the day of his birth, he kept a collection of lipstick-stained napkins with names, scribbled pink, like Cherry or Vida. he could charm a snake with his smile. sobering up in'82, forehead against a deadbolted door, near dawn at 4 a.m., he begged for a three egg omelet, or one last chance to kiss his kids before the money ran out. after ten years, the birth of a child who claimed his buried father's eyes, the death of a mother who named him from the Bible, one out of practice East Baltimore Catholic still kneels beside her holy wounds, reciting a prayer to one day know the fable of her secrets: blessed are they who have not seen yet still believe amen. (untitled) Eve Gibson, A99 mood music move me from these orange moon table tops and circular decals I hurl you into orbit. Spin Sex Wax, Starbucks, and Sea World Bumper sticker. Away with you regular, concentric, colored, informational blurbs on circular blobs. I exile you from the orbits about my head. I'll throw you up in the air like a fist full of coins and drop you on the ground. I'll play jacks with you And when I think I have lost you I'll step on your sticky side and march you face down into the ground. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. iii, 84 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gibson, Eve (senior editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 1999 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 1999. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 1999 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/93b41461b7659ace3466c7bd09408866.pdf 43956f41b1e4e5b469fe5ec38ad5529c PDF Text Text �EvepyEia: The activity in which anything is fully itself I ._, / , 11 ... vou EvcpyELa ~WY) ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) Staff: Cover: The character for the word tao, "way," "course," in the sense of a way one travels on-a road, path or watercourse. Tao is a key term in traditionalChinese intellectual discourse, where its meanings range from anormativewayof conduct to the dynamic principle that underlies the movements of nature. The character was written by Ch' en Po-chin. -note by Cordel/Yee Assistant Editors: Matthew Holtzman Kristin Masser Anne McShane Zachariah Swindler Junior Editor: Eve Gibson Senior Editor: Danielle Tabela Faculty Advisor: Chaninah Maschler The Energeia staff would like to extend its gratitude to Chris Colby, the St. John's Print Shop, and Barbara Goyette Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published yearly and distributed among the students, faculty, alumni and staff of St.John's College, Annapolis and Santa Fe. The Ig98 issue contains a sampling of the student work from the previous school year which the prize committees have selected for public recognition, and submissions from members of the community. Energeiawelcomes essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, photography, and the like for the I999 issue. 3 �CONTENTS K.I57 6 DRIVING IN VENEZUELA Alexandra Boozer 8 PARABLES AND FABLES Anne McShane 10 CLASS DAY SPEECH I997 Chaninah Maschler 12 EXCERPTS FROM: ''BECOMING HUMAN: A DIALECTICAL JOURNEY TOWARDS SPECIES BEING" Lydia Polgreen 14 UNTITI..ED Marianne Thompson 23 THE TENSION BETWEEN MERCY AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE'S MEASURE FoR MEASURE Heidi Jacot 24 THE KING OF ISRAEL Samuel Davidoff 36 A TRANSLATION OF EMIL VERHAEREN'S "ONE NIGHT" Eli Wiggins 42 Two TRANSLATIONS OF WILLIAM VoN Gomrn's "NATURE AND ART" Eli Wiggins 44 ANOTEON WILLIAM VON GoErHE'S "NATURE AND ART" Eli Wiggins 45 CHINESE GRAMMATOLOGY Cordell Yee 47 MooN CRATER DEPTII ExPERIMENT Anna Milazzo and Jill Nienhiser 54 THE HALF-DAY Aaron Pease 56 LANGUAGE AND MIND: AN ExAMINATION OF THE PHAEDO AND 0mER DIALOGUES Alan Rubenstein 60 VIRGIN MARY (MOTHER OF Gon) Marianne Thompson 71 EXCERPTS FROM: ''PARADOX AND EVOLUTION: IMAGES OF THE DEMANDS OF MODERNITY" 4 Chris Colby Matthew Braithwaite 72 5 �K. i57 * Christopher Colby classroom on a stage where a lectern was centered. Next to it was a table upon which he placed his suitcase, and he opened it as if he were opening ajar of formaldehyde. In ithe kept his lecture notes: dead, sterile things, drained oflife. On and on he droned in his dry, lifeless voice: mummified notes read year after year to each suffering generation. All from the same jar of preserved, dead feelings. "This isn't music," I thought, "this is mortuary science." Soon, I dropped out of school, disillusioned, and fell into the wild chaos that was rock music and the anti-war movement tearing apart 196o's America. Music of the '6os was loud, sometimes gentle, mostly angry and always heard best while taking drugs. I was not like the wanna-be politicians yet to come, who, for their future careers, and a gullible public, did not inhale: I did. Afterwhile, the warm summer glow of drug-induced blue skies and Woodstock faded into the cold, gloomy, and lonely grey of solitary Minnesota winter nights. I was unemployed, uneducated, and burned out after years of protest marches, rock concerts and all the youthful silliness that comes with drug abuse. The highs and lows came closer and closer until I was always high. On one of my endless wanderings, lost like a refugee, exiled even from myself, I came across a record store in an area known as "the Left Bank" ofMinneapolis near the Mississippi river. It was notorious for rebelling students, smoke-laced coffee houses, and a thriving trade in drug trafficking. There on a shelf I found K.157. The music didn't have a name, just a number, tattooed as if on the forearm of some forgotten boy. K.157. It was a string quartet in C major by Mozart, written very early in his life while he was in Italy, and the recording was an old DGG record in a yellow dust jacket with dark blue lettering. On the back, it said K.157was particularly loved by Albert Schweitzer, who played it on his violin. "Albert Schweitzer?" I wondered. The jungle doctor who helped the poor in Africa, and who, of necessity, sewed torn human flesh together with the snapped-off heads of soldier ants. I bought the record. I find it difficult to describe nowwhat I heard, lest I in turn become another embalmer. I can t1y to describe my feelings about K.157. I don't think it is Mozart's best. It was written while he was a teenager, and other fugues he wrote later were much more complicated: rich tapestries of woven counterpoint. It is uncharacteristically sad-Mozart is not usually a sad man. But K.157 contains one of the most poignant and exquisite second movements I have ever heard. My feeling is that Mozart wrote it while he was in some great pain. Perhaps "The Kaminskis were musicians in Poland," my mother explained to me one day. "They came here after the war. They're refugees, you know, and their son will go to school with you this fall." They had been among those freed from a concentration camp at the end of the war. I was six or seven years old then and about to begin school. They lived several blocks awayfrom us, but in the smallcommunitythatwelived in outsiders made ripples like stones cast into a pond. Even though he was older than me, Christopher, their son, and I had become great friends. He played the piano, and could say his prayers in Latin. On his forearm a black and blue number was tattooed: it was an enormous curiosity to me, but he always kept it covered. In the way that children often do, we had somehow discovered each other; I don't remember how. Heliveddownarutteddirtalley, across asumac-studdedandgrassyfield. "Watch out for the ditch with barbed wire," he used to say, or, "Remember the fallen log where Grey Boots the cat lives? She's had her kittens." On a comer was his tan-colored stuccoed house. In one of the trees nearbywe built a tree fort. We were quiet children, always careful of the witch living next door, in a house with a basement where she threw little children and wicked boys. Christopher practiced his piano lessons nearly everyday, and while his mother tutored him, I had to leave. So I wandered home alone or waited in our favorite treetop for him to finish. Often, while we played together in his room or elsewhere around his house, I could hear his mother playing her viola and his father playing the cello. I was entranced. They were like two mourning doves warbling their tunes : they chased each other, they played together, and sometimes they danced alone. When I was older, I learned the musical term fugue came from an old Italian word, Jugere "to chase or dance". The music they made was full oflife: sweet and calm. It filled me with joy, full of the here and now. I didn't know what the music was they played or who the composers were, but the quiet peacefulness of them playing together cast a gentle, magical spell over me. Three years later, my parents moved our family away to another city and I never saw the Kaminskis again. I never listened to 'classical' music after that until sometime in high school. Then, in a classroom full of bored students like me, I listened to worn and scratchy records. "This is music," we were told. Later still, in college, I sat in a darkened lecture hall with two hundred others trying desperately to keep awake. From a side door the professor entered the 6 .1 he mourned the loss of his own child}iood, when music-making was no longer simply fun , but had become work. The An·dante evokes feelings of great sadness, lost innocence, and pathos without the mind-numbing stillness that comes with melancholia or depression. No wonder Schweitzer played this at the end of a day without anesthesia, perhaps too full with the misery of chi1dbfrthing and of the pain of the dying. This nameless , numbered, second movement written two hundred years ago , sang to me in my jungle as it must have sung to Schweitzer in his . I remembered the Kaminskis. My childhood memories of them flocked back to me like mourning doves at sundown. I remembered hearing the story about musicians playing string quartets by Mozart at a concentration camp in Germany during WWII. Perhaps the Kaminskis played while naked women and children flocked past them on the way to their suffocating showers. Those who listened heard a moment of beauty before their screaming final solution: lives flamed into smoke, anonymous ashes turned into sludge and dumped into a nearby swamp. How can we , in our own personal concentration camps that are our work-a-day lives, understand such madness? "Arbeit ma ch das leben suss" -"work makes life sweet," was written above the entrance of one such notorious death camp. No, not work, but music makes life sweet. Between the little deaths we all suffer during the counterpoint of our lives, music offers moments of beauty and rest, and provides a link to the immortal. It cheats death. K.157 sounds the same to me as it did to someone else while black smoke filled the sky in another land. Whenever the Kaminskis played their music, whoever listened shared in the wonders of the eternal and the immortal, in the great terrors of the here and now, in the forever gone and yet to come , with all its sadness and happiness. In the same way as music, time moves forward. Ifirstheard K.157 a quarter century ago when I was 22 years old, almost as young as Mozart was when he wrote it two centuries before. I gave up drugs then. Like Schweitzer, music was what I really needed. My eight-year-old daughter came home today from school. In her hand, a violin in its case swung carelessly as she chased two mourning doves by the side of the road. Now her fugue begins . 7 �Driving in Venezuela • Alexandra Boozer I. Trying to Return to the Port Hotel with R. The moon roof opened by crank, the leather had a female smell; I was speaking to him through the sound of birds confusedit was night and they were flying. I was a bright orange plume, marking the night, tangerine beads and slight sunburn, a bright flash like the sudden passing of a familiar ghost, or a pet bird speaking, lost in the wild heat. We left the gaudy club an hour before, full on hydroponic tomatoes, wine-marinated fruits, pale green drinks. I have been kissed all night on the neck, though not by R. ; rare bright seeds have been tossed at me while dancing; I listened to Blue Serenade sung by a whore and wept, he didn't notice. I imagined the salt on my thighs cooling his free hand as we drove . We were lost on a forest road driving parallel to a river we knew by smell. Those were water birds flying above. I was surrounded by sexless sounds and painful heat. I knew he would find the way soon to that bleached hotel. I was beginning to fear the separate bed, the cold air-conditioner smell on the sheets, the lone hands. And if we travelled allnight, ran out of fuel, wrecked the car ... I imagined that we were already dying, that he was forced to venture into the heat with me, to hide in the woods and sleep, to never be found. Complete solitude, and the honesty that comes from hunger, the connection between fear and gender. 8 II . Inquiry into the Last Hours Low morning, we stumbled from the useless car, truly hurt and alone, we lay down to rest for days. Our clothes were torn but we were not ashamed; my wound was bound in his own Oxford cloth. His blood glimmered like nothing I have ever seen, he was beautiful and terrifying, speaking while asleep. I was the ignorant nurse, hungry and stunned. We were surrounded by remedies locked in hardwoods, the bitter milk of plants. I dreramed the nurse's dream: His watch read two a.m. a wounded doe eats a native plant, I fell asleep. sleeps to wake up healed. At four he made choking noises I find the plant, we both eat it, and woke me. we sleep together on the mat of vines. "Whose hands are choking you?", I I plead with our bodies for the blood to end. asked him; "Darling", he said and held my hips. But perhaps it is the right medicine: He told me would weep for sex, for regret of if you find this record, you will want leaving me cold so long. to know what our dreams were, what lit our fourth night. I was terribly hungry, surrounded by the sounds of unseen water predators R. told me years ago that he rarely dreamed. feeding at night. I envisioned killing I stayed awake to listen to him talking; that huge beast with my hands. I licked the he muttered a long time about some salt on R.'s elbows. Bangkok beauty stabbing his wrists. His wrists in the moonlight seemed alright. Land of dark oil underwater, I bound them tighter. the crushed carbon, brilliant hidden diamond of the bloody gods, sustain us. And I ate the last supper with my blood husband, seeds and fruit, narrating the myth oftwentyyears and war and bones, the final armistice. I baptized him in that slimy water and my own spit. I sleep next to his life. 9 �Similes, Fables, and Parables * Anne McShane I Similes, fables and parables serve different purposes. In looking at the three , I would like to examine what those purposes are, and how they are accomplished. several reasons: first, to put some distance between the listener (presumably a human) and the character. Second, so that certain characteristics can be targeted; the wiliness of a fox , the stupidity of a bird, or the irritating quahties that only a fly could have. Third, and this may be related to the first reason, stories can be both simpler and a little more extreme. That is to say, had a person pinched the Bald Man on the head, and the Bald Man was moved to shoot the person, but somehow missed and ended up shooting his kid or something, the story would seem both ridiculous and bloodthirsty. Killing flies is something almost everyone does, and is not be regarded as unusual. Having animals rather than people allows for little complication in the story; motivations are always simple, often based on pride, hunger, or, as in this case , irritation/pain , and glee at someone else's pain or irritation. The animals in the fable always represent people, and their actions are to be taken as simple and distinct cases, which can be applied to particular situations in the listener's life. And, lastly, the parable. The parable is also meant to teach a lesson . First, the simile. The simile is used for purposes of description. As a huge oak goes down at a stroke from Father Zeus, ripped by the roots and a grim reek of sulphur bursts forth from the trunk and a passerby too close, looking on, loses courage-the bolt of mighty Zeus is hell on earthso in a flash, for all his fighting power, Hector plunged in the dust, his spear dropped from his fist, shield and helmet crushing in on him, bronze gear clashing round him (li 489-496, book 14 )'. The simile sets up a proportion: as Oak to Zeus' thunderbolt, so Hector to Ajax' hurled rock. The simile is not just an exaggeration-I ate a billion hamburgers today-but a description of a relationship. The simile gives life to the sentence, makes it three dimensional. If one can imagine how such an oak would, at first , creaking, slowly topple, and then falling with increasing crashing speed at the chops of an ax, then so much more vivid is such a tree ripped out by the roots, inspiring terror into an onlooker. And such is Hector. But then, one must consider the rest of the simile; as terrifying as the tree is, that one instigating its descent must be inconceivably powerful. And such is Ajax. Clearly, the image itself of Hector falling under Ajax' rock would be less powerful without the accompanying image of the oak falling to Zeus' thunderbolt. .\ The parable teaches differently than does the fable. A story is told, but the moral is left in story form , rather than brought outside of the context of the story, as in the fable. This creates ambiguity regarding the moral, making different in.terpretations possible. Also , animals are not used, thus bnnging the listener much closer to the story's characters, is, at the same time, making the story more complicated; motivations and feelings such as forgiveness, love and resentment are introduced, as well as multiple motivations within characters. The characters in the parable do not immediately present themselves as good or bad; is the parable above so much a story about the younger son , than a story about the older son? It presents levels of good behavior, brings in attitudes, as opposed to simply actions. There is something in the parable that is not intuitive. The father's actions, to the black and white eye, do seem unfair, and the elder son's reactions justified. But the parable is, quite clearly, not suggesting this, but, rather, the opposite. On a gut level, I cannot escape sympathy for the elder son, though intellectually, the father's reprimand makes sense. I suspect this is a problem the fables do not often pose. 1. Fagles, Robert. Homer The Iliad, Iggo. New York: Penguin Books. 2. Caxton. Aesop's Fables, I95I. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. 3. Class translation. Then he said, "A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to the father , 'Father, give to me the share of the household that falls to me. The other divided between the living. And after not many days, having collected everything, the younger son went away from home to a distant place and there scattered his goods, living profligately. Having spent everything, strong hunger came to be throughout that place, he began to be in want. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that place and he sent him into his fields to tend pigs. Having come to himself, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have more than enough bread? I am undone in hunger. Having risen, I will go to my father and I will say to him , Father, I sinned against heaven and against you, no more am I worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired men .' And having risen, he went to his father himself. While he was still at a distance , his father saw him and felt mercy, and running, fell upon his neck and kissed him . The son said to him , 'Father, I sinned against heaven and against you , no more am I worthy to be called your son. The father said to his slaves, 'Quick, bring out the first robe, put it on him , and give him a ring upon his hand and sandals upon his feet, and bring the fatted calf, sacrifice it and eating, let us be merry, that this son of min e was dead and returned to life, was lost and is found. And he began to celebrate. His elder son was in the field. And thus going, he neared the house, he heard sounds and dan cing, calling to one of the children, he asked 'What could this be?' He said to him that the brother came, and your father sacrificed the fatted calf, that, being healthy, he had recovered . He became angry, and did not wish to go in . His father having come out, called him. Answering, he said to his father, 'Lo, so many years I work for you and you never gave me a kid in order that with my friends, I might be happy. When your son, this one devouring your life with prostitutes, came, you sacrificed with him the fatted calf.' He said to him , 'Child, you are always with me, and all things mine are yours. There was need to be merry and to rejoice that your broth er, this one was dead and lived , was lost and is found." 3 Second, the fable. The fable is used to teach a lesson. THE BALD MAN AND THE FLY Of a little evil may well come a greater. Whereof Aesop reciteth such a fable of a Fly which pricked a Man upon his bald head. And when he would have smote her she flew away. And thus he smote himself, whereof the Fly began to laugh . And the Bald Man said to her, "Ha, an evil beast! Thou demandest well thy death if I smote myself, whereof thou laughest and mockest me. But if I had hit thee thou haddest been thereof slain." And therefore men say commonly that of the evil of others men ought not to laugh nor scorn. But the injurious mocketh and scorneth the world, and getteth many enemies. For the which cause ofttimes it happeneth that of a few words cometh a great noise and danger. 2 The fable teaches in a very straightforward manner. A story is told; usually involving animals , with a moral. In this example, the moral is put at both the beginning and the end of the fable. It's rather difficult to miss. Animals are used for 10 11 �Class Day Speech I99? * Chaninah M aschler Thank you for the honor of inviting me to speak to you on this, your special day. In the course of the one fifth to one sixth of your life that you have spent at St. John's you have learned a few pregnant facts: For examplethat the avenging slaughter at Odysseus' house, well on the way to civil war, stopped, not of itself, but by a mentor's persuasive command; that the periodic table of chemical elements (which you bought at the bookstore for less than one dollar) is not a copy of an Ur-chart in some Ur-textbook of chemistry, but derives ~om innum~rable experiments inspired by and in turn inspirmg speculative hopes for chemical theory; that the behavior of gasses is less difficult to account for than is the behavior of solids, though gasses seem to be so much more mysterious, mind-like in their impulse to spread; that it was not by looking more intently at the planets that Kepler came to pronounce their paths elliptical rather than circular; that there are languages in which you cannot say "it" (for instance, French); that Greek idiom seems to suppose that once you have seen something, you know it, though your own experience is probablyatvariancewith this supposition (The studentwho's bothered by this discrepancy is the one who gets the hang of the Greek perfect, which usually is a "perfect of result," such as is illustrated by ou bouleuesthai eti oora, alla bebouleusthai "it is no longer time to be deliberating but to have finished deliberating," that is to make a decision, as in Crito 46a); that the American tradition of constitutional law, in keeping a record & thus preserving the memory of the Supreme Court's di.ssentingminorityopinions, holds resources for selfcorrection (thus , in the case of Dredd-Scott Vs Sandford Judge George Ticknor Curtis held that Congress does hav~ the right to control the spread of slavery into the territories, and the words in which this minority opinion was expressed gave guidance to the majority that later declared what the Constitution requires ); that the sources of moral courage are deeply mysterious-I am thinking of the courage of Frederick Douglass and his little band (p 307), the five slaves who, here, in this Chesapeake region, planned their run-away to freedom; that the God of the Bible, just and merciful as he may be, is not nice. You have acquired some proficiency in laying out a mathematical demonstration or executing a laboratory exercise. You have had experience of the pleasure of discerning what makes a proof or a theory tick-what links the many argumentative and observational steps into one melody of connection among connections, and of the pain of not getting it, of the notes of reasoning not swelling into song for you. Occasionally, unpredictably, while working on a paper, or chatting in the coffee shop, or reading a poem out loud that previously would not yield, there has been an epiphany. . _And in anticipation of the next night's seminar, you have, twJ.ce a week, stuffed yourself, sometimes nearly to bursting, with very big books. But this little sample of the things that you have done or that have happened to you while we were here together does not capture what's been distinctive of our endeavor. Bearwith me as I try for a better description. In the second week ofyour freshman year, when you began to study The Elements, you noticed with surprise and pleasure that this mathematics book, unlike all the others you had read previously, does not hide the fact that the words that are coming at you from the page have an author. Your implicit knowledge that the words that are made available by a language do not, on their own, arrange themselves into speeches, that even mathematical speech is personal, was made startlingly explicit through the recurrent formula Lego hoti, "I say that ... " Everytheorematic proposition began with an enunciation, a statement claiming that all figures or all magnitudes or all ratios that fall under a given description also fall under a second description. While promulgating this all-sentence the author simply declared. In the next portion of the proposition , theekthesi.s , or "setting out," the hidden first person who was the source of the declaration made plain that he was addressing a second person, ourselves, the readers, because he issued a command or r~quest, such as "Let ABC be an isosceles triangles having the side AB equal to the side AC," and even so-called "third person imperatives" place responsibility for the execution of the command on the addressee, the second person. Because of the fact that our editions of Euclid's Elements supply a picture of this very triangle ABC that was just mentioned, we mistake, perhaps, what's happening in the" setting out": Maybe it's notthepromulgatorof the all-statement by we, the hearers , who (to grasp the sense of the enunciation's grammatical subject) are invited to draw a case that instantiates it. Otherwise we cannot know what the hidden author is talking about. Now comes the Lego hoti step: the author pops out and proudly proclaims in the first person singular thatourtri- 12 angle ABC has the property he promised all of its kind to have. And, in the apodeixis itself, he makes good on his words by experimenting on our case and winning our assent to his claims about it. Finally, and this is the logically most mysterious step, the proposition circles back to its opening all-statement and claims that "therefore," which means, presumably, as a result of the conversation, which seemed to be about particulars, the universal enunciation holds, apart from that conversation (cf. Post. Anal. I 3 73b32.; Proclus on the" conclusion" of a Euclidean proposition, quoted p. 131 Heath, volume i). The conversational reading of Euclidean proposition that I just laid out stems from the feeling that there is more than a little overlap between what goes on in Euclid'sElements and what happens in Plato' s dialogues. Take, for instance, the episode in the Meno where Meno asks Socrates to teach him that what men do when they study is more properly viewed as recollection than as getting taught (81e) . Socrates says: It isn't an easy thing, but still I should like to do what I can .. .I see you have a large number of retainers here. Call one of them, anyone you like , so that, in him I may demonstrate/or you ... It sure looks as though both Euclid and Socrates believe that they do not have to run through an infinity of instances to obtain the logical right to make their statements about all triangles or all learning human beings so long as they grant their interlocutors the freedom to select the example that is to be experimented on-either in fact or in imagination. The slave who comes to be used by Socrates as though he were some triangle ABC drawn by Meno was perhaps not the cute little "boy" that many of us conjured up for ourselves as we read the dialogue. In ancient Athens, as in the still not entirely bygone American South, even a white-haired old man would be called "boy", so long as he was a slave. By calling these morally uncomfortable features of the situation to mind, we are helped to realize the following: Socrates may have been trying to persuade Meno that, since even when the interlocutor is at liberty to pick his instance from the least likely subspecies of humanity-slaves-it turns out that the learner actively participates in achieving his second, his educated, nature and does not persevere as a mere piece of wax that gets imprinted by the informing teacher, therefore all situations of human learning are misdescribed when the teacher, or speaker, is conceived of as artisan, the student, or hearer, as his material. Euclidean-style deductive science is, as Kant points out (in a section of the Critique which you were not assigned), the wrong model for philosophical inquiry. It's absurd to talk about human beings as though they were triangles. Deductive reasoning (though it's always going on in the interstices of our talking and listening and thinking), is an evanescently tiny fraction of it. Granted. And, as you found out by reading Lobachevsky and Einstein, if you want your geometry to be not only consistent but also cosmologically true, the imagination may have to be stretched to what feels like its breaking point. All of this is true and important. Yet doesn't my main contention stand-that it is only when the reader or hearer cooperates with the speak.er or author by using his conjuring faculty, his imagination, and tries to "set out" for himselfwhat the author is saying, that he grasps his meaning? Don't your four years here confirm that it was by entering upon conversational exchange with the author who speaks in, say, Leviathan or Genealogy of Morals or the Discourse on Inequality that you were enabled to guess at what he means and to determine on what interpretation of his words they would merit your assent? And isn't the courtesy of hearing the author out so damnably strenuous chiefly because our powers of imagination, of calling up the instances to which our author'swords apply, are too weak.and uninformed for us long to sustain the fellowship with him that we demand of ourselves? Fellowship with speakers who are present in the flesh, who offer us faces and hands to look at, not only words, is in some respects easier to sustain. Besides, isn't it both the source and the goal of fellowship with authors? It ought then, to come more naturally! But all of us know-from our years of St. John's coffee shop, classroom, dining hall, not to forget parties and soccer or baseball games-it's not all that easy. It takes concentration, patience, suppleness, humor, the willingness to risk saying or doing or asking something foolish. It takes tact, and (as was so beautifullysaidatlastyear's Class Day), it takes hope: Hope for hearing the unexpected, which may even come from you own mouth! There was a time when advocates ofa St. John's-style education claimed that it educates people to live where other colleges groom them for merely earning a living. Said in acertain tone of voice, this smacks to me of haughtiness and of regret at or disdain for the fundamental fact that, living as we do in modern America, our dignity, who we are in our own eyes and in the eyes of others, must depend heavily on how we spend our working day, how worthy we believe our work to be, how fit we are for doing it, and how much of ourselves we give to doing it as well as we are able. Since all of this is involved in the phrase earning a living, I hope that over the long haul you will be able to say truthfully that your alma mater has helped you become a person who earns his or her living. This will not be easy. It may take more than a little time and cause you some suffering. Yet I do believe that the allrequired program of studies at this talking college has given you not only a preliminary sketch of some of the main continents of the intellectual and moral globe but also some participatory sense of the work that went into and continues to go into the making and maintenance of this humane globe. Apt speaking and hearing-as you've had occasion to find out here, and as your working and leisure life henceforth will confirm-is by no means the sole condition for its existence. But it is a prime condition. In Yiddish, the most heartfelt word of praise is Mensch, human being. My wish-for you, for myself, and for the next generation-is that you'll be a Mensch. 13 �excerptsfrom: "Becoming Human: A Dialectical Journey Towards Species Being * the end of the material dialectic. The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. [Phenomenology of Spirit, § 808] II. The Marxian Dialectic The Production of Commodities in General A commodity is, in the first place , an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. [C.I, P-43i' The metaphysical question of the relationship of subject to object is taken by modern philosophy from the time of Hegel to be a matter of the history of the subject's relationship to the objects that make up its world. This is the dialectical point of view: the subject is not a fixed quantity, but rather a fluid, changing one, and as it changes, so , too, does the object and its perception of the object. If formulating a world history is the task of philosophy in our modern era, then the question remaining is from what premises this history is to proceed. The first formulation of a dialectical history of the world was made by Hegel, in hisPhenomenology of Spirit. He begins from the premise of individual consciousness as a substance existing in itself, and from there lays out the history of that consciousness and its journey towards its ultimate end, its solution to its metaphysical quandary, Absolute Knowing, or knowledge of itself as Spirit. Marx proceeds on very different premises. He begins with the fact of human existence in the world, rather than in mind and in itself, and formulates world history on that basis, with the goal ofspecies being as the end of its dialectical quest. Species being is analogous to absolute knowing, but the latter is a state of consciousness existing in itself, while the former is a state of man 's existence in the world. The goal of this essay is to examine the premises upon which Marx.formulates his dialectical history of the world, and follow this dialectic through to its logical conclusion, species being. The first section, entitledDialectic, is an exposition of the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness. I will then take up the inadequacy of the Hegelian point of view, and propose the material dialectic as the true formulation ofworld history. In the second section, The Marxian Dialectic, I will follow the thread of this dialectic through Marx's argument as given in Capital, in order to understand why Marx believes idealism is inadequate. I will then examine the effects of the material conditions of capitalist production on man's consciousness in the section entitled The Material Dialectic of Consciousness. The final section of this essay, Communism, will deal with the actualization of species being, which Marx sees as Commodities are produced to satisfy some human want. The very first kind of production takes place when man produces the objects needed for subsistence out of what is presented to him in nature. The work involved in this process is of a definite kind: it is the labor expended forthe object itself, and it is expended by the one who is to enjoy the fruits of his labor. This simple worker works only to satisfy his wants, and the value of the objects is determined by the intensity of his desire for them. This value is true for the self-laborer only, it has no universal content. As the wants are his, and their intensity entirely subjective, there can be no common measure of them for all men. This is what Marx calls use-value. The worker feels no need to measure the value of the objects of his work when he works only for himself, because his subjective desire for the object is all that is required for its production. When division oflabor begins, for whatever historical reasons, the need for a universal standard of value inevitably arises , as the worker no longer works only for himself. His relationship to the object he produces has changed: it is no longer an object of desire for him in itself, but rather an object of desire for someone else. He produces it in the hope of gaining some object that he desires from someone who desires the object he has produced. In a word, he wishes to exchange his object (for which he has no need) for an object he does need or want. This is the origin of barter. The two producers involved mutually exchange their products for one another. It is precisely when he produces for an other that the object on which he has labored becomes a commodity: The Division of Labor Prior to any talk of exchange there must be a division of labor. In order to engage in exchange, one must produce what one does not need in the hopes of exchanging it for another commodity. The division oflabor takes place quite naturally. It exists already in the family, according to Aristotle .., The various tasks of the household are divided among the family members according to who will best be able to perfonn them. Here, of course, it is difficult to see the "work-for-other" that shows itself quite clearly in the social division oflabor. Members of families probably did not see their relations as alien from themselves, much less opposed to them , but still, the concept seems to exist here first and most simply. The social division of labor also seems to happen rather innocently.Natural ability makes some people more adept at certain kinds of work. If each man had to farm his land, sew his clothes, cobble his shoes, and forge his tools, his days would be quite arduous. In order to reduce his labor time, or perhaps improve the quality of the goods he consumes, he undertakes only one occupation, leaving the rest to others who will practice their trade much better than he did, no doubt. And so begins the division oflabor, or "workjor-other." The division oflabor is the first revolution that takes place in the history of production. Adam S~ith describes its advantages for production. Exchange Value and the Market Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values .... This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. [C.l, p.54) When our producer of commodities wishes to exchange his commodity, he brings it to the market, where the exchange of commodities takes place. The challenge he faces here is to ascertain what he can get for his commodity. He knows that it is worth nothing to him in terms of use-value. He did not produce it for that reason. He cannot gauge the subjective value of the commodity to another, as he will surely be cheated in such an exchange. He cannot look into the wants of another in order to find the intensity of his desire for the commodity, and the person with whom he hopes to exchange cannot fathom his desires. Their respective desires for each other's objects cannot serve as the medium of exchange . The only thing that the two commodities have in common, then, is the amount oflabor invested in each. How can one compare two objects that seem to be unrelated? Only with respect to some quantity, some common measure, can they be compared. Since they are qualitatively different, the quantitative measure must be completely abstract, like number. We said earlier that the amount of work invested in an object when man works exclusively for himself was determined purely by the intensity of his desire for the object. When the laborer produces the object as a commodity for consumption The division oflabor ... so far as it can be introduced, occasion s, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers oflabor. 3 The division oflabor undeniably increases the productivity of labor, and probably increases the quality of the goods produced. It is a natural , rational, and dialectical motion, demanded by the inadequacy of the previous mode of production.Work-for-self is inadequate for meeting the aims ofwork, so it is sublated into work-for-other. The division ofla~or better accomplishes the end of work, which is the satisfaction of human wants. This revolution has inevitable consequences for its participants. It places men in relationships ofboth mutual independence and dependence: Whoever directly satisfies his own wants with the produce of his own labor, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must produce not only use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values. [C.I, P-48] The social division of labor causes his [the owner and producer of commodities] labor to be as one-sided as his wants are many-sided. This is precisely why the product of his labor serves him solely as exchange-value. [C. I, p.108) Similarly, the work that goes into the production of the commodity is of an essentially different kind. It is work with 14 satisfy with his own commodity. The division of labor transforms the producer of any particular commodity from an undifferentiated human being into a baker, weaver, smith, or carpenter, and defines his being in terms of the commodity he produces. His social position is determined by the commodity he produces, something that simultaneously brings him together with other men (although only because they possess commodities he needs) while separating him from them as individual men apart from the commodities they produce. The division oflabor, then, necessarily brings about an alienation of man from man. It brings men together as producers of commodities, entangled in an antagonistic, estranged relationship with them as producers of other commodities, or simply as others. Once work-for-self is sublated into work-for-other, the former antagonism between man and nature is transformed into an antagonism between men in the form of barter, the first kind of exchange. The division oflabor marks the beginning ofsociety among men as we know it. Society is a conglomeration of individuals dealing with one another as individuals. Social relations are the relationships between individuals in the context of society, that is, where there exists both attraction to and repulsion from other men. The division of labor necessitates the recognition of man simultaneously as an independent individual and as one dependent upon other men. Hence all social relationships between men are merely a function of the division oflabor and the beginning of exchange. Only such products can become commodi~ies wi~h regar.d to ea~h other, as result from different kinds oflabor, each kind berng earned on mdependently and for the account of private individuals. [C.I , P-491 Lydia Polgreen Introduction another in mind. I call this kind of work labor, as opposed to simple work. Labor is work done with the aim of exchange, rather than consumption. Producers are independent insofar as they produce different commodities, but are dependent because each one must rely upon others for the satisfaction of the wants he cannot 15 �by another, he speculates on the amount of desire that the other might have for the object. He expends the same amount of labor as when he produced the object for himself, but the labor involved is essentially different. He guesses, in essence, how much labor the other would be willing to invest in the object if he were producing it for himself. This is how they come to agree on the terms of exchange. Each looks at the labor required to produce the commodity, and bases the value of it in terms of exchange exclusively upon this . Each has labored a certain amount to produce his respective commodity, and this is all the two commodities have in common. This, therefore, is their only measure of value with respect to one another. The labor involved in producing particular use-values is of a particular kind, such as weaving, wood-working, forging, and so on. But as far as the commodity is concerned, the labor invested is entirely undefined and formal . For the purpose of exchange all forms oflabor are merely different expressions of the same thing: human labor as a social substance. Thus the labor that is used in measuring value for the purpose of exchange is what Marx calls "socially necessary labor." This is the amount of labor that would be required to reproduce the commodity today, expressed in terms of a social mean, or average. The qualitative differences between the various kinds oflabor are as unimportant in exchange as the qualitative differences between the commodities they produce. All that matters is the quantitative difference in socially necessary labor. This value is the exchange-value of the commodity. Exchange-value is a purely social expression: objects enter into exchange by their own nature . Once they have been produced, the producer is merely transportation and a mouthpiece. I tis important to note at this juncture the important change that has taken place in this abstraction from use-value to exchange-value. Each producer estimates the value of the commodity in terms of his own labor, but that labor is abstracted, as it has not actually been performed on the object they are now hoping to obtain . Each takes the value of his own labor to be the same as that of the other. Once a value is assigned to labor, it is labor of an essentially different kind. The work that produces use-values is a means to the end of satisfyingwants, while the labor involved in producing use-values is a means to exchange. Work is the activity of gaining one's sustenance for oneself from nature; labor is work performed for an other with a view to exchange. The dialectical antagonism of usevalue and exchange value that arises out of the division oflabor is expressed here by the end of each kind of production . In the first, use-values are the primary end, in the second, exchange values . Hence what was once a use-value, or an end in itself, has now become a means to an end, exchange. So the commodity leads a double life; it has at once both use-value and exchange-value, the latter of which is completely alien from it as a use-value. The commodity is speechless with respect to its use-value; this value is inexpressible .4 Accordingly, this value cannot be alienated from the commodity, as it resides inherently in it. It can, however, through its seller, articulate its exchange-value. Its exchange-value is precisely the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it as a commodity. This quantity has meaning independent of the commodity itself; it is fully alienable. Labor, as something universally applied to nature in order to bring forth use-values, is a quantity that can be articulated. Use value and exchange-value express the two-fold antagonistic nature of the commodity both in its production and in its exchange. It exists in two ways: for the seller, it exists only as a receptacle ofvalue, while for the buyer, it is a good he can use. For each, the exchange-value that they agree on in common is an articulation of their alienation from one another and from their commodities. Implicit in the reliance upon an alien standard of value is an alienation of the buyer from the seller. They meet one another as opposites, brought together by their differences: each has a commodity that he does not need, produced by labor that he alienated specifically for the purpose of exchange. They meet not as men , but as buyer and seller. Their relationship is defined by the relationship between their commodities. One has a commodity to sell, the other has realized value which he hopes to exchange for unrealized value, i .e. something he can use. Each offers the other something he has alienated. Also implicit in this expression ofvalue is the acknowledgment that there is an other, that the two people in this situation are fundamentally different and that the difference between them with respect to the commodities they produce is what brings them together. In resorting to an abstract measure of exchange they in effect say to one another "You are not myself, and furthermore, I have interests that do not co- The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition .. .. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only insofar as they are expressions or embodiments of one social substance, viz., human labor, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. [C.I, p.54] The commodities begin to take on a social meaning, and with it a life of their own. They become not just external objects in the world, but objects imbued with a certain social quality, the mirror image of the social relation of buyer and seller. In fact, it is rather more accurate to say that the social relationship between the two people is a product of the relationship of their commodities, as it is for the sake of these commodities that they came to market in the first place. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing.. . because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not in themselves, but between the products of their labor. [C.I, p.77] The reason for the mystery, of course , is that in producing the object for another, man alienates his labor, and by so doing gives it an independent, objective existence in the world. This objective existence is a condition of the possibility of exchange. With object in hand he goes to market, and the 16 Labor for another necessitates the existence of private property. The philosophy of the natural rights of man, which claims that work is the agency of ownership, mistakes work for labor, and confuses cause with effect. John Locke, one of the primary founders of the philosophy of the rights of man, describes the process of appropriation thus: incide with yours." This expression isolates one 'I' from the other, and drives a permanent wedge between them. 5 Although the buyer and seller are alienated from one another, they seem also to have a natural affinity for one another. They are a beautifully matched pair, each perfectly meeting the needs of the other. But this harmony is a mere semblance. Exchange is possible only because commodities are two-f~ld, having two separate modes of existing in the world. The fust is as themselves, as use-values. The second is as exchangevalue, or as an expression of human labor invested in them. These two are at odds with one another, because they are housed in the same object and yet are of essentially different natures. Buyer and seller approach one another as mouthpieces for their respective commodities, as beings defined entirely by those commodities .6 The commodities have a natural affinity to one another, but they have this affinity only as two ways of expressing exchange-value. The commoditythe producer hopes to exchange attracts other use-values because it has exchange-value. Therefore it is only because the commodity is dual that the exchange can take place. The commodity and its owner recognize something of themselves in the commodity they hope to gain from the buyer, something that simultaneously brings buyer and seller together and repels them from one another. Whatsoever then he [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. 8 But Marx considers this account inaccurate. It is onlywhen the division of labor takes place and the time for exchange arrives that there is any question of ownership. Work is the operation of creating use-values for one's own consumption . It is hard to see how this gives the worker any right over either the means of production or the product itself. For what does right mean here? Rights only become meaningful when man is alienated from man through exchange. With the division oflabor, man allows himself to come into relations of dependence with other men, while simultaneously putting himself at odds with them. For labor is the work performed with a view to exchange. In order for this exchange to take place, there must be some kind of ownership. This is when labor (not work) becomes the hallmark of ownership. It is not simply by performing work that one makes something one's own. It is by performing labor and bringing the fruits of that labor to market. But this is not the agency that brings about private property. Private property is simply the name we give to the means of production and the commodity produced for the sake of exchange. Furthermore, the owner of private property is necessarily alienated from that which he owns. For how is it thathe owns it? He is said to own it only because there is an other. Private property, then, is merely the material expression of the work pei-formed for the other, or labor. The quantitative division oflabor is brought about in exactly the same spontaneous and accidental manner as its qualita~~e .division. The owners of commodities therefore find out, that the same diVIs10n oflabor that turns them into independent private producers, also frees the social proce.ss ?f production and the relations of the individual producers to each otherwithm that process, from all dependence on the will of those producers, and that the seeming ~utual independence of the individuals is supplemented by a system of general and mutual dep endence through or by means of the products. [C.I, p.109-rn] The dependence brought about through the products is the true state of affairs. The alienated products have a truly social relationship with one another, while the producers simply tag along. For what does it mean for men to have a social relationship? The two parties involved must be simultaneously individuated and mutually dependent. The truly social relationship exists between the commodities first, and in the owners only after the fact. The producers come to market for the sake of exchange, for the sake of the social relationship of their commodities. Separated from their respective commodities, the buyer and seller have no relationship at all. Their products are the result of alienated labor, labor brought forth into the world as objective being-for-other, and hence have a life entirely independent of the producer. The commodities are a kind of Frankenstein, a creature created out of noble hopes, but necessarily imbued with an independent existence which inevitably must supersede the original intentions of its creator. The Division of Labor and Private Property So far we have considered only the simple barter exchange, which arises out of the division ofl abor, and examined how private property comes into being out of this same division. We have shown the dialectical move from work-for-self to work-for-other. With the division oflabor and the beginning of exchange, which both bring about private property, all the elements are in place for capitalist production. We must begin our investigation into capitalist production with ~n exa~i­ nation of the various kinds of exchange, and the dialectical motion from one to the next, beginningwith barter, and ending with trade by means of money. IV. Communism [Communism] is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man - the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Com- The subjective essence of private property - private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person - is labor. [EPM, p.128)7 Private property arises directly out of the division oflabor. 17 �'I munism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution . [EPM, p .135] country. In these three modes of production we see how labor is divided. The property, or mode of ownership, associated with each is identical to its particular way of dividing labor. Property, then, is simply the expression of how a particular organization of people, be it a family, state, or trade , divides the labor involved in its mode of production. There is a further division, however, between the owners of property on the one hand, and the property-less workers on the other. In the ancient communal property of the state there are the slaves, acquired through conquest, and in the feudal system the serfs. (The feudal system is somewhat more complex, as there are two kinds of property and two kinds of workers , whereas in the ancient communal system there is only one kind of property and one kind of worker.) Hence we have two kinds of antagonism existing in each system, the first in exchange, the second between the owners of property and the property-less workers. These are separate antagonisms , and they do not intermingle, as exchange does not generally occur between the classes, but rather between states or between the owners of property. There is no real intercourse between them, and hence the issue of property and the issue of exchange seem completely separate. The means of production in any given era are given by the particular circumstances of those producing, as we saw in the three modes of production outlined above. The mode of production is simply the way in which these means are used in order to produce. This is identical with the division oflabor: the mode of production is necessarily dual. It divides society into two classes, the owners of property and the property-less workers. The mode of production is the sum total of this relationship. It manifests itself as a class struggle between the two groups. Capitalist production begins with the appearance oflabor as a commodity for sale on the market. The conditions that bring labor to the market place have been set out elsewhere in this essay, but they primarily consist in the decline of feudal agriculture and the flight of serfs to the cities, and the decline in the guild system due to improvements in technology and growth of the small capital invested in manufacture. The division oflabor in capitalist production exists between capitalists, who exchange with one another. Capitalism brings with it private property, that is , property owned strictly by individuals. In the feudal mode of production the owners of particular kinds of property were allied with one another and did not engage in exchange, for they all essentially produced the same things; feudal lords almost exclusively produced agricultural products, guilds produced different manufactured goods , and the two groups engaged in exchange as groups . But capitalist production places individual capitalists in competition with one another, as capitalist production can take place in any industry and in any place. Thus the alliance of property owners is broken. With the advent of capitalist production the antagonisms inherent in exchange and in property ownership which once were separate become identical. The property-less worker in the capitalist system sells his labor as a commodity, and in- Thus farwe have given an account of production not in its overall history, but within the dialectical process of the capitalist mode of production itself. There are actually two dialectical processes taking place simultaneously according to Marx. The first is the inner dialectic of each particular mode of production, which finds its roots in the individuals who produce and the antagonisms implicit in their self-production. The second is the larger dialectic of world history, which is made up of the serial progression of the modes of production as sweeping historical movements. Each new era in production brings with it a new kind of property, or with reference to the subject, a new mode of ownership. Marx gives a brief sketch of this progression in The German Ideology. The first kind is tribal ownership, that arises out of the hunting and gathering mode of production, which included animal husbandry and farming on a small scale. The division oflabor here is entirely in the family, and the tribe is merely an extension of the family unit. Ownership here is communal in the sense that no particular individual holds title to the land, animals, or other property; they are all owned in common by the tribe, which is divided along familial lines. These tribes eventually come into contact with one another, through trade or war. Because of mutual interest or by means of conquest, they begin to consolidate into city-states. With conquest come slaves, hence the mode of production changes, and agriculture and large-scale construction become possible. Also, commerce develops between states, and cities become mercantile centers, with greater populations. The slaves are the laboring class and the members of the conquering tribes, citizens, are the masters, with the state as the owner of property. Property is still owned in common bythe citizens, but now by means of the state rather than the family. Here we see the first real separation of classes between citizens and slaves. Also, the division of labor between states, brought about by the natural resources available to each state and the various industries indigenous to each, leads to commerce, and hence antagonism, between states. 9 Feudal property arises not out of cities but rural areas. Marx gives the decline of the Roman Empire as a possible reason for the rise offeudalism. Commerce, which was made possible bythevastreachoftheRomanEmpire,wasvirtuallydestroyed by its fall, and in its place came large-scale farming of land owned by local nobility. The laboring class consisted of the local peasantry who became serfs, and farmed the land for the feudal lords. In the towns, industry flourished in the form of guilds, which consisted of small capitalists who employed apprentices to ply their trades. This set up the opposition between town and country, as commerce between them was necessitated by the division oflabor implicit in the feudal mode of production. Manufactured goods invariably came from the cities, and were traded for agricultural goods from the country. The feudal system, then, created two kinds of ownership out of its particular division oflabor: the small industrial capital of the cities, and the large land-based ownership of the 18 tercourse between the owners of capital and workers begins. They are both free individuals , coming together as equals in exchange on the common market. But the laborer is not exactly property-less. Labor here is taken as a kind of private property, something alienable. Since everyone owns private property (now that labor is included as a kind of property), the antagonism of ownership and non-ownership between the classes seems to be resolved. Now the worker has a commodity he can sell, his labor, so all that remains is the antagonism between the various producers of commodities, brought about by the division oflabor and exchange. Just because everyone now owns property, it does not mean that everyone is a capitalist. To the contrary, only the owners of property other than labor can be capitalists. Hence what appears as an elimination of the class distinction between the owners of property and the disenfranchised is actually the reinstatement of this same distinction in a different form. The division oflabor is the true source of all divisions in society, and exchange is the source of all antagonism. Once ownership is the right of an individual rather than a class , the division oflabor and exchange reveal themselves to be two sides of the same coin. Thus the capitalist class is one of individuals engaged in antagonistic relationships of exchange. Their mutual interests as a class are secondary to the desire of each individual capitalist to expand his capital. The laboring class, the proletariat, is engaged in an antagonistic relationship with the capitalist class because there is exchange between them. Labor, the production of use-values for the sake of exchange, is divided amongst the capitalists, and they engage in exchange with the laborer as well as other capitalists .. Where there is exchange, there is alienation , hence the capitalist is alienated from both his fellow capitalists and the workers he employs. The free sale of labor is the first and most impor tant condition of capitalist production. The laborer and the capitalist must meet in the open market, where " Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham " [C.I, p.172] rule. Capitalism depends completely on the freedom and equality of the laborer and the capitalist, as these are the fundamental conditions of any exchange. But so soon as the laborer leaves the market and follows the capitalist to his factory, his labor becomes, albeit only for a stated amount of time , capital belonging to the capitalist. The laborer becomes property just like a slave or a serf, but it is for a limited time , and rather than being placed against his will in servitude, he went to the market willingly. But this freedom is a sham, one that must be debunked if we are to understand the true nature of capitalist production. The laborer is not free; he finds himself forced to sell his labor by the conditions that surround him . The only other choice is death; he sells his labor as the last possible way in which he can sustain himself. The dialectic of the modes of production has delivered him to this state. The laborer is no more free than the slave delivered into servitude by his conquerors. He is brought to that point by forces that are beyond his control. The notion that a person can own himself as property, as something external and hence something that is within his control, and by definition, alienable, is fundamentally untenable. Capitalism, by placing property in the individual and not the class, destroys the fortress that formerly safeguarded it. It is the antagonism between capitalists that brings about the final destruction of capitalist production. The opposition between the capitalist class and the proletariat is a product of capitalist production, but it is not the cause of its downfall. The proletariat need not destroy capitalism by force , as it dies at its own hands. Capitalism relies on the laborer as a free individual, but this freedom is merely an idea, not an actuality. Real freedom is the absence of material constraint on the lifeactivity of man. This is clearly not the kind of freedom that the laborer has. His freedom is in name only. Similarly, the capitalist is constrained by his material conditions. Capital by nature wishes to be expanded, and the capitalist is simply the human form of capital. He is as enslaved by capital as the laborer is. He has even less freedom than the laborer, as he is at odds with everyone and allied with no one. He seeks only his own interest, which is obtained necessarily at the expense of others in his class as well as the laborer. The laborer has only one antagonist: capit al. There is no natural source of antagonism within the proletariat as there is no exchange between them, because there is no division oflabor. They labor only for the capitalist, and hence are able eventually to unite and see their common interests. The capitalist class, by its very nature , can never do this ." Marx calls communism the "positive transcendence of private property." [EPM, p.135] Private property is the kind of property that arises out of the capitalist division oflabor, property owned by individuals. It places individuals in opposition to one another. In the earlier modes of production tribes were opposed to tribes, states to states, and classes to classes. Capital pits man against man directly, without recourse to some unified structure to support his claim. The resolution of this antagonism , of this estrangement, necessarily demands the sublation of private property, the rendering of it into its opposite, social property. This sublation puts the means of production that formerly served capital in the hands of the proletariat. The means of production determine the mode of production , which has been up to this point antagonistic. By removing the concept of individual ownership from production , com munism removes the class struggle completely. The mode of production is simply the way in which the means of production are set in motion in order to produce. When this is undertaken on asociallevel, the means of production are set in motion by society as a whole, not by some particular class. This is possible only when society as a whole owns the means of production. But the dialectical process is essential, as it makes the division oflabor an unnecessary division. The division oflabor arose out of the inadequacy of the previous mode of production, but in capitalist production it eventually becomes its opposite. It is rendered useless by the capitalist mode of production. Private property is the result of the division oflabor, so the removal of the latter destroys the former. Capital, through its accumulation, continually improves production and systematically reduces the amount of labor and level of skill required to produce commodities. It reduces all labor to 10 19 �11 1 essentially the same thing, and effectively turns the division oflabor into its opposite. The division oflabor in capitalism exists only between the various kinds of manufacture, which are represented by individual capitalists. This division has no meaning for the laborers. The transcendence of private property consists in the birth of social property. This can only take place when man recognizes himself as a species being, rather than an individual. Man as species being sees nothing as alien from himself, but sees all objects as objectifications of himself as a species being. ties once enjoyed, and appropriates it for himself. He, as a conscious beingwith a life-activity, work, recognizes himself as species being. This is the end that communism, as the transcendence of private property, makes possible. Man's life becomes an object for him, rather than his being himself an object of his life. That is, his life-activity is his essentially, and is an end in itself, rather than the means to an end. Once his life is his, the dialectic of antagonisms ends. The key is the activity of man: the dialectic moves man by its own forces, propelled by antagonisms that are the product of something external, the material conditions of his life, which are fundamentally beyond his control. His individual will is powerless to overcome them. The recognition of the other (be that man or nature) as identical with man, allows man to appropriate the activity for himself, and the seemingly external activity of the dialectic becomes the self-propelled and selfcontrolled life-activity of man. This cannot, however, take place on an individual level. It relies on the universal recognition of man as a species being. Communism is "the riddle ofhistory solved" because it resolves all the antagonisms that seem to be essential to human existence. By placing man's essence in his species being rather than his individual existence, it removes all traces of otherness from the world. The resolution of Marx's material dialectic is essentially identical in form with Hegel's dialectic of consciousness. But for Hegel, the end of dialectic lies in a certain kind of knowledge, rather than a certain way of being, or way of life. Consciousness's knowledge of itself as Spirit, something over and above itself of which it is an expression, is state of mind. Species being is a mode of being in the world, which Marx sees as the only possible mode of being. Being in the mind, or knowledge, must necessarily be an expression ofbeing in the world, not the other way around. To the question "why a material dialectic?," Marx would surely answer this: "Show me an idea that exists independently in the world as a force that moves men, and I will give up my material dialectic. " The argument for a material dialectic is clearly an argument of the whole, and is made from experience. The world is made up of objects, and objects are moved by other objects, not by invisible forces of the mind. Man's conscious being only reveals itselfwhen he is engagedin some kind of activity, or being in the world. Hence the notion that his ideas are independent of this being, or that the world is a product of these ideas, is es sen ti ally backward. Man becomes conscious through activity, and through his activity he makes the world around him. His activity is not a result of his consciousness, his consciousness is the result of his activity. Ifwe set out from the premise that man first and foremost exists in the world, and thence proceed to his consciousness of his existence as a means by which he perpetuates his existence, we fully understand the material dialectic and its primacy over the dialectic ofideas. This , Marx argues, is the correct understanding of the history of the world, and the only means by which we can realize the ultimate goal of the human species. Idealism, for all its attractions , fails to address the fundamental question ofhuman existence, man's beingin the world, because it places his being elsewhere than in the world. [M]an is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object be- comes for him a social'~ object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object. [EPM, p.r40) Man becomes an object for himselfbynegatingthe reality of the objects outside himself as something alien, and hence independent of him. By so doing he appropriates the objects as expressions of himself as man. This can only take place on a social level, that is, on the level of common recognition of all men as social beings, or species beings. The true inner equality of man lies in the common condition of all men, that of work. The recognition of this equality takes place through the destruction of the division of labor as a qualitative division. Commodities long ago realized that they were all expressions of the same social substance, human labor. There is no alienation between commodities, only between the producers of commodities, for the commodities, as commodities, are aware of nothing in themselves other than the labor invested in them. This is how exchange is possible. Man must recognize himself and other men in the same manner, as being qualitatively the same, and hence equal and unified. Exchange brings alienation only because the producers of commodities see their labor, and thus their products, as something alien from themselves, and see themselves as separated from other men, with whom they necessarily exchange, by the qualita-tive difference between their commodities. This alienation disappears when man ceases to produce for another individual and commences production for all of society. This is not a backwards motion to the prehistoric state in which man worked only for himself; it is aprogressive motion towards a new state, in which man works for society, with which he sees himself to be identical. The common social substance, work, becomes a unifier of men, rather than of commodities. The laborer, by producing himself as a commodity, learns well the lesson that commodity production teaches: that all commodities are essentially the same with respect to other men. By becoming a commodity himself, man recognizes the essential equality of himself as a working being. This is why it is the proletariat that becomes the ruling class. They unlock the secret of human equality through having found themselves made essentially equal (albeit against their will) by capital. The dialectical motion from work-for-self to workfor-other thus completes its elfin work-for-self, where the self is taken as a species being. Man thus enters into the social relationship that com modi- 20 Bibliography The fundamental problem of human existence lies in existence, that is, in the world, and nowhere else. To find its solution, we must look only to the world, the world of objects, of which man is one. His consciousness exists only on the condition thathe exists, and hence his material life, his beingin the world, is necessarily primary. This primacy is the key to understanding the necessity of a material dialectic. This dialectic is one of man's becoming. At the end of his journey, man becomes human. In order to become human, man must undergo the dialectical process that facilitates this becoming. Man's humanity lies in his activity, and because he is conscious, that activity must be his essentially. The only way in which man can possess himself in this manner is by becoming a species being. Once he becomes a species being, man becomes himself. Thus as the dialectic draws to a close, man is completed, and with this completion, man actualizes the true essence ofhimselfbymeans of work, the conscious activity that ultimately defines him. As with every other mode of production, communism produces a certain kind of man. Communism makes men equal and free, not as a mere idea, but as an actual state of being in the world. Communism is a return to work-for-self, but the concept of self has been expanded to include the whole species. Thus it is not really a return, but a sublation. Man is both preserved and transformed. This expansion, this dialectical growth, is the fundamental process of the history of the world, and its immanent resolution is that which propels it. History, that with which philosophy is primarily concerned, ends with the resolution of its process. Where history ends, so too does philosophy. Here man leaves off his investigation of himself and the world as something outside of himself, and begins living in the world, which is merely an expression of himself. The end of philosophy marks the beginning of truly human life. The commencement of this human life is that to which the entire process of history is ultimately directed. Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Princeton University Press, Princeton, Ig84. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press, Oxford, I977· Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, I99I. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Ig8o. Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore & Edward Aveling. International Publishers, New York, Ig67. Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederick. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. International Publishers, New York, Ig48. Marx, Karl. The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of !..8..44.· Translated by Dirk J. Struik. International Publishers, New York, Ig64. Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. Translated by C.J. Arthur. International Publishers, New York, I947· Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Translated by Donald A. Cross. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Ig87. Smith, Adam. An Inqui:r:yinto the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Ig76. Footnotes I The C in my notation refers to Capital. The roman numeral following it refers to the volume number. 2. "The family is the association created by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants .... " Politics, I252b I3-I4. 3 An Inqui:r:yinto the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, Book I, Chapter I, Adam Smith. 4 That is, for commodities to have universal meaning, as they do in exchange, they must have a language. Note here the resemblance to Hegel's description of language: '' Language is self-consciousness existingfor others, self-consciousness which as such is immediatelypresent, and as this self consciousness is universal." [PS, § 652] It is also interesting to note that this description comes in the context of morality. What is consciousness trying to bring into the world of objective existence through language? Its inner worth, or value. So the exchange value of a commodity is actually the commodity existing as a universal, or for another. 5 This is the true beginning of the "mine and thine" that so embittered Rousseau. Private property begins with the division of labor and the birth of self-interest in opposition to 21 �other men. This is perhaps the force of Rousseau's distinction between amour-propre and amour de soi-me me. The former he sees as a product of society, while the latter is but an expression of the instinct for survival. 6 There is a kind of community of commodities, they have a truly social relationship. That is, they recognize themselves as identical with one another as values. There is no alienation between commodities, only between their producers. Commodities are social in the sense of being of the same social substance, human labor. The social relationship between producers is a reflection of this, but necessarily different. The attraction and mutual recognition of commodities leads to repulsion and mutual alienation between the producers. 7 The EPM in my notation refers to The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of1844 . 8 Second Treatise on Government, Chapter V, John Locke. g In Section II of this essay we saw that wherever there is division oflabor, there is exchange, and wherever there is exchange, there is antagonism. (The exception to this is the family, where there is no real exchange.) 10 This raises an interesting question about The Communist Manifesto. What is it if not a call to action on the part of the proletariat? The rhetoric of the Manifesto seems to contradict the notion that the dialectic will be the primary cause of the end of the antagonistic mode of production. Marx's use of rhetoric elsewhere is similarly troubling. What place could rhetoric possibly have in dialectical philosophy? 11 This is parallel to the Lord and the Bondsman in Hegel. The double alienation of the bondsman from his lord and the object he makes for his lord leads the bondsman to find new certainty in himself through his activity and progress dialectically. The lord, because he has no activity other than pure negation of the objects the bondsman produces, from which he is alienated, cannot progress, and his consciousness plateaus. The fundamental difference between Hegel's account of this stage of consciousness and Marx's account of the laborer is also revealing; for the bondsman in Hegel, the next stage is stoicism, certainty in oneself and indifference to the outside world. For the laborer in Marx, this change in consciousness must be manifested in the world if it is to have legitimacy. It must take the form of a demand for changes in the conditions of his life. 12 It is clear that by social Marx does not mean here the society of individuals as alienated from one another by exchange, which is the sense in which this word was used earlier in the essaywith reference to man in society. He clearly means social in the sense that commodities are social; they recognize their mutual identity as expressions of a common substance, human labor. Untitled Woodcarving Marianne Thompson 22 23 �The Tension BetweenMercy and Justice in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure * Heidi Jacot William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is a study of the uneasy tension between the principles of justice and mercy in government. The theme is debated by the play' s main characters. It appears in the conflict between public and private duty, and is raised as a struggle between two competing systems: divine justice and earthly justice. The tension between mercy and justice is most visible in Isabella as she fights within herself to find compassion in her heart for the man she hates above all, whose very life is placed into her hands. If there is one crucial moment in Measure for Measure, it is undoubtedly the moment of Isabella's indecision, when, struggling between Mariana's pleas, she shows mercy and her own desire for revenge, standing silently before Angelo. In this moment, the play hovers between comedy and tragedywith Isabella's soul in the balance. She is being tested by the Duke, whose enigmatic speech urges her first to show mercy and then to exact revenge: Then, Angelo , thy fault's thus manifested; Which, though thou wouldst deny, denies thee vantage. We do condemn thee to the very block Where Claudio stooped to death , and with like haste. V.r.461-5 Perhaps Isabella is brought up short by this blunt comparison. She does not speak; instead, Mariana and the Duke alternately beseech and goad her on, and Isabella is swayed from one side to the other. Although the Duke speaks sharply, his purpose is still to test Isabella, hoping that she will rise above her instincts and ask for Angelo's pardon. It is less of a test of Isabella than/or her. For Isabella stands in danger of being consumed by self-righteous anger and a desire for revengeby the inhuman coldness with which she had accused Angelo. When put to the test, Isabella finds it hard to give mercy, although h er pleas on behalf of her brother to Angelo in the second act are among the most eloquent and moving lines in the whole play. This woman , a novitiate from the convent, who stands in our minds as the representative of divine mercyin the play, has another side to her as well- one that is less forgiving. Pushed to her breaking point by Angelo's lascivious demands and her brother's cowardice, which makes him willing to sacrifice her honor for the shred oflife, Isabella at one point cried out against the brother she sought to save: For this new-married man, approaching here, Whose salt imagination yet h ath wronged Your well-defended honor, you must pardon For Mariana's sake. .i-449-521 Here he brings out her "imagination," her "well-defended honor," and her friendship with Mariana as grounds for mercy. However, the tone changes as his speech continues: 0 fie ,fie,fie ! Thy sin's not accidental but a trade Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd: 'Tis b est that thou diest quickly. But as he adjudged your brotherBeing criminal, in double vision Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach Thereon depende nt- for your broth er's life The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, "An Angelo for Claudio, death for death! Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure . V.i-452-60 III.i.156-73 In this moment, Isabella sees such foulness in her brother that she claims that mercy itself would act like a procurer to help him on to further evils. This is the same Isabella who , in her rage at Angelo's treachery (the broken promise of pardon for Claudio's life), says in fury, "O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!" (IV.iii. n9 ). Her experiences in the world have brought her a long way from the convent and her idyllic vision of "fasting maids whose minds are dedicate/ To nothing temporal," (Il ,ii ,189-90 ). Before the Duke in the last scene, she cries out against Angelo, calling for "justice, justice, justice, justice! " (V.i.28). The invectives she hurls publicly against Angelo are some of the most severe in the play. How does this passionate, vengeful fury we see in Isabella, the young novitiate, fit with what we saw in her earlier appeals to Angelo to show divine mercy? This is the same woman who movingly pleaded with Angelo: It is as if these words are Isabella's own thoughts, swinging between pity and anger. There is a curious line here: what does he mean by " the very mercy of the law" which demands Angelo's death in recompense? The word "mercy" is surprising in this context-we usually think of mercy as a departure from the letter of the law, not the fulfillment - but perhaps the Duke intends for it to ring in Isabella's ears. The conclusion of the speech goes beyond the righteous feeling of" death for death," it focuses on the parallel between Angelo and Claudio in order to bring out Isabella's empathy: 24 her appeal that lecheryis, after all, a common sin , Angelo suddenly turns on her with the full force of his righteous anger blazing: ... How would you be If He, which is the top of judgement, should But judge you as you are? 0, think on that, And mercy then will breathe within your lips Like man new made. II.ii.97-IOI The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept ... Isabella : Yet show some pity. Angelo: I show it most of all wh en I show justice; For then I pity those I do not know, Which a dismissed offense would rather gall; And do him right that answering one foul wrong, Lives not to act another. Be satisfied. Your brother dies tomorrow; be content. How can we understand this disparity in Isabella's character which shows itself in such vindictive extremes and tender appeals? Let us look, though , at those appeals in Act II scene ii. We usually think of mercy being invoked because of extenuating circumstances, corning from the consideration of the particulars of the individual case. In the case of Claudio, Isabella could have pleaded his engagement (a legallyrecognized precontract no less) , and intention to marry Juliet, hampered only by lack of money. She begins, however: II.ii. n5-32 It is a weak conclusion to such a powerful speech. He has lost the force of his argument and tries awkwardly to cover over the brutality of his own anger by telling her to take comfort . But where Angelo breaks down , Isabella gains strength, and she comes back at him (provoked by his insufferable arrogance) in a tone of contempt: There is a vice that most 1 do abhor And most desire should m eet the blow of justice; For which I would not plead but that I must; For which I must not plead but that I am At war ' twixt will and will not. So you must be the first that gives this se ntence , And he that suffers ... Could great men thunder As, Jove himself does, Jov e wo uld ne'er be quiet, Forever pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder, Nothing but thunder! ... but man , proud man, Dressed in a little brief a uth ority, Most ignorant of what he's most ass ured , His glassy essence, like an angry ape Plays such fant astic tricks before high Heave n As, makes the angels we ep ... II .ii .133-50 II.ii-40-4 This speech of Isabella' s comes out sounding simply garbled: She is forced to plead to save her brother-although it comes in conflict with her natural inclination and sense of duty- so that she is at war between will and will not. It is neither a defense for Claudio nor a passionate appeal to show mercy. In fact, when Angelo argues with her about the justice of Claudio 's sentence, Isabella agree s with him , " O just but severe law!/ I had a brother , then " (Il.ii.55-6) , and prepares to go! She acknowledges th e claims oflaw on her brother' s life , and, h aving don e her duty in asking for his pardon, is ready t o relinquish. There is something chilling in the absolute detachment of, "I had a brother, then," she r eally does con sider herself as part of the convent and divorced from life and its "earthly concerns" already. But Lucio will not let her give in so easily, and under his insistence she returns to Angelo. She presses him with unsetding questions. Backed into a corner by his own contradictory statements, he tries to send her away (ll.ii.85). But Isabella is not to be gotten rid of easily. This seemingly callous dismissal from Angelo has needled her. I hear her response, a kind of "I would I were you," coming out of long pent-up frustration at a woman 's dependent and submissive role. In this speech we see Isabella genuinely affected and reacting from the inside, shaking off the demure and reverential character she has assumed. It is not furious, but it is a passionate statement about herself and I think that it is this that catches and fixes Angelo's attention : Ratherthan appealing to ahigher law than man ' s, Isabella attacks human justice itself. Her criticism of the pretensions of man are less reflections on law and government than arrows aim ed at Angelo' s pride and self-righteous attitude. As we have seen, h er first speeches (delivered in cooler blood) show a reverence for and acceptan ce of the jurisdiction of hu man law. It is her interaction with Angelo that leads her further and further into making ardent statements which h ave the sound of religious conviction. Righteousness meets righteousness: Isabella reacts to Angelo's disdainful coldness and arrogance; Angelo is driven to extremes by her attack on him, on law, but mostly on his authority which rests uneasily on his shoulders. When we look at her speeches and how this first scene between them unfolds, we see that Isabella speaks less out of conviction than in response to him - impulsively. We might not be so surprised to find her behavior inconsistent with her statements. Perhaps now we have a better understanding of her character an d why it turns out to be so diffic ult for her to p ut these petitions for mercy into practice in her own life. For Isabella it is an effo rt to forgive. Isabella needs to learn t o let go: she is holding herself so tightly. She shares with Angelo a fierce pride and love of absolutes , grand-sweeping gestures , and high principles; which is preciselywhythey feed off one-another in their arguments. Having so much in I would to heave n l had yo ur Potency And you we re Isabel! Sho uld it th en be thu s? No, I would tell what ' twe re to be a judge And what a prisoner. II .ii.86-9 Stung in turn, Angelo reacts , and the scene escalates. At 25 �Perhaps Isabella's mild plea for mercy at the end of the play is a mark of wisdom her character has come to in the play. More experienced, less fantastically idealistic, she has learned to plead within the framework of human justice, and to consider the case as that of an individual, rather than as an abstract matter: a fault to which both Angelo and she are prone. It is a triumph for Isabella to have overcome the strong temptation to take revenge, and she is now rewarded with the "heavenly comforts of despair/ When it is least expected" that the Duke promised: Claudio returns, seemingly from the dead, and is joyfully reunited with his sister! Most bounteous sir, Look, if it please you, on this man condemned AB if my brother lived. I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds, Till he did look on me . Since it is so, Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. For Angelo, His act did not o' ertake his bad intent, And must be buried as an intent That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, Intents but merely thoughts. V.i.500-10 In contrast to her impassioned speeches to Angelo for mercy earlier, this plea sounds somewhat grudging, on conditional te ms rather than on principle. The argument has been "ari Angelo for Claudio, death for death," and Isabella recasts it in terms oflaw again: Claudio died for committing the act of adultery, but "for Angelo," (and there is a heavy pause here in the text), he has not, in fact, taken her maidenhood and stands not condemned under the law's sentence. For mercy, this sounds very much like justice. If itis mercy-pardoning what the law condemns- it must be because justice does not demand intent be dismissed as "merely thoughts" and excused. We might have hoped her petition here would have been in a more lofty vein - some grand redeeming gesture ofloving compassion. Instead, what Shakespeare gives us, is a much more human Isabella. We see what a great effort is required on her part to even bring her so far. In part, such great gestures which paint life in high principles, black or white, have been brought into critical scrutiny in Angelo's character. noble and princely, Barnadine seems to be little more than an animal. Their pairing is especially meaningful because throughout the play, Shakespeare has been raising a question in the comparison of murder and begetting bastards, children born out of wedlock. Angelo is the first to put these crimes side by side when he says (half to Isabella, half to himself): But despite the affirmation in the last scene of the play of the prevailing power oflove shown in mercy, this scene is characterized not by mercy, but by justice! Angelo himself begs nothing more than justice according to the law: "I crave death more willingly than mercy:/ 'Tis my deserving and I do entreat it" (V.i.537-8). He stands by his vow made earlier to Es cal us (although little thinking at the time that his sin would be Claudio's), "When I, that censure him, do so offend,/ Let mine own judgement pattern out my death,/ And nothing come in partial" (Il.ii.3I-3). But Angelo is not to be let off so lightly. He longs indeed for death to bury the shame and selfloathing that has become interminable to him . Instead, he is "punished" with life, the heavier burden for him to bear. The Duke measures Angelo not by justice according to the laws of the land, but with dramatic justice- which punishes and rewards, in exact and appropriate measure, good and evil in proportion to the character's actions. Angelo has not killed Claudio, he shall not die either. He has wronged Mariana's honor, he must restore than honor by taking her now in marriage. In so determining, the Duke also rewards Mariana with her due , honor for dishonor, the fulfillment of her wish for marriage in return for her years of sorrow at Angelo's rejection. The plays supporting characters also receive their desserts. To Escalus the Duke gives "thanks ... for thy much goodness ," and promises more to come , "that is more gratulate": that is , rewards for his faithful service (V.i. 592-3). The Provost, although first arraigned for his disobedience to the deputy is released for his loyalty to the Duke and also thanked. Claudio is given his due as well . "She ... that you wronged, lookyourestore." (V.i.598) . Everything seems to be tidily concluded: the Duke returns and reassumes his rightful place, and Angelo is exposed and forced to make amends. Yet there is one man at the end of the play who does not get what he deserves ... Barnadine- a prisoner of nine years, a murderer, perpetually drunken and surly, who was to share Claudio's fate. He is introduced to us first by the Provost: common with the temperament of Angelo, she too stands in danger of sharing his fate: self-loathing and self-control taken to such extremes that natural longings finally break through violently, destroying the last threads of moral conscience. To feel self-righteous is a pleasant satisfaction, but pride is no more a source ofhappiness than it is of power - Isabella must learn to forgive out of compassion or, nourished by her anger, she will shrivel away. That she does, in that moment of struggle, finally go down upon her knees on Angelo's behalf, is a singing triumph of the power of mercy and love in the play. Swayed one way and then the other, she is caught and held by the sudden similarity she sees between Angelo and her brother (whom she believes dead), and by what she sees in Mariana. When she joins Mariana on the ground to beg Angelo's pardon, it is not because of Mariana's offers to lend Isabella all her life to do her service, or even out oflove for Mariana, but because she begins to see -as if from far off- the unfathomable depths of Mariana's love for this man. Looking at Angelo again and wondering what must be in this man that he can be so loved, perhaps simply struck by the intensity of love a woman can feel for a man; drawn toward what she barely knows, Isabella make the choice to extend forgiveness to the man who forced her to search into her deepest fears and sense of shame. Haltingly, she begins: And he intends to punish lechery as severely as murder: with beheading. To Angelo the crimes are one and the same. Isabella's reply to this is "'Tis set down so in Heaven, but not in earth" (Il.iv.55) . In the eyes of God both sins are equally grievous, but on earth, lechery is given more leeway. Again and again it is said in the play, by Lucio, by the Provost, that Claudio is a man "more fit to do another such offense/ Than to die for this" (II.iii.I5-I6), while for Bamadine there is only the disgust his crimes and dissolute life have earned him. He is regarded by the Duke and Provost in Act IV as something dispensable, a substitute whose head might be used in place of Claudio's. The coupling ofBarnadine' s fate with Claudio's has the effect of making us ask: is adultery a crime? And , if so, is it as great a crime as murder? Only Angelo stands behind the state's old laws which demand death as penalty. The opinion among the play' s characters, however, seems to swing in favor of answering no. Dramatic justice demands the taking of Barnadine's life since he , unrepentantly, took another's. But Bernadine does not die. Instead, the Duke has Barnadine secreted awaywith Claudio, and offers free pardon to him when he is brought into the Duke's presence at the end of the play. How can it be just, by law or by deserving, to set this unrepentant murderer free? Why does the Duke release him? To answer why the Duke rescinds his policy of justice according to desert, releasing Barnadine, we must look back at his experiences as a friar , in disguise, and how they have changed him. In this role he faced and began to come to terms with his fears, his inadequacy, his moral incertitude, and to reach a new level of understanding of the church and tl;ie place ofGodin the world of men. Seeing the degeneracy of Vienna, the Duke has decided, before the play opens, that the old, stern laws, which during his rule he has let slide, must be reawakened. He thinks it will be perceived as tyrannous though, if he, who had given vice tacit permission by failing to punish it, were now to unleash strict Justice. Instead, he resolves to leave Angelo to reinstitute the laws in his place, since he "may, in the ambush of my name, strike home, I And yet my nature never in the fight I To do it slander" (I.iii .44-6 ). Is it a brillant political stroke? Or is it overly optimistic to think that the people will not turn against him when he returns? Perhaps they would be angry if he suddenly be- Call hither Barnadine and Claudio: Th' one has my pity; not a jot the other, Being a murderer, though he were my brother. IV.ii.60-2 Barnadine provides a foil to Claudio in prison: Claudio is 26 gan to enforce the laws, but will they be any happier when he returns and picks up where Angelo has left off? He merely delays the effect. It might, in fact, be worse if the people had been looking forward to his return to end the "oppression," only to find him in support of the new regime. My sense is that the Duke thinks thepeoplewillresentareinstatement of the law from him, having let them get so out ofline, but that they will be surprised, rather than angry, at Angelo because he has no such expectation to maintain. I also suspect that the Duke is not thinking of these ''strict" laws in the particular-that he never intended for Angelo to put anyone to death. Angelo is to him a trial case, a figure of his own creation, not a ruler in his own right. Is this shifting of duty admirable? ~ a ruler, perhaps his plan makes good pragmatic sense, but however astute a political maneuver it may be, how can we respect a man who loads the blame on another's shoulders and walks away? The fact that the Duke is telling his reasons for leaving the state in Angelo's hands to Friar Thomas, unashamedly, leads me to think he does not consider what he is doing and his reasons for it as such a bad thing. We the audience, however, have that friar's observatioon, "ltrested in your Grace I To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleased ... " which I tend to read as the voice of the play casting a doubtful shadow on the Duke's behavior at this point. It is difficult to justify. On the other hand, in a certain regard, it does seem like the perfect plan. The Duke is freed from a duty which is distasteful to him, and the job is put into the hands of Angeloa man of spotless reputation, free from the taint of hypocrisy or blame, who embraces the task ofreinstating the laws willingly. At the same time, this gives the Duke an opportunity to test Angelo himself and see "if power change purpose" is in him (l.iii.56-7). What is more, though conceived of the necessity ofreestablishingthe laws, the Duke is not entirely sure of his plan (after all, he has not ruled this way in fourteen years). Through a substitution he gets to observe, from the outside and at the ground level, what such a system would be like. With this end in mind the Duke disguises himself, choosing the habit of a friar. It is for this purpose he has come to ask Friar Thomas' assistance in Act I scene iii: . . .It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stol'n A man already made as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin Heaven's image In stamps that are forbid. (II.iv-47-51) ...to behold his sway I will, as 'twere a brother of your order, Visit both prince and people: therefore, I prithee, Supply me with the habit and instruct me How I may formally in person bear Like a true friar I.iii-46-51 Here it is apparent from his words that the Duke believes that as a friar he can "visit both prince and people," that that character is somehow outside the political sphere, neither ruler nor ruled. But as Lucio , more wisely than he knows, remarks, "Cucullus non facit monachum,": a cowl does not make a monk (V.i. 298), and the Duke finds the role to be more demanding than he had expected. His treatment of Pompey, whom he meets being led off to prison in chains, shows him still reacting more like the duke he isthan the friar he is pre- 27 �ii persuasion. Duke: But hearyouBarnadine: Not a word! If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward; for thence will not I today. tending to be: Duke: Fie, sirrah! a bawd, a wicked bawd! The evil that thou causest to be done , That is thy means to live. Do thou but think What 'tis to cram thy maw or cloth thy back From such a !lithy vice ... Canst thou believe thy living is a life, So stinkingly depending? Go mend, go mend. Pompey: Indeed, it does stink in some sort, sir; but yet, sir, I would proveDuke: Nay, if the Devil hath given thee proofs for sin, Thou wilt prove his. Take him to prison, officer. Correction and institution must both work Ere this rude beast will profit. IV.w-49-63 The Duke is absolutely stymied! Barnadine he finds "unfit to live or die" (IV.iii.64) , and he cannot bring himself to order his execution. Perhaps the Duke is a somewhat squeamish who prefers "the life removed" and theory to practice, but I think that there is something that he sees in Barnadine which makes him unable to carry out the sentence of death upon him. It is not that he suddenly perceives something noble in Barnadine's life to make it worth preserving, butthe opposite. Barnadine's life bespeaks intemperance and brutality. He has shown himself to be more of an animal than a man. He has wasted away, idle , in prison these nine years , a social outcast neither harming nor benefitting his fellow man. If Barnadine were to die now, what could be said about his life? Is man no more than this? The horror he feels in this reflection makes it impossible for the Duke to give the order to end this life and so conclude the story. Moreover, the same concern which he showed in this instance that Claudio be persuaded to be reconciled to death cries out against the beheading ofBarnadine in his drunken stupor. Yet, as a Duke, it is his reponsibility to see that the law and the punishment of criminals are carried out-and in this particular case, it is necessary if his own plot is to work. Helpless, in disgust, he gives the order for Barnadine's death , but confesses to the Provost that Barnadine is "a creature unprepared, unmeet for death; I And to transport him in the mind he is I Were damnable" (IV.iii .68-70). Here, and for the first time, the Duke shows some concern for the state of his own soul-and doubt in himself. From this predicament, the Duke is saved, not by his own cleverness, but by the hand of God. "Here in the prison," the Provost reveals, "there died this morning of a cruel fever I One Ragozine, a most notorious pirate, I Aman of Claudio's years, his beard and hair just of his color ... " "O, 'tis an accident that Heaven provides!" the Duke exclaims (IV.iii .70-8). God has provided a ram caught in the thicket to be offered in place of the son whom it would be a sin to kill. The experiences of the Duke in disguise are for him, life-changing. In diguise , the Duke has watched Angelo strip off his virtuous " seeming" ; in disguise he has been startled by Juliet and has fallen in love with Isabella. He has seen the inadequacy of "reason"to persuade Claudio, and its complete and utter failure before a man like Barnadine. He has heard his own character abused by Lucio (and had to struggle to hold his temper). He has been confronted by th e frustration of wanting to act, and the conflict between acting as a man of state and a man of God. His understanding of what it is to be a ruler, in the end, is expanded to include the religious. His images ofleadership now include both the sacred and the secular. To Isabella he says: III.ii.20-35 There he speaks as a ruler, as one who must think of the general welfare and public safety, not as a priest for whom the individual soul is of primary importance. Would a friar advocate "correction and instrcution" in prison for the well-being of Pompey's immortal soul? The Duke shows in his language he considers Pompey even less than a man with an immortal soul, for he is a "rude beast," incapable of responding to anything but physical punishment and reward. It is worth taking a moment to recall that this violent rebuke of Pompey for being a bawd comes almost immediently after the Duke arranges with Isabella Mariana's secret tryst with Angelo. Is it possible that some of the abuse the Duke hurls on Pompey comes out of a secret disgust with himself? He is not as unlike Pompey as he would like to think. The real moment of change, when the Duke begins to grasp both the inseparable connection between political and spiritual matters and at the same time his own incompleteness and inadequecy, is in his encounter with Barnadine in prison. Taken by surprise by Angelo's double-dealing treachery which will deny Claudio life through the forfeit that has been paid in a maid's dishonor, the Duke has to quickly come up with another plan to save Claudio's head. A substitute must be found for Claudio as there was for Isabella. And why not Barnadine? Barnadine, who has been proven guilty beyond doubt, and who openly confesses his crime without penitence; Barnadine who is sentenced to die the same day-might his head not be struck off early and be sent to Angelo in Claudio ' s stead? "Call your executioner," the Duke tells the Provost, "and off with Barnadine's head. I will give him present shrift and advise him for a better place" (IV.ii.221-23). But Barnadine proves to be more of a challenge: he will not consent to die! Dragged, half drunk from his prison cell, he refuses to listen to the Duke's prepared speeches and sanctimonious words: Dulce: Sir induced by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you. Barnadine: Friar, not I: I have been drinking hard all night, I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that's certain . Dulce: O sir, you must: and therefore I beseech you, Look forward on the journey you shall go. Barna dine: I swear I will not die today for any man 's Come hither, Isabel. 28 mercy as they hope for grace. Sexual offense, the play has impl1ed, is less grave than murder, but the Duke's pardoning ofBarnadine goes beyond even this distinction: all crime, even crime as grievous as murder, can be forgiven. Punishment now in the Duke's realm is to be instruction , not by blows, but by spiritual counsel. With Barnadine's judgment, the play is raised beyond the narrow margins of justice by the Duke's visions of commonality, and therefore sympathy, among all men. It is an inspiring moment, but unfortuneately, this is no way to rule a kingdom. Law has been and will be created to protect a stable society from the ravages of crime bred by greed and unchecked license. If one wishes to pardon all offenses , one would have to live secluded from the world or die its vic6m. There must be a balance in the state between justice and mercy, although this seems to be against the spirit of Matthew' s writing. Shakespeare recognizes and brings out the tension between political and private duty. How can you be arulerwho must judge and enforce lawagainstyourfellow man, and yet obey the spiritual injunction t o forgive as you yourself hope for forgiveness from God? In some ways Angelo is a better ruler because he knows this, and makes a careful distinction between what is public and what is private. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the example he gives Escalus of a jury passing judgment who "may in the sworn twelve have a thief or two I Guiltier than him they try." This is the basis of his conception oflawandits proper use: "What's open made to justice, /That justice seizes. What knows the laws I That thieves do pass on thieves?" (Il.i.23-5). Justice (which for Angelo means carrying out the penalty of the law) concerns itself only with what is made public; private causes or sympathies are not to be urged for they are irrelevant for this understanding of government. Although he claims concern for the good of the polity, discouraging crime by invoking harsh penalties, it seems to me that Angelo has essentially two motives in wanting to see justice served. The first is simply a love of rules and stricture which shows reverence for the law as a thing in itself: because a man has broken the law, he will p ay the penalty directed by that law (not from any consideration of what that penalty is, but solely because it is handed down by tradition); the second is a natural desire for reciprocity, to insure that he who injures aniother is hurt in equal measure. Angelo blends both of these motives to see justice wrought: a strong motive of vengeance which he cloaks (even withoutknowingithimself) in the objective , political garb of doing his duty as a deputy of the state. To a certain extent, Angelo' s attitude towards justice does make him a good ruler, since he respects the law and makes it his primary concern to see it carried out. He neither expects nor considers any exceptions on personal grounds; he understands his position and accepts the responsibility alone for his decisions, keeping the distinction between public and private. His view is pragmatic. I find his argument for the justice of Claudio's sentence according to the law strong and convincing. At the same time, how can we help but be aware of how Angelo (untried, ignorant and unforgiving of Your friar is now your prince. Advertising and holy to your business, Not changing heart with habit, I am still Attorney to your service. V.i-426-31 What he has gained from his experiences is a new respect for religious concerns and for the providence of God in the political realm. The roles of friar and ruler have become blurred. What the Duke has learned reflexing upon the example of Angelo is this: He who the sword of Heaven will bear Should he as holy as severe; Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue go; More nor less to others paying Than by self-offenses weighing. III.ii.265-70 Here the Duke is saying the ruler ought not to punish "more nor less" than what he finds within his conscience. This is diametrically opposed to Angelo, who casually accepted that, often, "the jury... I May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two I Guiltier than him they try" (Il.i.20-23). Affected by this reflexion, (perhaps having gained newwisdom into the common ality of man, or perhaps moved by Isabella's plea for Angelo) when Barnadine is led before him in the final scene, the Duke addresses him thus: Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul That apprehends no furth er than this world And squarest thy life accordingly. Thou ' rt condemned: But, for those earthly faults , I quit them all; And pray thee take this mercy to provide For better times to come. Friar, advise him ; I leave him to your hand. V.i .542-58 Ifhe is condemned, it is by Heaven , for the Duke will not presume to pass judgment upon Barnadine for his earthly crimes. Not to the correction of a prison cell where he once sent Pompey, but to the care of a friar the Duke now commits this man who had been proclaimed, "careless , reckless , and fearless of what's past, present or to come ; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal" (IV.ii.157-9 ). In light of this example of mercy, I believe the intention of the Duke's speech, "He who the sword of Heaven will bear ," is not that one ought to take care to be spotless in virtue, but, (coupled with the telling example of Angelo's fall) that no man can hope to attain such freedom from imperfections, and that we are bound accordingly to use the utmost mercy. The title phrase " Measure for Measure," (which appears in the Duke's speech to Isabella in Act V, inciting her to take revenge on Angelo as he has killed her brother ) comes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew-and the meaning there is not to justifythe Mosaic law, " An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth ." Quite the opposite: Jesus in Matthew's account says to the crowds, "If you want to avoid judgment, stop passing judgment. Your measure will be used to measure you" (Matthew r1-2) 2 • To God is left the power to judge and to condemn; men must use 29 �his own humanity) is setting himselfup for a fall? Against Angelo's uncompromising reliance on the law stand Isabella and Escalus, who try to persuade Angelo to mercy by appealing to conscience. They ask him to regard the situation as if he stood under the judgment of Heaven rather than think of himself as the dispenser of justice on earth. In contrast to the earthly justice Angelo represents , Isabella and Escalus urge a kind of divine justice which differs in two respects: r) the judge himself is judged, " and wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote from thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?" (MatthewT4)both of which urge the ruler to think of himself first as a man and take care for his own soul; 2) desire is equivalent to crime in Heaven just as surely as if you had committed the act: "Ye have heard it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: Butl sayuntoyou, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery alreadywith her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-8). Both Escalus and Isabella rely upon these two premises of divine justice in their arguements. When Isabella asks Angelo, in essense , to love the sinner and hate the sin, Angelo replies scoffingly: unrelated to Claudio's sentencing, although it might make for a powerful emotional appeal. But Angelo has , in fact, not committed the crime for which Claudio is arraigned, as Ecalus knows, and so he makes a "you would" argument, which moves rhetorically from desire to action: it is only a matter of inauspici ous circumstance which keeps desirer from becoming fact in Angelo's case. Angelo's response is to separate desire and action , "'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, I Another thing to fall. .. " (Il.i.18-9) , and to emphasize the impartiality of the law and his willingness to give up his own life under the same charge. Two wrongs do not make a right. The appeal of Escalus' to " natural inclination," desire , makes me wonder what it is we pass judgment up on? Fact, answers Angelo, deed, violation of the law. "Thoughts are no subjects," Isabella says at the end of the play, but "Go to your bosom and knock there" in Act IL T his seems to be a crucial distinction between earthly and divine justice. On earth, how can we know punishment on the basis of motive alone? We have access only to deeds, to public , not private matters. On earth, the person standing trial must be considered separately, apart from any other at that moment in timesomeone else's crime is irrevelant (ifwe agree that two wrongs do not make aright). We may feel sympathetically, atthe same time, that crime should not be punished if many others or the judge himself is guilty of the same crime. But, before Heaven each man stands trial himself, and there can be no pointing fingers to your neighbors ' sin as greater than your own . The crimes of my fellow man are not my concern, only my conscience before God. And we are not judged only for our deeds, but for our desires as well. How can the ruler on earth perform his duty under the weight of the perpetual duty to Heaven? Earthly justice requires that we consider each crime as a separate case, and that we punish on the basis ofaction ratherthan desire , but to say this is to remove oneself from the juristiction of Heaven: the ruler must, temporarily at least, think of himself as not under the judgment of God. The arguments for justice and mercy in the play reveal a tension between the idea of earthly and divine justice and and call into question the possibility of being both a good ruler and a man. What I do not understand is how Angelo can be so right, and at the same time so wrong. Examinded piece by piecelfindmyselfwholeheartedlyin agreementwith the practices and principles of what I have called earthly justice, but he is under assault throughout the play from Escalus, from Isabella, and from the Duke, and these people are vindicated (morally) while Angelo descends lower and lower into hypocrisy and corruption. It is true that ifwe expect our rulers to be free from all taint, and even impulse, then no one can live up to demands made on the ruler in the Duke's speech, "He who the sword of Heaven will bear ... " (and this means a radical statement against all forms of government, unless on e can be conceived of which is not disciplinary), but why should the ruler have to try to live up to this impossible standard? Is Angelo's position wrong because he becomes unscrupulous? By his own understanding, no, since two wrongs do not make a right-condemn me then to if I so offend, the law stands by Condemn the fault and not the actor of it? Why, every fault's condemned ere it be done. Mine were the very cipher of a function, To fine the fault s whose fine stands in record, And let go by the actor. II.ii.50-4 Which is true ; such a protest leaves no room for earthly justice. Just as Isabella demands of Angelo "Go to your bosom: Knock there and ask your heart what it doth know I That's like my brother' s fault. " Escalus' argument is: Let but your Honor know ... Had time cohered with place or place with wishing, Or that the resolute acting of your blood Could have attained the effect of your purpose, Whether you had not sometime in your life Erred in this point. Il.i.9-16 But consider carefully the foundation of Escalus' argument: There is a logical fallacy called "Pointing to Another Wrong," a means of confusing the issue athand byintoducing another. In Fallacy-The Counterfeit of Argument 3: Though many give lip service to the adage "Two wrong do not make a right," few are not tempted to mitigate blame for wrongs on one side by citing those on the other. Justice seems to demand that one who complains of wrongdoing should himself have "clean hands ." Powerful charges are difficult to answer, by showing that the accuser himself is guilty of misconduct. This device is an effective rejoinder in controversy since it both deflects attention from the original grievance and creates sympathy for the accused party... Yet even when the countercharges are deserved, all that is demonstrated is that neither side is right when both are wrong. 3 Whether or not Angelo has ever felt the desire is irrelevant. Even if Angelo had committed adultery that fact is logically 30 When nights are longest there: I'll take my leave And leave you to the hearing of the cause, Hoping you'll find good cause to whip them all. II.i.136-9 itself, not subject to my example. The danger of that thought surfaces in Claudio's shaky morality. His definition of crime depends upon the judge, and he reasons that an action can not be considered a crime if teh judge is guilty of the same. Angelo , for all his strong arguments, does not stand by the~, because he did not turn himself in as he ought to have done if he really did believe in the absolute objectivity of the law as he says he does. Would anyone have turned himself in? Is the problem not "can anyone be of sin to judge ," but, "can we expect anyone to show such honesty?" There are judges who are not guilty ofbreaking the law, but this is considering crime to be deed rather than inclination. The powerful thing about inclination that I cannot quite let go of is that it is the basis for seeing commonality of men. There is something so profound and beautiful to me in the Duke being able to look at Barnadine and see something of himself. The moral we draw is not, we are all sinners, therefore I am wretched and evil, but, here is something to pity and to love, loving your neighbor as yourself. And indeed, at the end of the play Angelo , the judge, himself comes under the sentence of the law and is judged. Angelo stands condemned for two different things: for adulterywhich is a matter for the law, andforthe death of Claudio, which is not since Angelo is in this case entirely justified according to the law and by the power invested in him by the Duke. It is the death of Claudio which Isabella pardons him for, though , and the remainder of her plea for "mercy" for Angelo focuses on the fact that Angelo really did not committ adultery with her. These two separate charges become confused in the end, because the argument is that Angelo is guilty of the one (Claudio' s death) only because he is guilty of the other (adultery). Not only does this reason rely on the same "two wrongs" fallacy, but the characters who prosecute Angelo for his misdeeds have wanted to argue throughout that play that adultery is not a crime. Actually they are passing judgment on Angelo for being a hypocrite. What is Angelo's crime? To me it is not Claudio' s death (real or supposed) which is legally justified, not even desiring Isabella or making love to Mariana since she is a willing and consenting party, but that moment when he realizes, "Who will believe thee, Isabel..."; that he can use his position to force her, that acceptance of hypocrisy, duplicity in choosing from then on to hide the truth behind until he is utterly confuted by the Duke's revealing himself. But whether we side with the justice of Angelo or of the Duke, there are elements in Angelo' s character which make him, even at his best, a poor ruler of men. We see this in act II, scene i, when the bumbling constable Elbow and his two prisoners appear before Escalus and Angelo. Although Angelo strives to maintain his "gravity," that cool, collected mask of impassivity, Elbow's malapropisms , Pompey's coarse, high-handed manner (conducting his own trial), and the general confusion and ineffectuality of the whole proceedings drive him to the breaking point of utter frustration where he suddenly explodes: Escalus remains and spends his time listening, trying to sort out the complaint; he tries to reaon with Pompey and reawaken his conscience, indulging in a little humor on the side. Escalus (whose name contains the word "scale") considers each case separately and tailors his punishment accordingly. Unfortunately, the play casts doubt on the effectiveness of Escalus' methods (Pompey leaves unrepentant and fixed in his ways) , but Escalus' example is chiefly imp ortant here for the contrast it provides to Angelo's pent-up fury, pride and impatience. Because Pompey is oflow birth , Angel o sees him (not unlike the Duke in Act III ) as incapable of instruction: punishment alone will keep him in line (nothing better can be expexted of such a creature), and his punishment will be whipping. Angelo judges Pompey unworthy of death; indeed, how can one punish with severity a man in whom vice is regarded as simply nature? Angelo's class prejudice and impatience expose the weakness of his character and of his rule. Control, for Angelo, is primary. He wants people and events to conform rather than stopping carefully to look and listen to the way other people perceive the situation. Behind this lies a certain self-importance and lack of consideration. Although Escalus is able to see the humor in the misguided ramblings of Elbow, Angelo is frustrated to the point of rage by the confusion and incompetence which surrounds him. But in no small part, frustration at incompetence is also a feeling of righteous self-satisfaction . It contains a judgement that the situation is important, and that it is someone else mistake which is causing the "trouble," (another value judgment about outcome): I know better, but it's his fault that what I think is right is not happening. The situation is important to Angelo because it is a case for the law to be enforced, but the details of the case (precisely what Pompey emphasizes) he finds interminable. Angelo has no patience with "trivialities": everything must be big and bold, principle against principle, ofheroic, tragic stature- smallness and ambiguities are repulsive, life is to be lived greatly with drama and power. The message Angelo communicates by his abrupt departure is that trivialities are a waste of his time (my time is important) , and that his work here thwarted, now to be sought elsewhere, is pressing and significant (I am important). Angelo's outburst is not only a a response to the imbe cility he sees around him, but to Pompey's repeated attempts to take charge of his own trial. In this situation control is tenuous, and the authority of the law and the statesman is mocked, Angelo is unable to tolerate such high-handedness from an underling. A good ruler, however, cannot have such contempt for his subjects, nor hope to avoid the mundane business of government. The state is a collection of people , after all, and any ruler who forgets this and looks on justice as something abstract is either tyrannical or ineffectual. The Duke, I believe, succeeds, where Angelo fails . The dramatic justice which the s This will last out a night in Russia 31 �Duke delivers at the end of the play shows him to be individualistic where Angelo is absolute, forgiving where Angelo is proud and untouchable. Our concern should be, though, whether the Duke shows mercy to a fault. What has happened since the beginning of the play, when the Duke decided greater strictness ought to be enforced? Must law be upheld? So much seems to depend on how disordered the city has become. The evidence we have of the lawlessness ofVienna comes almost entirely for the Duke's own report, and the question is whether his perspective is an accurate reflection of the dissolution of state. Then, too, the only crime which Angelo and the Duke are concerned with is sexual promiscuity. Why should licentiousness be a political concern? Possibly it encourages instability and helps to nourish other small petty crimes such as gambling, stealing, or drinking which fill the brothel-taverns. Possibly there is a very real public health concern about the proliferation of venereal disease among the populace-our only other hint as to the condition of the city, in fact, is this: a comic scene in which Lucio and his friends pun on venereal disease and its spread. Has the duke changed his methods of governing, or has seeing the example of Angelo caused him to reevaluate the need for strict laws? The change we saw in his character wrought by his experiences as a friai· is the inclusion of a religious or spiritual concern in politics. This is most apparent in contrasting his treatment of Pompey, and later, Barnadinebut then we ask has the Duke' s policy changed, or are the causes of Pompey and Barnadine different in kind? The one a clever, long-time bawd, the other a brutish and violent single offender. If Pompey had appeared in the final scene (though he and other low-life of the play are, perhaps conspicuously, absent), would the Duke have found it in his heart to offer pardon to this repeat offender? Will the Duke, put-off by Angelo's deadly justice, turn to the other extreme and set all free? When we look at the judgements the Duke passes at the end we see the difference between Angelo and Duke's conception of the purpose of justice. Angelo is not a statesman pure and simple; he wants to purge the state, not just keep it in reasonable functional order. Angelo's conception of justice is carrying out the penalties incurred by the violations of the law-his system of justice is based on expectations and absolute measures which leave no room for mercy except as weakness on the part of the judge in being susceptible to emotional appeal. Mercy is foreign to Angelo's concept of statesmanship; pity he understands only as the extirpation of criminals from society which both removes the offender and forestalls, by the severity of the example, further vice: to punish the crime? His betterment by instruction? Claudio is to die, not learn from his error. Does it better his soul in heaven to have his crimes punished on earth? Or is "right," not better, but justly served?-a sentence which does not benefit but balances the account . The purpose of justice in Angelo's eyes is to remove the offender from society and to deter others by making harsh example, but, underneath , it is fulfilling a desire to see evil deeds punished. 4 The Dukes' purpose in passing judgement is the social good, the effect it will have on the society-so that punishment is not an end in itself but a means to some further end which protects the polity. This is appropriate because justice is a concept of community. The "dramatic justice" he serves in the end accomplishes this. Angelo's justice is rooted in a sense of moral outrage which demands that a man who has hurt another is to be hurt himself in equal measure. He would fit the punishment to the offender so that he is punished by the excess of his own crime. But the desire to see offense punished equally could be accomplished by demanding equal payment, such as an eye for an eye. Or, in a milder form, the trespass might be accorded some unspecified punishment which is only concerned with makingthe criminal suffer in someway forthe suffering he has caused. Now, all of these are different from the dramatic justice the Duke shows in the end because the purpose of dramatic justice is to compel the offender to make amends, not to inflict more injury to make it "right" . This is a radically different idea of the purpose of justice, and one which focuses more on the ramifications of the punishment than on the punishment as an end in itself. Dramatic justice does not resolve the tension between earthly and divine justice: it is still a kind of judging, and as such belongs to the realm of earthly justice, but holding a people to make retribution without inflicting further penalty is the closest a system of government which still protects its citizens can come to acting a according to the idea of divine justice. It is therefore a kind of compromise between the extremes Angelo and Isabella argue. In the dramatic justice the Duke dispenses in the final scene of the play he manages to hold people accountable for their misdeeds, but not to punish them beyond making amends-the sentence of death Angelo , Claudio, and even Lucio, stand under is commuted to marriage: the tragedy becomes a comedy (another kind of substitution !) . In this final scene Lucio stands out because he is the on e the Duke claims he cannot find it in his heart to forgive. In Barnadine the duke saw something of himself, and pardons him as he hopes to be pardoned in turn, but here he says, "I find an apt remission in myself;/ And yet here's one in place I cannot pardon ... " (V.i.561-2) . Lucio's slanderous, snide witticisms have gotten under his skin, and he proposes to have him whipped and then hanged, against which Lucio (for once deprived of his supercilious, cocky air ) cries out piteously. He is, of course, forgiven his slanders (as I suspect the Duke intends all along), and let off with only the injunction that he must marry the woman he got with child, (another case of marriage being used I show it most of all when I show justice; For then I pity those I do not know , Which a dismissed offense would after gall; And do him right that, answering one foul wrong, lives not to act another. II.ii.I27-3I But this second argument which has slipped in here is curious. " Do him right"? How is it "doing" the criminal "right" 32 to restore honor and make amends), and Lucio, one of the most comic characters in this dark tale is taken awayprotestingthat beingmarried to a whore " is pressing to death , whipping, and hanging! " (V.i .586-7). The reversal further underscores the tragicomic nature of the playwhen Lucio can complain that marriage is like death to him! We have seen that the play raises the question of acting with regard to the judgment of heaven or according to the laws on earth , and that this places the ruler in the problematic position ofbeing both the one judging and the one being judged. It would be wrong to say that the tension between political and private duty is resolved by the end of the play, but the Duke does manage, in a way, to combine roles ofboth a ruler and a man. In the final scene we see him dispense well-measured justice-the capable ruler-and we are made aware of him at the same time as a single , private man by his offer of marriage to Isabella. Previously he had considered himself past marriage, preferring to study rather that " to haunt assemblies/ Where youth and cost a witless bravery keeps" (I.iii.ro-1) ; well-defended, as he thinks, from "the dribbling dart oflove" that cannot "pierce a complete bosom" (I.iii.2-3 ). But his experiences as a friar have changed him , not only in bringing him close to Isabella, a woman he deeply admires, but in forcing him to see things larger than himself and face situations where his powers were inadequate to the task. Perhaps one of the motivations behind his decision to leave in the beginning of the play was to test Angela as a successor. If so, that has been subsumed by his decision to marry. And Isabella? Is she also allotted justice in the end? The ambiguous end of the play, which leaves her no lines to accept or decline the Duke' s proposal, has often been interpreted darkly as a final miscarriage of justice. Whether Isabella is thwarted in her religious aims , or suppressed by a dominant male society, she stands in the fading light as a tribute to the good that can be corrupted by society. Underneath, however , this is a fundamentally self-righteous feeling, and such self-righteousness has been criticized throughout the play in the person of Angelo. It is my belief that the end of the play is comic, as its form implies. The end of Measure for Measure contains typically comic elements: the apportionment of dramatic justice , marriage between the principle characters, and the loose ends tied together in a last epiloguelike speech given by the Duke in the style of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Leontes at the end of The Winter's Tale, or the KinginAll' s Well That Ends Well-where the confusion which has reigned has finally been sorted out and as Pucksays, "JackshallhaveJill;/Noughtshallgoill" (Midsummer III.ii.62-3) (although we may doubt the passions of the characters in Measure for Measure can be so tidily concluded without a magic love potion). Why should we look for comedy at the end of this often grim play? Because the genre of tragicomedy seems to be a statement about life: life is not all high tragedy and extremes oflove or death, but, on the whole, a joyful and often amusing thing. One of the messages of the play is superiority of temperance, acceptance of human failing, and love, over high-principled idealism was which thrives on abstractions and is fueled by righteous pride. To read the final scene of the play as dark in tone is to ignore all that has come before. The real argument for a happy ending lies in Isabella herself. It is tempting to read her as a kind of martyr to the cause (be it religion or feminism, as I have seen it performed), but look closely at her character and one begins to find inconsistencies, pride and petty jealousies, fears and temptations , which make her fallible and real. She stands so close to Angelo, and she must be won slowly, by degrees , to the temperance and understanding the Duke embodies and represents. The play details not only the secularization of her character, but also the transformation she goes through in order to descend from her tragic heights to a comic, life-embracing, heroine who does not always take herself seriously and is able to laugh Isabella, I believe, really does not belong in the convent, where she starts out. Her passion and demand for stricter rules are naively exaggerated. It is tempting to picture her as a young novice walking about the gardens, but it is worth remembering that Claudio has sent Lucio off with the words , " This day my sister should the cloister enter" (I.n.I82). She is taken from the convent before she has a chance to experience its life; her descriptions of its transcendent joys are really the fanciful work of imagination . There is something eerie in the ardent, otherworldliness of her picture of " preserved souls ... fasting maids whose minds are dedicate/To nothing temporal" (II.ii.188-90). She longs for exalted heights rather than seeking, realistically, a quietlife of prayer and menial duties. I see Isabella, in her scenes with Angelo, slowly driven back into personal involvement with the world, a change which allows for her transition between the impervious detachment of "O just but severe law,/ I had a brother, then " and "Die, Perish!" with all its fiery passion and wounded anguish. Her encounter with Angelo in the play brings sharply into focus the tension between the two sides of her personality. On the one hand, she is a person of quick wit and great intelligence, on the other a woman who is expected to be both cold, submissive, alluring, and desirable at the same time. We see this double standard in Claudio's picture of his sister: ... in her youth There is a prone speechl ess dialect Such as move men; besides, she hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse. J.ii.I87-90 This same dual nature which women are expected to have in society is reflected by the rules of the convent: When you have vowed, you must mot speak with men But in the presence of the prioress. Then if you speak, you must not show your face; Or, if you show your face , you must not speak. J.iv.IO-I4 There it is again: show our face (loosely, be admired, be looked at as a woman) or speak (use reason and discourse) , but you cannot do both. And it is Angelo in that emotionally 33 �wife, and let every woman have her own husband .. .it is better to marry than to burn" (Corinthians r2-9). The disorder of the state at the beginning was in the form of sexual promiscuity; the play ends with a series of marriages which "legalize" sexual desire. Marriage is society's recognition oflawful or unlawful intercourse and determines a woman's honor or dishonor. It is a way ofbringing passions potentially destructive to society under control and imposing the stability of family. In the midst of this play about sexual crimes and "after the fact" marriages the Duke and Isabella might be exceptional: a couple married for the sake ofromantic love. But the proposal is ambiguous, Isabella's reaction impossible to determine , and the union in many ways is so un expected that it is less likely that they represent an exception than that their marriage takes its color from the many examples which surround it. Isabella's experiences have made her more aware of her sex; possibly they have awakened desires in her which she had forbidden. Whether or not her marriage with the Duke is truly for love , it allows her a socially acceptable role in the world as a wife. The Duke is a more curious example-his falling in love, or discovering passions in himself, is surprising, not only to him (having thought himself immune) but to us as audience who might otherwise be tempted to see him as a manifestation of the author or divine presence, determining the action of the play but being removed from it himself. His proposal to Isabella (and his reaction to Lucio's jibes) bring him back into the play as a real character with quite human tendencies to love and anger. One might have thought, still, that like Paul he would have encouraged others to marry while remaining apart himself. But it is interesting to find this ruler, whom I am tempted in so many other ways to call almost ideal, knows and accepts himself as frail-as human-as his fellow men and women. To deny that would have made him another Angelo, who fell trying to climb too high. Who is there to bestow dramatic justice on the judge himself? What dramatic justice is there for the Duke in the end? Somehow, he distributes dramatic justice on himself in his new self-knowledge. Having learned by being confronted with his weaknesses and passions, he knows something more of what is appropriate to him as a ruler and as a man. Is there a moral to this story and its struggle between the principles of mercy and justice? If so I think it must be the truth the Duke recognizes at the end of the play, that we are all flawed, that a man should not take pride in virtue or set himself apart, and that should teach us not to judge harshly. No one can obey the law truly. Although this sounds more like the divine than earthly law, perhaps the implication is that there is not such a great difference between them as we are used to imagining. We have an idea of sin which somehow we recognize all men are prone to an frequently slip into. The law is supposed to be something most people can follow, and only the willful wrong-doer indulges'himself with predictable consequences. But in this play even the most virtuous have discovered their frailty. Between the example of Angelo (the "angel" who fell), of the futility of trying to be "holy and severe " enough to wield the sword of Heaven, and Escalus' ar- oveiwhelming scene of his abominable proposition who says, "I do arrest you words. Be that you are,/That is , a woman" (II.iv. I47-8). Having chosen the convent, Isabella-consciously or not-denied her sex, but she is dragged by her brother's plight back into the world of men (where, as we have seen, she is desired by Angelo less for her mind than for her beauty). It may be that Isabella is not entirely unaffected by Angelo herself. So often one feels in productions that Angelo onlypercipitates revulsion in her, but could the encounter between them not be an awakening (however surprising and unwelcome) of the feelings she has denied, as it is on Angelo's side? Could the extremityofherreaction to his proposal, when she finally understands it, be not so much fear of him as fear of herself? Is it possible for a young woman of Isabella's vibrancy to be touched for the first time by a man and not physically oveiwhelmed by the experience? Threatened by Angelo, betrayed as she feels herself by her brother (the only man she could turn to in her distress) , s4e turns naturally to the Duke in his friar's habit and clings to him as someone "safe" and sympathetic to her distress. It is easier to see that he is struck by her than to gauge her reaction to him, but the two of them end up putting their heads together and working as a team. Although it is true that in the second half of the play Isabella has almost no lines until the final scene in which she accuses Angelo, it seems to me that she is working in close conjunction with the Duke, as much a part of the planning as he is. The scene in Act III in which the Duke first approaches her with the idea of Mariana's taking her place, the details ofMarianaandAngelo's past and the trick they will play on him appeal to her immensely and she becomes wrapped up in the proposal: Isabella and the Duke think alike; they share a love of puzzles and tricks. Simple consideration for the balance of the drama mightlead us to draw this conclusion: watching their gradual coming together and the awkwardness of the friar's guise which both allows them to be together and keeps them apart drives, I think, the second half of the play, which otherwise is apt to flounder in production under the weight of pure plot devices. What must herreaction be when, in that final scene, he stands revealed, the friar's hood torn away?! The Duke's two proposals of marriage have drawn criticism as being informal and public rather than romantically private, but I now think it is possible that his manner can be attributed to their closeness and the "naturalness" of the arrangement. Having undergone throughout the play this process of secularization, discovering in her energy and her love of plans perhaps a calling to a life of practical virtue, how can she return to the convent of her exalted but sterile fantasy? Is marriage for Isabella dramatic justice? Is it an appropriate reward for her virtuous words and deeds, and triumph over temptation? The other marriages seem just, but Isabella needs no such justice from marriage. For Isabella, marriage is not so much dramatically fitting, or just, as it is necessary if she is to end up where she belongs, among her own kind. Marriage is not, however, a "reward," in this playnor is it the romantic fulfillment oflove. The spirit of Paul dominates: "to avoid fornication, let every man have his own 34 Footnotes gument that only lack of opportune circumstances keeps us from sin, there emerges from the play a warning against righteousness and self-justification , against thinking we stand on better ground than our neighbor since we have not committed the same crimes. The play reveals Angelo's practice of government insufficient and, in fact, detrimental. We have called Angelo ' s justice "pragmatic," butitis the Duke's policies, his concern for the individual and willingness to forgive (his focus being not punishment as an end in itselfbut a question of how best to turn social disorder into social benefit), which are truly pragmatic. Human beings cannot be confined by narrow precision and the use offear. I. Line numbers are taken from the Folger Edition. Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, ed. Louis B. Wright, Simon & Schuster, New York, I975· 2. Translations from the King James Version of the Bible 3. W. Ward Fearn side and William P. Holther, Fallacy-The Counterfeit Argument, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersy, 1959, p. 126. 4. Is it possible that this desire in us to see wickedness punished and good rewarded also stems from self-righteous pride? -,· 35 �The King of Israel * Samuel Davidoff And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die. (Exodus 20: 19)' and to save Israel from the hand of the Philistine. Regardless of God or Samuel's feelings about the correctness of Israel having a king, the establishment of a monarchy has certain necessary effects on the people. In particular the choosing of king must in some way alter the nation of Israel's relationship with God. Until now they have been led more or less by God through the medium of His prophets, but now they are to be led by a king. He is to be invested with the power ofleadership; a power that formerly was the domain of God. The new king will, in a way, fulfill an almost religious role for the people. The new king is not merely replacing an old leader but is in some sense replacing God. What kind of man does God pick? All we are told about Saul is that he was " a choice young man" and "from the head and shoulders upward he was higher then any of the people."(9:2) The description seems to be merely one of physical beauty. We are told nothing about Saul's soul or his heart. But God does not ignore these things . Immediately after he has Saul anointed we have the scene quoted above. The Bible says that the spirit of the Lord descended on Saul and he prophesied with the result that he becomes a new man. Prophesy here does not seem to refer to the type of communication with God that we usually associate with that word, such as the communication that Samuel has with God. We are not told that God "says" anything to Saul. Instead what we know is that Saul is among a troop of prophets, but not prophets like Samuel; there is something Bacchanalian about these prophets with their psaltery, and pipe and harp. When Saul prophesies he does not speak the word of God, instead he receives a new heart and becomes another man . What Saul exper iences seems to be a sort of ecstasy. Ifonly for a moment he sees something of the divine, he is touched by God, and he is forever changed. I think that what this contact with God instills in Saul's heart at that moment is a longing for further contact with the divine, a love of God or perhaps even a lust for God. And so the first king of Israel is picked, perhaps, merely for physical appearance, but he is then bound to God through an ecstatic vision . Saul's action as the king of the nation oflsrael reflect this unusual process of appointment that he has undergone. What we see in Saul's actions, and particularly in his failures, as the king oflsrael is almost directly a result of how he is bound to God. There are two peculiarities about the relationship that God establishes with Saul. First that Saul is bound by some sort of transcendent experience as opposed to a verbal communication or prophecy of the kind that Samuel and the other The nation oflsrael' s peculiar predicament is that they are a divine nation. They are chosen by God but they are nevertheless human. They are not of the same make as their leader, and their communication with this leader, with God, must always be mediated. Startingwith Moses the medium that God chooses is prophecy. The major prophets in each generation are people who have direct communication with God, such as Moses, who spoke to God "face to face" or Samuel, whom the Lord speaks to "in his ear." Even in the case of certain lesser prophets, prophets who merely see God in dreams or visions, there is a decidedlyverbal aspect to their interaction with God. God speaks to His people through His prophets. It is through the prophets that the people know the commandments of God, the advice of God in pru:ticular situations, and, in some cases, the future intentions of God. In the book of Samuell it is primarilythe prophet Samuel who conveys the people's requests to God and who reports God's responses. Later, when a king is appointed, it is Samuel who, under God's guidance, selects him and Samuel who tells King Saul the wishes of God. But while Samuel, and perhaps some of the lesser prophets of the time, may be the only voices of God, the only speakers of God's word, it is not the case that other people do not experience God. Contact with God, however brief, plays a crucial role in the lives of several other figures in the story of the origins of monarchy in Israel. " ... And it shall come to pass, when thou art come thither to the city, that thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy; And the spirit of the Lord will come upon thee and thou shalt prophesy with them and shalt be turned into another man ... And it was, that when he had turned his back to go from Samuel, God gave him another heart: and all those signs came to pass that day. And when they came thither to the hill, behold, a company of prophets met him; and the spirit of God came upon him, and he prophesied among them. And it came to pass, when all that knew him before time saw that, behold, he prophesied among the prophets, then the people said to one another, What is this that is come unto the son Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?" (Samuel I 10:5-6, 9-11)";,, The scene occurs immediately after the anointing of Saul, the first king of Israel. Samuel's feelings and God's words about the appointing of a king are ambivalent and unenthusiastic. The people have clamored for a king and God has seen it as an act of rebellion. Why should they have a human king when they have the Lord? But God has granted their request and has sent them a king to be" captain over His inheritance" 36 prophets receive. Second that he is .instilled with a longing for God as opposed to being granted an ongoing relationship with God. He is granted a yearning for God not a communion with God. With one exception, which I will discuss later, Saul has no other direct experience with God. All his other communication takes place through prophets and priests. Both aspects of Saul's experience with God make themselves most apparent in Saul's failures as king. Saul is not a bad kingin consideration of military or political leadership goes. He neither loses any wars nor is there any sense that the people are unusually dissatisfied with him at any point. Saul fails with respect to his position relative to God. He may serve well as king but not as the king of God's people. Saul is disobedient to God and it is this that causes his kingdom to be taken from him. The first instance of disobedience occurs in the second year of Saul's reign right before a battle with the Philistines. Saul is waiting for Samuel to arrive so that they can make a sacrifice before the battle. Samuel does not arrive and so Saul makes the offering without him. Then Samuel arrives: managing of a particular battle. What sort of picture are we to form-of Saul? Does it make sense that a man would be on the one hand so eager to please God and yet on the other hand be found guilty of flagrant violation of the divine command? I think that both of Saul's failures stem from the particular attitude Saul, as a result of his ecstatic experience, has towards God because of his ecstatic experience. k:, said above, Saul's experience of God has two aspects: first, its transience which leaves him with a sense of unfulfilled longing and second, the visceral and emotional aspect of it as opposed to the rational and communicative prophecies of Samuel. Saul's position is an odd one. k:, a young man he has an extremely powerful experience with God and is then left alone. He is left, though, with some idea about the nature of his responsibility to God; after all, he is made king of God's nation. Due to the particular nature of his divine experience, Saul is left with a peculiar sort of motivation. He wants a repetition of the rapture he experienced previously. He does not desire to fulfill the will of God, but merely to experience or 'see' God again. It is this type oflonging for God that makes Saul crave the type of assurance he does before he goes into battle. He does not sacrifice so much to please God, but to please himself through an attempt to bring God closer to him. What he fails to realize is the importance of following God's commandments. The nature of his experience with God has caused him to see this as unessential to being close to God. This causes his disobedience in the war with Amalek. He spares the animals so that he can sacrifice them. This particular disobedience is paradigmatic of his misunderstanding of his relationship with God and Samuel says as much in his rebuke: "Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat oframs."(15:22). In fact, this is exactly Saul's misunderstanding; he has a longing for the presence of God, but not for the word of God. Let us leave Saul for now and look at another example of a man who has contact with God, Saul's son, Jonathan. The first time we meet Jonathan is during the same war with the Philistines in which Saul first disobeys God. Saul and his army are reluctant to attack and are waiting in Gibeah near the Philistine garrison. Unbeknownst to Saul, or the rest of the a my, Jonathan takes his armourbearer and they go up to the camp of the Philistines. "And Samuel said, What hast thou done? And Saul said, Because I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that thou earnest not within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered themselves together at Michmash; Therefore said I, The Philistines will come down now upon me to Gilgal, and I have not made supplication unto the Lord: I forced myself therefore and offered a burnt offering. And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the Lord thy God." (I3:n-I3) Samuel then tells him that his kingdom shall not continue. The second, more prominent failing of Saul is also an act of disobedience. In this case he has been instructed by God to utterly destroy the nation of Amalek. Instead, Saul spares the king and the livestock. Samuel rebukes Saul and tells him that "Because thou has rejected the word of the Lord he has rejected thee from being king ... And Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death ... and the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel." (15:23,35) The second example of Saul's disobedience seems to be incongruous with the first . In the war against Amalek Saul fails to completely follow God's instruction concerning the battle. However, in the first war Saul disobeys God because it seems he is to eager to please God before he goes into battle. Saul thinks he is giving God some token of his faith. This .desire is characteristic of Saul. We are told several times of his building altars before battles and his consulting priests. Most notable is his attempt before his final battle to contact the dead Samuel through a sorcerer. "And Jonathan said to the young man that bare his armour, Come, and let us go over unto the garrison of these uncircumcised: it may be that the Lord will work for us: for there is no restraint to the Lord to save by many or by few." (I4:6) "And Samuel said to Saul , Why has thou disquieted me to bring me up? And Saul answered, I am sore distressed; for the Philistines make war against me, and God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams : therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do?" (28:I5 ) Jonathan then proposes a test. They will call up to the Philistines and if they are told to come up to the camp they will know the Lord is with them. The Philistines respond appropriately and Jonathan and his armour bearer, alone, destroy their camp. Right awaywe see that Jonathan has a unique faith in God He believes that God can bring destruction to the army of the Philistines even with only two men. He believes also that God This striking dependence on God's approval of his battle plans seems odd when compared with Saul's supreme act of disobedience in which he disobeys God's instructions for the 37 �is with the nation oflsrael and favors them over the uncircumcised nation of the Philistines. Of course one could ask if there is anything particularly special about this kind of faith? After all isn't there something obvious about the sort of belief Jonathan has? In the period of the people of Israel's initial establishment in the land oflsrael their warfare has been noticeably characterized by the presence of God. It is typical of Israel's battles that the many should defeat the few with the help of God. What, then , is unusual about the faith Jonathan exhibits? Most of the examples of faith we have seen fall into two different categories. There are the obvious examples of the faith found in people who have direct communication with God. Abraham and Moses come to mind. The greatness of their faith did not lie in their beliefin the existence or the ability of God. After all they spoke with God and so the question of his existence does not have the same force in their case as in Jonathan's. In general, the faith of the forefathers and prophets seems to be on a grander scale then the faith of a smaller character like Jonathan. There is a less obvious kind of faith that we find exhibited by the people oflsrael. After all they must have gone into battle in the times of Moses, Joshua, and Samuel with a certain faith in God's protection. But the faith we find in the people of Israel at large is of a different nature the Jonathan's . It is only in directly a faith in God. While it has been Israel's experience that the many have defeated the few, the connection to God has been less evident. Israel has always been under a leader of some sort, a prophet or a king. The people' s communication and faith have been in the leader as the medium between them and God. I do not think that the nation has gone \nto battle, as Jonathan did, with f~th in God so much as with faith in their leader, the emissary of God. Therefore, Jonathan's faith is different. He believes in _God directly despite the fact that he has had no communication with God. He has the experience of a common man but a faith that approaches the faith of the prophets. Jonathan's contact with God, however, is of a completely different nature than Saul's. Jonathan does not have any·direct experience of God or any mystical or divine ecstasy. God does not come down and touch him, at least not in the way He does Saul. Jonathan's invasion of the Philistine's camp is not simply an act of faith. He does not march blindly into the camp with confidence that God will help him. There is the test that he proposes to his servant so as to determine whether or not they will be successful. While there is no doubt that faith plays a decided role in this scene, Jonathan's use of a test changes the character of the scene.Jon athan asks for a sign, he is given it, and then what amounts to a miracle occurs. He and his armourbearer destroy the Philistine camp. I imagine that Jonathan must see the hand of God clearly manifesting itself at this moment. He has faith in God to be sure, but when he is granted a sign of his victory it seems to point decidedly to the fact that what occurs in the invasion is divine intervention. God comes down and wins the battle.Jonathan too has a communication with God, not a mystic experience but a revelation, a miracle. These two examples of God's communication with indi- viduals comes at an important time in the Bible. The important issue at this point in Samuel I is that of the monarchy. As discussed above in the case of Saul, the appointment of a king calls into question this very issue, the issue of people's relationships with God. Thus far, we have seen two categories of relationships that the majority of the people, the non-prophets have with God. There is primarily the relationship of the people to God through the medium of the prophets, but there are also these examples of divine contact that individuals have at certain moments, such as those that Saul and Jonathan have. For the most part the former relationship to God, the relationship through the prophets, has been the standard. The people have believed and known God because of the prophets. With the creation of a monarchy it is this very relationship that is called into question. It is no longer God' s intention to communicate with the people through the prophets He intends now to have kings. There is, however, the same problem that was present in Saul. What kind of man will God choose? We might reformulate the question now to ask, what kind of man will God choose as his intermediary with the people? The king will be the leader of the people, but, as a leader, he repla'ces God to some extent. Who should be picked? The answer is David. I think in David God picks a new form of communication with the people. He picks a form similar to the sort of individual communication manifested in the examples of his relationships with Saul and Jon athan. The first hint of David's existence that we get is when Samuel tells Saul, after his first disobedience, that he will eventually lose the monarchy. "Butnowthykingdom shall not continue: the Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart." - this, of course, is David. What this description means is unclear. We first meet David when he is anointed by Samuel after Saul's second disobedience. The Lord tells Samuel to go to Jes~e's house for he has chosen a king from one ofJesse's son's. "And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on Eliab, and said, Surely the Lord's anointed is before him. But the Lord said unto Samuel , Look not on his countenance or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him : for the Lord seeth not the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." (I6:6-7) Finally David, the youngest, is called. "And he sent, and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the Lord said, Arise, anoint him : for this is he. Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward." (16:12-13 ) It is odd that while we are told that God looks on the heart we are not told anything about what he sees in David's. In fact all we get of David is a physical description of his beauty, a description that sounds suspiciously like the initial description of Saul and, furthermore, a description of characteristics that sound just like what God explicitly told Samuel not to look for. We are also told that the spirit of the Lord descends on David, but we are not told that he was changed as in Saul's case, furthermore , though we are told several times that the 38 lectual, or verbal understanding of Him. His senses are overwhelmed, not his mind. When he sees David he has a similar experience. He hears music, as before, and he sees this beautiful youth, whom we are told he loves. Perhaps he even sees David's beauty as divine for the spirit of the Lord is with David. David's coming before Saul is the only time that he is comforted, it is the only time that his melancholy is dispelled. It is as if David's presence serves the same purpose for Saul as God's. His reaction to David is also very much like his reaction to God. While he does not receive a new heart, we are told that he loves David. With David's approach Saul sees a glimmer of hope , a glimpse of his beloved. He sees that there is a chance that the spirit of the Lord has not utterly forsaken him. This is not to say the Saul's relationship to David is perfect. While it is true that he feels closer to God in the presence of David he at the same time sees David as a threat to his other link to God - the mornu:chy. Saul has a paradoxical relationship to David. It is at the times when he sees David as the most divine , when David plays for him, that he sees him as the most threatening. The two times that we are told of Saul's greatest anger towards David are when David is playing for him and Saul attempts to kill him with his javelin. Saul's pursuing of his hatred for David leads to an instance that I think portrays this paradox of Saul's hatred for David coupled with his seeing the divine presence in David. In Chapter rg Saul has decided that he must kill David. He appeals to his closest relatives, to Jonathan and then to his daughter Michal, to kill David. Both of them refuse to help him out oflove for David. David meanwhile flees to Samuel in Ramah and Saul himself decides he must pursue him there. He goes to Ramah expecting to find David, but what he finds instead is God. Lord is with David, in all of Samuel I we never see God say anything else to David. There is, in fact, a decided absence of God's explicit appearance , particularly around David. We do see , however, David's effect on the people around him-particularly on Saul and Jonathan . I think that by looking at David's relationship with these two we will gain an understanding ofwhat kind of choice David is for the future king oflsrael. The first thing we are told of after the story of David's anointment is that "the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him."(16.14) Saul's longing for God has met with despair, Samuel has left him and he has been told that the kingdom will be torn from him. "And Saul said unto Samuel. .. Now therefore, I pray thee, pardon my sin, and turn again with me, that I may worship the Lord. And Samuel said unto Saul, I will not return with thee: for thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord hath rejected thee from being king over Israel. And as Samuel turned abo ut to go away, he laid hold upon the skirt of his mantle, and it rent. And Samuel said unto him, The Lord hath rent the kingdom oflsrael from the this day ... [Saul] said, I have sinned: yet honour me now, I pray thee, before the elders of my people , and before Israel, and turn again with me that I may worship the Lord thy God." (15: 2'4-30) It is as if Saul is a lover who sees all his ties to his beloved slipping away from him. He is not concerned with the loss of the kingdom in and of itself (this is actually the second time he has been told he will lose it) but rather with the loss of the gift of the Lord. He pleads with Samuel to pray with him so that he might not lose all hope of feeling God's presence again. But it is to no avail; his links with God are gone, and his only hope of receiving the presence of the Lord is gone. ~e falls into melancholy, the Bible says "and the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house"(r8.rn). The use of the word "prophesy" to describe Saul's depression seems ironic when compared to his previous prophetic rapture. He is at the other extreme of his experience of the divine, as far from God as he can imagine. What his servants tell him is to call "a man that can play well." Hence, David is sent for. "And he went thither to Naioth in Ramah: and the spirit of God was upon him also and he went on, and prophesied, until he came to Naioth in Ramah. And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and he lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets. (19:23-24)" The scene is almost identical to the scene of Saul's initial rapture . Even the people's reaction is the same. But what is interesting is the timing of this scene. The scene comes when Saul is forced to search for David himself after all his followers refuse to help him out of love for David. Saul too is prevented from finding David by his love for God. It does not seem to me coincidence that the scene of Saul's second rapture comes at the same time as his pursuit of David. The presence of God defeating Saul's attempts to murder David underscores the idea that somehow the presence of David goes hand in hand with the presence of God. When David comes on the scene so does God's presence and we see this most clearly realized in the rapture seeking Saul. In Jonathan, Saul's son, we find another person who is greatly affected by his contact with David. "And David came to Saul, and stood before him: and he loved him greatly; and he became his armourbearer .. . And it came to pass when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (I6:21,23)" There are two things that work to dispel Saul's melancholy; the first is David's music, the second is his presence. I thinkit is important that we are told that Saul loves David. What causes the evil spirit to depart from Saul is listening to music as it is played by a boy who we already know is "of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to ." In a way the scene is parallel to the scene of Saul's initial rapture in the presence of God. In both cases the experience is transcendent but in both cases it is also intensely physical. Although in the first instance Saul is experiencing the presence of God, nevertheless, there is also something decidedly material about a scene filled with singers and music. Saul "sees" the beautifulin God in a corporeal sense, as opposed to having an rational, intel- "And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him, and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand. And Saul said to him. Whose son art thou, thou young man? And David answered, I am the son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite. And it came to 39 �pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul." (ITS7-I8:1) man closeness that Saul and Michal attempt. Jonathan has seen the hand of God work through David and realizes that there is something superior about David. We are told how much Jonathan loves David but the only mention of David's love for Jonathan comes much later in a psalm he composes after Jonathan's death. This is not to say that David does not love Jon athan but there is a certain disparity in their positions. The expression oflove that Jonathan turns to is the expression oflove, not that exists between equal people, but that exists between man and God, a covenant. What Jonathan does is bind David to him with God as an intermediary. Before David leaves Saul's palace, after he and Jonathan have made a second covenant, Jonathan says that the Lord will be "between thee and me for ever." An oath allows Jonathan to express his love for David in a way that does not require physical proximity. Instead Jonathan has the Lord between him and David. So what do we see of David in all these stories of his life with Saul and Jonathan? What do we see of David the future king and chosen of God? One thing we do not see, as said before, is God having anything explicitly to do with David. His voice is, with one minor exception, never heard from the scene of David's anointment until the end of Samuel I. It is not exactly true, however, that God is not present. Having seen David's interactions with Saul and Jonathan I think that God's presence with David is made strikingly clear. When David comes into the story both Saul and Jonathan find their experiences with God mirrored in him. Saul finds a form of his ecstasy in the presence of David. Before David approaches Saul, Saul is as far from God as he has ever been, a state of melancholic prophesy. After David comes to Saul, God becomes once again present in Saul's life. In someway, his presence is equivalent to Saul with the presence of the Lord. In Jonathan's case, he sees two things in David. He sees his own faith in God mirrored in David's actions but he also sees God's work made manifest in David. When he sees David, he sees the hand of the Lord. Jonathan sees David's defeat of the Philistines repeat, in fact embody, the Lord's actions towards himself. His way of expressing his love towards David, with covenants, is the way that man relates to God because Jonathan has seen in David the same thing he has seen in God. It is interesting to note that the stripping off of his clothes that Jonathan performs when he makes his first covenant with David is the same act of devotion that Saul performs when he has his second ecstatic experience. Now let us consider the notion that David is a man that God has chosen "after his own heart," I think that we see in David a type ofleader that we have never seen before. David is not, like Samuel or Moses , an intermediary between God and the people, neither is he a leader like Saul who is fastened to God though not really under His command. With David God finds a new answer to the problem of the establishment of the monarchy. Israel's position when God alone was their leader had two aspects. There was the political sense in which God led the people, deciding which wars to fight, which lands to conquer etc., but there was also the fact that there is something spiritually unique about a.people led by God. The nation What has Jonathan seen in David that causes him to "love him as his own soul"? The most obvious event is David's slaying of Goliath, but what is it about that event that makes Jonathan love David? Jonathan has seen David, a young boy, challenge and defeat the champion of the Philistines with only his sling. However, it is not merely David's courage that Jonathan admires. I think he sees something in David's action against Goliath that reminds Jonathan of his own contact with God. "Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies oflsrael, whom thou has defied. This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand ... And all this assembly shall know that Lord save th not with sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord' s, and he will give you into our hands. (1T45-47)" David's words and his faith in God almost mirror Jonathan's at the time of his invasion of the Philistine camp. Jonathan must see in David's success a repetition of his encounter with the Philistines. Both of them went into battle against overwhelming odds with confidence in God and in both cases God made clear the correctness of their belief. And so Jonathan does not merely love David, as we are told of Saul, but he loves him "as his own soul": Jonathan sees himself in David. But Jonathan does not see an exact mirror of his situation in David's. David does not ask for a sign from God before battling Goliath. While Jonathan had faith that God could turn the battle in his favor, David has faith that God will. Jonathan does not see an exact repetition of his miracle in David's slaying of Goliath, for David's action is not the same as Jonathan's. David's absolute confidence and the absence of a sign in his case seems to me to show a different manifestation of God. While in Jonathan's case God responds to Jonathan and helps him defeat the Philistines, in David' s case God acts through David. There is no dialogue between David and God. It is as if David's action of going against Goliath and God's defeating of Goliath are the same act. God does not respond to David, David and God act as one. Jonathan's initiation of his friendship with David represents this aspect of David's relation to God. "Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.(18:3-4)" This is the first of three covenants that Jonathan is to make with David. The next is made before David flees Saul's palace in Chapter 22, the third when David is fleeing from Saul in Chapter 23. A covenant is an odd expression oflove, one that we have only seen before between God and man, namelywith the forefathers. Michal, Saul's daughterwho loves David, marries him. Saul, when he first meets David, takes him from his fathers house. Jonathan sees, when he first loves David, that David's relation to God does not permit this sort of man to 40 Footnotes whose king is God must necessarily have a special connection to the divine. With the establishment of a monarchywe then have two questions which we saw first addressed with Saul. First, who would be merely a good king in a political sense? In this respect Saul was a good choice, he won his wars and behaved for the most part as is to be expected of a king. Second, how is a nation to maintain its relationship with God in the face of His abdication of power to a monarch? It is David who is the answer to this question. In the choosing of David God picks a man who is first of all a good leader. Presumably we find this out later in Samuel II, but I believe this similarity between David and Saul is already suggested by the fact that they are both described as beautiful when they are first introduced. More importantly, David's appointment also serves as some sort of way of allowing the children oflsrael to maintain their relationship to God. Having abandoned prophecy as the form ofleading his people, God finds in David, the people's new leader, a way of maintaining a more individual relationship with them. I think that the fact that Saul and Jonathan's interactions with David parallel their interactions with God point to what is unique about David. He is not an intermediary between God and the people but rather a representative of God. Jonathan and Saul show us that people see in David a manifestation of the divine presence. When David acts they see God acting through him, when they feel David's presence they feel God's presence. I think this is the way to understand that fact that we are told "But all Israel and Judah loved David because he went out and came in before them." (18:16) It is not that David communicates God's will to the people but merely that he is there. The spirit of the L~rd is not alongside David but is in him. Let us then take one final look at David, the man whose actions are imbued with the divine spirit, this time after he has become king. After the death of Saul, all the tribes oflsrael come to David and ask him to accept the monarchy. He does, and we then hear his first decree as king. 1. All quotations are from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. 2. All quotations are from the book of Samuel I unless otherwise noted. "And David said on that day, Whosoever geteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites , and the Jame and the blind, that are hated of David's soul, he shall be chief and captain." (Samuel II, 5:8) It is fitting that David's first decree should be in his name and not the Lord's. After all David does not communicate the word of God, but manifests it. His actions are not done in the name of God, moreover, they are performed under the Spirit of God. But perhaps it is also fitting that David's first action as king is one that is violent and terrible. The mediation of the prophets between the people and God was necessary partly to shield the people from the terror of God as seen in the previously mentioned quote from Exodus "let not God speak with us, lest we die." I wonder if David's first action as king is not the action that most shows David to be God's representation. For with the removal of the intermediate, with the approach of the spirit of God within David, it seems appropriate that the people would see again the horror that they fled at Mount Sinai. 41 �- , A Translation of EmileVerhaeren 's "One Night" Un Soir * Eli Wiggins He, who of an eve and not age of ours, will ope' Me up, disturb my verse in slumbers or in cinders, Lend new life to far-off feelings, and surrender To how we of today did arm ourselves with hope, Celui qui me lira dans les siecles, un soir, Troublant mes vers, sous leur sommeil ou sous leur cendre, Et ranimant leur sens lointain pour mieux comprendre Comment ceux d'aujourd'hui s'etaient armes d'espoir, Let him know with what wild dash towards the fray My Joy has hurled itself through cries, revolts and tears, Into the proud and manly war of woes and fearsFor love to level them like conquerors their prey. Qu'il sache, avec quel violent elan, ma joie s' est, a travers les eris, les revoltes, les pleurs, Ruee au combat fier et male des douleurs, Pour en tirer l'amour, comme on conquiert sa proie. I love my fevered eyes, nerves, brain, the blood wherein My heart has life, the heart inside which lives my torso; I love Mankind and too the world, and I adore so The force my force can take and give the All and Man. J'aime mes yeux fivereux, ma cervelle, mes nerfs, Le sang dont vit moncoeur, le coeur dont vit mon torse; J'aime l'homme et le monde et j'adore la force Que donne et prend ma force a l'homme et l'univers. To live is this: to take and give with jolly rush. My fellows find themselves exalted just the same As I myself feel hungry, heaving, hardly tame At intense Life and its own wisdom's ruddy flush. Carvivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse. Mes pairs, ce sont ceux-la qui s'exaltent autant Que je me sens moi-meme avide et haletant Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse. Hours of Downfall or Grandeur! All is gone Blurred and, in the blaze that is existence, bereft Of former form; so long as Longing yet is left In leaving, 'til Death, before th'horizon's wakeful dawn . Heures de chute ou de grandeur!--tout se confond Et se transforme en ce brasier qu'est I' existence; Seul importe que le_ desir reste en partance, Jusqu'a la mort, devant l'eveil des horizons. The one who finds is thus a wiseman not above Communing with the sweeping swarm, humanity. The spirit dives now drunk in full immensity; In order to discern with genius, one must love. Celui qui trouve est un cerveau qui communie Avec la fourmillante et large humanite. L' esprit plortge et s' enivre en pleine immensite; 11 faut aimer, pour decouvrir avec genie. One great kindness can fulfill the grating grope Of knowledge; it exalts the beauty and the force Of the world; foretells the basic bonds and source. Oh you, who an eve and age is not ours, ope' Une tendresse enorme emplit l'apre savoir, 11 exalte la force et la beaute des mondes, 11 devine les liens et le causes profondes; O vous qui me lirez, dans les siecles, un soir, Me up, see wherefore you're summoned by my verse? 'Cause in your time some hothead will have had to gauge From his own heart, no doubt, the truth, the empty page, To draw from it the meaning of the universe. Comprenez-vous pourquoi mon vers vous interpelle? C'est qu'en vos temps quelqu'un d'ardent aura tire Du coeur de la necessite meme, le vrai, Bloc clair, pour y dresser l' entente universelle. 42 43 . �A Literal Translation and a Verse Translation of William Von Goethe's ''Nature and Art" * Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen, Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden; Der Widerwille ist auch mir verschwunden, Und beide scheinen gleich mich anzuziehen. Es gilt wohl nur ein redliches Bemuehen ! Und wenn wir erst in abgemessnen Stun den Mit Geist und Fleiss uns an die Kunst gebunden, Mag frei Natur im Herzen wieder gluehen. So ist's mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen: Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister Nach der Vollendung reiner Hoehe streben. Wer Grosses will, muss sich zusammenraffen; In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben. Verse Translation It seems that Nature always flies from ArtHas found and fast embraced it, though it flee; And all aversion vanishes in me, Till both with equal pull tug at my heart. Upright pains and toil alone are blest! And if at first in measured hours we bind Ourselves to Art with work and spirit's mind, Then Nature may burn freely in our breast. Only an upright effort counts! And if we once in measured hours With spirit and industry bind ourselves to Art, Then may Nature freely glow in our hearts again. All learning, too, must listen to this call: The unbound spirit strives in vain to stand, To perch upon perfection's purest height. This is how it stands with all education: Unbound spirits will vainly Strive for the completion of pure heights. He who wants greatness must pull himself together; In limitation only does the master prove himself, And Law alone can give us Freedom . 44 * Eli Wiggins Eli Wiggins Prose Translation Nature and Art, they seem to flee one another, And they have, before one thinks it, found each other; Aversion h as also disappeared from me And both seem to attract me equally. A Note ·on Goethe's "Nature and Art" Man, to be great, must snatch himself up small; For Confines limit Lords however grand, And Law alone will lend us Freedom's light. Whenever we translate Greek or French poetry at this school, we strive first for literal accuracy and leave the style ans the sound of our English mor e or less to unconsidered chance. This I find unfortunate. It makes sense to translate without regard to style someone like Aristotle, who obviously gave no thought to it himself. But as soon as we set before ourselves the task of Anglicizing a dialogue of Plato , which is dripping with self-consciousness of syntax, meaning, and their interplay, it is criminal to come up with an English version, no matter how painstakingly "accurate," andclaim that it is a true translation if it doesn't sound good in our own language. And what is criminal with regards t o beautiful prose approaches deadly sin when we slug our way through the poetry of Sophocles with the same plodding literalness that Aristotle deserved. (I think our essay-writing-or at least my own-also suffers from this sole attention to meaning at the cost of style.) I find that the best translators are by no means the Lattimores and the Fitzgeralds of to-day, who turn Horper into a fusty old scholar, but rather Chapman and Pope , who may well make Homer out to be a boisterous, wordstruck Elizabethan and decorative, neo-classical Georgian, respectively, but who at least keep him a poet! I am most enamoured of the mediaeval school of translation, through which Boccaccio's 11 Filostrato doubles in size, entertainment, and beauty to become Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde , or by which King Alfred's Boethius can list "ensamples" from everyday life in seventh century England. In our readings for the Goethe Preceptorial last semester, the translations of Faust by Kaufman and Arndt, although they were in rhyming English verse which which should leave them open to more innacuracythan prose, disturbed me far less than Mueller' s rendition of Goethe' s Botanical Writings. Mueller seemed to omit all the force and vigor of Goethe's style, missed the strength of his choice of verbs, and ignored the wonderful connections that Goethe draws between disparate elements by the links of syntax alone without descending to the grubby trouble of stating the likeness explicitly. Therefore, after giving us as bare a literal translation of Goethe's poem as I could, I decided to try my hand at turning "Nature and Art" into an English sonnet. Despite Goethe's insistence that the master proves himself by limiting his enterprise , I have chosen to disregard the limitless list of good reasons against amateur college students slaughtering the true works of art by presuming to render Goethe's poetry in English verse. Amidst this process I feel that I have learned to notice more about the brilliance of Goethe's poenythan I ever would have had I stopped at the literal translation. It has also been grand fun. Allow me to remark briefly, however, on the inadequacies of my verse that mar its ever approaching the elegance and beauty of the original. In general, since English usually requires fewer syllables to say something than does German (observe lines 3-5, rn , II, & 14 of the literal translation especially) , I was forced to pump up the English lines with stuffing of my own in order to fill the pentametre. I tried to do so with as much significance and as little hindrance as possible , but I know that the least amount of extra baggage slows the slick, unburdened journey of Goethe's sonnet. Another general problem is a perennial curse of philosophical poetry in English: whereas German, Greek, and other languages have built their metaphysical terminology from the simple , everyday language of their own tongues , English took the lazy route of borrowing all our complicated words from French, Latin, and Greek. Latinate verbiage such as "indusny," "education," "completion," "limitation," and any other "tion" sand "ism" shave no place in English poetry. Their German equivalents, however- "Fleiss," "Bildung," "Vollendung," and "Beschraenkung" - are quite natural constructs that sound no fancier than the simple words which break them up. Philosophical poets in English have to be doubly clever: not only in the intricacy of their thought, but in the subterfuge by which they trick their readers into following their thoughtlines without putting them off with un-English fancy-talk. The greatest structural change in my translation was in the rhyme scheme of the second quatrain. Goethe repeats the ABBA structure of the first quatrain, setting off the tone of the A rhyme, however, by slipping in "Bemeuehen" and "gluehen" in place of the "fliehen" and " ziehen" in lines I and 4. The "ue" diphthong is often rhymed with " ie" in German, but they are far enough near-rhymes to signify a changea sort of A,BBA1 • I despaired of achieving this subtlety in my own version, and resorted to a complete switch in CDDC in the second quatrain, which is still a viable form of Petrarchian sonnet, but of course sacrifices the tighter unity of the octet that Goethe achieves. Goethe ' s rhyming alone comments beautifully on the meaning of his poem. Two pairs of opposites are bound together in dual unity by the four rhymes of the first quatrain alone . The A rhymes ("fliehen "-to flee from and "anziehen " - to attract towards) point towards the inevitabil- 45 �Shu-tao: Of Grammatology, Chinese Style ity of opposing forces working together. They share the encompassing places of the first and last rhymes . Framed between them "gefunden" (found) and " verschwunden" (disappeared) compliment each other with equal opposition . The final rhyme in the poem is also meaningful. In the last line Goethe writes that law will give us freedom. Line I I stresses how useless it is to strive for this freedom if we are unbound . .A£, even the modern English spellings of" give" and and "strive" suggest, they once rhymed in their Germanic roots, and "geben" and "streben" dutifullyrhymein German. It is wonderful how Goethe uses this rhyme to emphasize how we can achieve nothing by our own will (as subject) striving, but only when we submit to the strict exactions of scientific method will this law (as active agent-subject) give us (as object-indirect, even) liberty. I attempted, certainly, to make the poetic devices and the structural requirements of my sonnet more than vapid and empty formulae , but I think that after all I have made only a rhymed rendering of Goethe's meaning, and have not written a poem. It would require a poet to do that, and he, like Chaucer and King Alfred, would end up with a work similar in premises, perhaps, to Goethe's sonnet, but with a poem apparently independent from its germinal seed. Goethe's poem is entirely composed of various yet complimentary weaves of self-referential threads. He wove them so tightly and seamlessly together that my version can only be an unravelling knot in comparison. But perhaps my fraying edges can point to some of the beauty of the eternal boundlessness that pleased Goethe so much, and that he imitated in his inimitable verse. * Cordell D.K Yee T he title of this essay may require some explanation. Shu means "writing," and tao might be translated as " discourse." Shu-tao might serve as a translation of "grarnmatology," discourse on writing. 3 Those hoping to read something about Jacques Derrida-or perhaps waiting to pounce on him-will be disappointed. The subject here is far less theoretical and far more trivial than deconstruction and the margins of philosophy. The subject is the material of Chinese text , specifically Chinese writing itself. Writing is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Chinese civilization. Few things separate us more from Chinese culture than its writing. Our writing is , more or less, a phonetic script. Our letters are , more or less , attempts to represent units of sound. Chinese script is logographic. Each character represents a word or, more accurately, a complete syllable. The linguistic differences between Chinese writing and ours are explained in detail in more than a few popular and academic works on the Chinese language,4 and I will not deal with these differences any further. What is of more interest to me is the difference in the value placed on the two kinds of writing as art. For us in the West, writing has been at best a minor arr. Normally we do not rush out to the National Gallery, say, to look at samples of handwriting. With computer graphics widely available , interest in handwriting seems quaint, nostalgic, and even backward. For us, wi-iting is usually not meant to be noticed; it should not be obtrusive; it should not call attention to itself. We want to see past it to the words it represents. Reading efficiency is what matters. For us, writing is not supposed to be a complicated matter. Its elements are as simple as ABC. In the Chinese scholarly tradition, writing was far from a simple matter. Good handwriting was one of the crowning achievements of the intellectual life. Virtually no one could be considered as having any intellectual virtue without mastery of the art of writing. Ifwe ask what accounts forthe high place ofwriting, satisfactory answers are usually hard to come by-at least answers satisfactory to us brought up in the Western intellectual tradition. If we tum to traditional Chinese works on the subject, we do not seem to get much help at first. On the most important and most serious matters, Chinese works tend to be long on assertion and metaphor-and short on argument. In works devoted to the art ofwriting, we might read that writing contains "profound secrets of change ," and that it is "the integration of reason." This sounds promising, but no explanation is given. Instead we will get comparisons of writing to the flight of geese , the wings of a cicada, a firm 46 mountain.s Understanding the Chinese art of writing seems to be like reading inkblots. The art seems to be highly subjective, lacking in universality. If we turn to the modern scholarship on writing, we fare perhaps a little better. 6 At least the terms are easier to grasp . In traditional China, from the seventh century on , the ability to write well was linked to power, wealth , and privilege, even more so than in the West. The government bureaucracy provided the main avenue of upward social mobility, and a prerequisite of government service was the ability to write. Writing was a form of cultural capital that helped one gain membership into a political and economic elite. This elite was highly exclusive. During the sixteenth century, for example, only one in 10 , 000 males could expect to pass the "advanced scholar" examination and gain a position in the imperial bureaucracy.7 If the same standards were applied here , only one student out of 100 classes at St. John' s would be awarded a degree. With such tremendous odds against success, it is easy to understand why those seeking economic and political advancement practiced writing diligently. If there are any doubts about the relationship between economics and the value of writing, what has happened to Chinese writing in this century should dispel them. Take away the political apparatus of the empire, and the importance of good handwriting diminishes. Replace a managed agricultural economywith a capitalist market system and a somewhat more liberal political regime, and the art of making money becomes more important. In the modern world the art of making money is not identified with the art ofwriting. In one context the art of writing is the means to powe . In the othe context it is a sign of power' specifically economic power-a form of conspicuous consumption. One purchases works of writing much as one buys antique furniture. The experience of modern Chinese societies confirms that the art of writing was of a certain value in a particular place for a period of time. It is not of our time and place. In our time , it should go the way of bound feet. This is a strong conclusion, and there is a great deal of truth in the account that leads up to it. But the argument has a number of omissions. Some are factual, but the most serious omission concerns method. It is possible to do political and economic analyses ofartwith one's eyes closed. I mean that such analyses often emphasize context at the expense of the art itself. Such was the case in the account I summarized. And for that reason, we do not find it fully persuasive. So to make up that defect, let us begin to look at the writing itself. 2 47 �j.A ~~~J ~ !\~~~ ~il~t FIGURE I. WEN I TSAI TAO, WRITTEN IN Presented here (Figure 1) is a highly simplified and truncated view of the development of Chinese writing. Reading vertically from the right, the first four characters, more figures composed of straight lines. The types of strokes have been reduced to basically three: dots , lines, and hooks; or points, lines, and angles. In the traditional criticism, the standard script is described as square and straight. These adjectives are also classical Chinese geometric term s, and the coincidence in terminology seems more than accidental. What happened in the movement from seal to standard script was thatwritingwas mathematized. Its forms became clearer and more abstract, thus easier to read and reproduce. Writing transmits thewayin the sense of mathematical reason. One of the ways in which the chart of styles is misleading is in suggesting that characters in all styles are in a uniform size. In fact, it is characteristic only of the standard script to be written in such a manner. Here (Figure 2) the -# writer has supplied boxes ~ around his standard forms ---:I:0 as if to emphasize their ~ regularity and uniformity. The appearance of the text ~ is suggestive of movable type. We can imagine each square representing a piece of type. The standard script does lend itself to mechanical reproduction. Its straight-line forms are easier to carve than the curFIGURE 2.. WEN CHENGvilinear forms of the other MING (I470-I 559) . styles. Because it was a DETAIL OF TsuI-WENC good typeface, one might T'INC CHI (ACCOUNT OF TSUI-WENG PAVILION). consider the standard script to be a remarkable technological achievement. As a typeface, it has been fairly stable for more than ten centuries. Chinese printed texts from the ninth century are still highly readable today. This (Figure 3) is an example from the tenth or eleventh century, a printed edition of the Tao-te ching. If the development of a good type style does not sound particularly impressive, consider that we are still waiting for a wen i tsai tao, THE FIVE MAJOR FORMS OF CHINESE might be loosely translated as ARE NOT SHOWN; FOR THE MOST PART, "Writing transTHE ARTISTIC TRADITION WAS NOT CONSCIOUSLY AWARE OF THEM. THE mits the way." WRITING IS BY CH'EN Po-CHIN (CHEN It is typical of BonN)' A PRESENT-DAY PRACTITIONER Chinese sayOF THE ART. ings in that its tone of certitude is matched by the uncertitude about what exactly it means. As we look at writing, at least a few ways of interpreting this statement will emerge. For the sake of comparison, the saying has been written four more times, each time in a different style. From right to left the styles appear in more or less chronological order. The rightmost style is known as the seal script, dating from the third century B.C.E. 8 It is followed by the cursive, semicursive, and clerical scripts, which are almost contemporaneous. The style on the far left is the most recent style and dates from about the second century C.E. It is probably the most familiar to us in the West. It is seen on most Chinese public signs, and perhaps most important for us, it is found on most Chinese menus. It is sometimes called the perfected script. When we move from right to left on the chart, it seems that the other forms are striving toward it. The leftmost style is also called the standard script. From a formal point of view, the standard form seems to be the one from which the others arise. The other forms seem to be deviations from it, the variation increasing as one moves from left to right. Even those with little familiarity with Chinese script are able to sense the rightness of the standard script. The notion that a script can be right might be somewhat disconcerting to those of us brought up to believe in the arbitrariness of the written sign. With some hard looking, though, it becomes clear that something is not right with the seal script. The seal script characters can be intricate and thus difficult to memorize. Each character seems to present a different set of structural elements; each seems to have its own organizing rules. In addition, writing in the seal script presents difficulties, since it is hard to tell where one stroke ends and another begins. The standard script seems to address those problems. The contours of the characters have been simplified, as have the components of the characters: we see more straight lines and SCRIPT. THE EARLIEST FORMS OF SCRIPT ~~ ~'~ ~ Jf."4 '± tJ --- ~ -;r: FIGURE ~ .\ 11 1~ \ l·:i:'. I IH 11 ,\ , I 1\:=:CJI I P ~ TY 1 D\ ll'Q<"i \: \ ' FIGURE •1.f)·ri:i1:-;:q lih-/1 pl' ~on po;n 1 11 1 x1Ji« 1 ti F; -rJ' 1/'> OF GREEK TYPE: !\ BC~EZH81KJ\MN20flPLTY.-PXY.JQ EUCLID FONT. 4. SAMPLE ctl3y8r:l;q8u.:/..µv ; onpcr;i:u1px41(»ts F~?)'1 p ABIL'IEZHGIKAMN:=:onPLTYct>Xl!JQ?:S a0yoE ~TJ~tKApvE,onpcrc;w¢xljJw~ Fr; '?;J lop ABrnEZH01K/\MN~OnPLTY¢X4JO a~y5E~l]6LKAµ v~onpoc;ru<Px4Jw~ Fr;~t,~ FIGURE 5· SAMPLE OF PRINTED GREEK TEXT IN NEW HELLENIC FONT: PINDAR' S ODES (TOP); THUCYDIDES , PERICLES' FUNERAL ORATION (BOTTOM) . APIHON MEN YllWP, 0 llE XPY202: Al80M ENON nYP Che 5tcrn-phm vvKTi µEy6:vopos E~oxa ni\ouTov· el 5' &eOi\cx ycxpvev ei\5m1, cpC\ov fiTOp, µf)KEe' CxALOV 01<0TIEI a i\i\o Ocxi\TIVOTE Ev aµEp<;i: <pCXEVVOV aCITpov pov epi] µas 5 L' aleEpos· µ115' 'Oi\vµnia5 aywva <pEpTEpov mi56:croµev · oOev 6 noi\vcpcrros vµvos a µcp1!3 6:i\ikrcx1 :fltJ ~ 3· ingprocess byincreasingthe spacing between characters. He forces a reader to linger on each character. The writing calls attention to itself, and when we pay attention to it, we notice more deviations. The horizontals are not true horizontals, but are slanted. We seem to be viewing the characters obliquely. The writing space appears to be three dimensional. The characters seem to have volume, monumentality, a sculptural quality. We notice also that certain elements seem to be incomplete. Elements normally joined or closed are left open: we see open rectangles, angles without vertices. We get the sense that we are viewing the characters as they are coming into being. Here the lines seem to be reaching out, stretching out, toward each other. The strokes themselves seem to pulsate as a result of the variations in their thickness. At their best, characters are often thought of as organic: in traditional criticism , characters are spoken of as having bone, blood, breath. As organisms, they have weight: they must be shaped so as to be able to stand and maintain their wholeness. The example we have been looking at does not exhaust the ways in which one can make the standard form new. In this example (Figure 7), again in the standard FIGURE 7. Su SHIH script, the writer has perhaps (Io36-noI). SECTION tilted his horizontals even OF CH'IH-PI FU more than in the previous ex(RHAPSODY ON RED CLIFF). ample, and has altered the satisfactory typeface for Greek lettering. I haven't really analyzed the Greek situation carefully, but these examples make one source of the problem clear. 9 TAO TE CHING (CLASSIC OF THE WAY AND VIRTUE; FACSIMILE OF A SUNG DYNASTY PRINTING). THE BOOK IS OPEN TO CHAPTER II, WHICH DEALS WITH MAKING In Figures 4 and 5, the upper case forms are block letters, mostly rectilinear. The lower case letters are curvilinear cursive forms. The two do not harmonize well and even irritate. Having just asserted the importance of the standard script for its legibility and mechanical reproducibility, I will go on to say that the art of writing the standard script begins where legibility leaves off. It does not take a genius or much talent to write clearly. It does take something more than clarity to lift writing to the level of art. The end of writing _q!li! art is vitality. This is a quality seldom associated with typographic forms , which seem static, inert, dead, with their boxiness and uniform appearance. Writing as art aims to counteract the inertness. It does so by departing from the norm . Several departures from the norm are illustrated on this example (Figure 6). First, the writer has altered the spacing. On a printed page, the characters are as close together as they can be without causing confusion about word boundaries. Here the writer disrupts the read- 6. PAGODA. BEGINNING OF THE YEN PAGODA PREFACE TO THE BUDDHIST CANON. SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING. 48 (778-865). KuNG- STELE AT HsliAN-MI (596-658). FIGURE 8. Lrn SECTION OF RUBBING OF CH'u Sm- LIANG FIGURE cH'tiAN 49 proportions of his characters so that they appear more squat. In Figure 8, in the standard script as well, the writer has elongated his characters and has varied the pressure applied to the brush so that certain strokes appear bolder than others. Excellence in the standard script was measured in part by how far one could depart from the standard and still be recognized as following the standard. The same could be said of the other styles of script. Acommongoalwasto produce vital forms of script. In order to excel, one needed to have some ingenuity, some �t 1f ~~ manual dexterity, and some perceptiveness. In this way writing bore the imprint of a person's mind. It provided some indication of a person's mental capacities. It was also important in shaping a person. Writing transmitted the way in the sense of ethics. Those who mastered writing developed discipline and excellent memories. They had to memorize thousands of characters and their various forms. According to one account, a student should spend eight years studying the standard script, practicing writing it in various sizes and imitating various masters. After that one studied the semicursive script for three years, the cursive script for five, the seal script for ten, and the clerical for five. 10 Fortunately, some styles were studied concurrently, otherwise one would spend thirty-one years practicing and studying writing. Much of the practice was tedious and repetitive. Success required patience and persistence. A dozen characters could take as long as an hour to complete. Mastering the art of writing also meant mastering its history. A student spent considerable time studying and imitating the works of past masters. Copying past works was not simply a matter of exact reproduction. Too many factors worked against a perfect copy. Variations in ink, brush, paper, even differences in breathing patterns, could affect the outcome. One almost invariably fell short as soon as one put brush tip to paper. In order to make progress one had to learn to adjust as one proceeded, compensating for one's mistakes so that the overall impression of the original would be preserved. Mastering the art of writing meant developing acertain resourcefulness and adaptability. (See Figures 9-1I.) The practitioners held up most often as models were known for the excellence of their characters. Thus, to imitate a model of writing was to imitate the thought and action of a virtuous person, atleastfor awhile. Writing practice was an opportu- FIGURE 9. Lrn KuNG- *~~~ 1.f FIGURE II. RUBBING AND COPY COMPARED. THE "DEFECTS" OF THE COPY ARE MORE APPARENT ON CLOSE EXAMINATION-NOTE THE DIFFERENCES IN ANGULARITY, IN LINE VALUES, AND IN THE SHAPE OF THE HOOKS. nityto enterthe mind ofanotherperson, to try to understand why a certain stroke was executed in a certain manner. Writing provided an escape from one's personality, or perhaps a better way of putting it, writing enlarged one's personality. One acquired, in small ways, traits one would not have acquired otherwise. In the course of one's practice, one would copy out classic works and commit them to memory. This was no mean feat, since the core texts contained more than 400,000 characters. As one worked to master writing, one also worked to acquire a tradition. Writing transmitted the ways of past excellence. The selection of texts a person copied beyond the core works said something about what that person valued. In that sense also, writing revealed the person. This aspect of writing should be familiar. The last time I looked the application to St. John's asked about one's reading. I suppose we would judge a person who could recite the works of Aquinas in the original language differently from one who could recite the works of Danielle Steel in the original language. As we do here, so they did in imperial China: as an index to a person, what shaped a person, what a person valued, HEN MIN RIBAO writing was an important con FIGURE I2.. MAO TSE-TUNG (I893-I976). sideration in deMASTHEAD OF ]EN-MIN JIH-PAO (PEOPLE'S termining a DAILY). person's fitness to serve in the government. The cooperation of mind and body, the harmony of wholes and parts, achieved by the mastery ofwriting, were analogues of the harmonious society that was supposed to be the goal of the ruling elite. Ideally the Chinese official would find political direction in the written word, just as the philosopher-king would find it in his or her vision of the good." The notion that there was a resonance between writing and politics survived even until recently. Chairman Mao's understanding is shown by this sample ofhis handwriting (see Figure 12). FIGURE IO. MODERN COPY OF 9· cH'tiAN. SECTION oF FIGURE RUBBING OF STELE AT THIS COPY SEEMS TO BE A FAIRLY HstiAN-MI PAGODA. SEEN AS A WHOLE, GOOD MATCH, STROKE FOR STROKE. IT IS CLEAR THAT IT IS BASED ON Lrn ~ KuNG-CH'tiAN's WORK. 50 This is the masthead for the People's Daily, written by Mao in 1949, just before the Communists took over China. The characters are still recognizable as standard script, though there are a number of deviations. Mao introduces cursive strokes into the last character. The characters are not uniform in size. Mao enlarges the first and last characters,;en meaning "people" and pao meaning " report. " In the past reports were directed upward. This newspaper addressed to the people reverses that process. Mao also changes the direction of the "legs" of the character Jen . Normally they would point down. Mao bends them upwards, almost reshaping the legs into wings. From this sample alone, one might read Mao's revolutionary tendencies or at least infer a change in political emphasis: he aims to lift up the masses. So far I have been describing the political consequences of wTiting in ideal terms. It was of course all too easy to corrupt the political process. Those who could not write well could cheat by paying someone else to write for them or by purchasing an office. There could be mistakes in judgment or just poor judgment when it came to evaluating writing. The imitation of models could become slavish. Writing could be used primarily to inculcate a respect for authority, a reverence for precedent. These are good qualities to instill in one 's subjects if one is interested in maintaining a repressive political structure. It has to be granted that writing often served the purposes of autocratic rule. Even so, it was also a democratizing force. The equipment required to write was not too costly, and once acquired, the art of writing enabled a man to rise above his social class. In order to justify their mandate, emperors were not exempt from the expectation th11t office holders write well. They often sought criticism of their work, and their ministers might be able to couch political criticism in terms ofartistic criticism. In one famous example, the emperor asked for advice because he was having trouble holding his brush straight. One ofhis ministers replied, "If the heart is straight, then the brush will be straight." It would have been ideal if such freedom of expression had regularly spread to other subjects of discourse, but at least the potential was there for more openness and liberality. Writing also had its value beyond politics where it often served as recreation. It was a means ofliberating oneself from daily cares, especially if politics proved to be too dirty a business. Just as often writing was a matter of serious discussion. Examples ofwritingwere analyzed. Good pieces were canonized. There were at least four standards for canonization. A piece of writing must have stood the test of time, or have appealed to large number of people over the centuries. It must have merit as fine art: it must have vitality. It must be beautiful; it must impress with its order, elegance, and form. It must be original, and it must have influence. What I have just summarized are not only standards of Chinese writing, but also, of course, some of the criteria Scott Buchanan applied to books. One might question whether works of Chinese writing prompt interpretations and raise questions, thus satisfying more of Buchanan's criteria for greatness. I would argue that they can do both. Subject to interpretation is the movement of the brush, the writer's thinking as he wrote, the qualities expressed in the writing, and its points of excellence. The interest of the piece shown in Figure 13 goes beyond what it says.The text here deals with a familiar topic: whether one can learn to be a sage. The text says that the key is to be without desire. The writing itself suggests a somewhat different answer. The work is quite large , more than five feet high. BeFIGURE I3. TUNG CH'Icause the characters are CH' ANG (I555-I636). TRANSCRIPTION OF T'UNG large, they are difficult to SHU (PENETRATING THE execute. The coordination BooK OF CHANGES), BY between mind and body is CHOU TUN-I (IOI7"?3). quite impressive here , especially considering that the writer was about seventyyears old. By writing so large, he seems to answer the question. Yes, one can learn to be a sage, and you are looking at him. As for whether works of writing can raise questions, questioningwas an important aspect of the art of writing. Refinement of the art itself depended on a questioning of the past. Furthermore, in writing a word, one might think about it, question what it means, clarify what it means. As an example, we can take a rendition of the Chinese characters for the infinite (see Figure 14). It is barely recognizable as standard script because of the indefinition of its boundaries. Something like this indefiniteness, this vagueness, this difficulty in comprehension, is associated with our notions of the infinite. The writing itself thus suggests something about the meaning of the term. Practiced at its best, the art of Chinese writing involves a fusion of thought and feeling. It is an art critical ofitself, and in that respect it may be considered modern-of our time. FIGURE I4. CHIN In our time the question of NUNG (I687-I763). whether Chinese achievements Wu-LIANG (INFINITE), belong in our education has been DETAIL OF AN ALBUM. the subject of some debate. The focus has mainly been on books. But the books have not been entirely persuasive. To many in the West, they do not seem to depend on reason, they often seem 51 �to undermine it, and they often do not seem to encourage questioning. The problem with the discussion so far is that its scope has not been wide enough. If one looks only at books, one gets a limited view of the Chinese intellectual tradition. We risk misunderstanding that tradition by taking what we would call its philosophical works as representingwhat is best in it. Chinese scholars often put their highest thought not into discursive prose, but into poetry, painting, and calligraphy, the art of writing. Their highest expression took place not only between the lines, but in the lines. The Chinese elite did much of the work we try to do, but by a different object of study. Their art of writing is in a way a reflection of who we are. In the end East does meet West. China, after all, gave us the technical foundation for our modern world. In Novum Organum, Francis Bacon identifies printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass as the three defining inventions of the modern age. ' 2 All three, as far as we know, originated in China. The list of Chinese contributions to the West might be expanded without too much effort to include the art ofwriting. '3 If there is a Chinese contribution to the liberal arts, the art of writing is it. Those who learned it well were freed from having to labor in the fields and allowed to participate in the political process. Learning and practicing it required considerable leisure. In addition, the Chinese art ofwriting represents the study of grammar at its most basic and perhaps most intense . It involves a kind of rhetoric and a kind of geometrical construction. I do not advocate that everyone go out and pick up a brush, but I think that a more informed look at Chinese writing is possible. At the very least, consideration of the centrality of writing in China should adjust how we view certain Chinese paintings. Such paintings often depict scholars writing or discussing writing amid spectacular natural surroundings. In the West, these have typically been interpreted as "landscape" paintings showing the insignificance of human beings in relation to nature. This view is gen- erally a misrnterpretation. The paintings are generally not transcriptions of scenes, but metaphors. They affirm the power of human activity, specifically writing. The natural scene often emanates from the scene of writing, as in Figure 15. In Figure 16 the eye's movement up the pictorial space culminates in writing. To write is to be taken from one's FIGURE I6. SHIH T'Ao (I64I-CA. I7IO). urban setting. To PAINTING OF WILDERNESS COTTAGE. THE write is to be able POEM AT THE TOP LEFT READS: "THE SHEEN OF BAMBOO SURROUNDS THE WILDERNESS to make new SCENEJ THE IMAGE OF A COTTAGE RIPPLES worlds. To write is IN THE FLOWING RIVER." also to participate in the processes of nature. The interplay ofyin and yang, ultimately responsible for the phenomenal world, is imitated by the alternation of black and white in Chinese writing. Through writing, human beings resonate with the natural world. Notice in Figure 17 how the writing at the top of this painting merges with the branches of the pomegranate. Footnotes r. This is a slightly revised version of a lecture presented on January 23, 1998, at St. John's College, Annapolis. 2. Wade-Giles transcription is used here. 3. Shu-tao is also one of the traditional Chinese terms for the art, or "way," of writing. 4. Forexample,JerryNorman,Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 5. The examples come from Shu-p'u (Treatise on writing) , completed in 687 by Sun Kuo-t'ing. A translation of the treatise appears in Two Treatises on Chinese Calligraphy. tr. Chang Ch'ung-ho and Hans H. Frankel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 6. In this paragraph, I am following, perhaps caricaturing, the types of analyses offered in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 7. Useful accounts of the Chinese examination system are Ichasada Miyazaki, China' Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations oflmperial China, tr. Conrad Schirokauer (New York: Weatherhill, 1976); and Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368rgn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 8. More accurately, this style is known as the lesser seal script. There are forms of writing older than this one , but for centuries the artistic tradition was unaware of them. 9. Useful discussions of Greek typography can be found in Greek Letters: From Tablets to Pixels , ed. Michael S. Macrakis (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press , 1996). rn. This regimen was prescribed by Feng Fang in the seventeenth century in "Hsueh shu-fa" (Learning the art of writing). Feng' s essay is translated in Tseng Yuho, A History of Chinese Calligraphy (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1993), 240-42. rr. The philosopher-king is compared to a painter in Plato, Republic, Book 6, 484C-D (see also Book 7, 540A-B). 12. Novum Organum, Book I , Aphorism 149. 13. It has influenced a few Western artists, such as Robert Motherwell. FIGURE I8. CHENG HSIEH (I693-I765). PAINTING OF BAMBOO. THE TEXT CONSISTS OF A NARRATIVE AND POEM ON THE "INTOXICATING" BEAUTY OF BAMBOO. IT IS UNCONVENTIONAL IN THAT IT READS FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. Notice in Figure 18 how the writing at the bottom of this painting provides the ground, the nourishing soil, for the bamboo. Writing transmits the Way. The Way is Nature . Nature is writing: it is a book for us to read. Thus we can affirm with Jacques Derrida that there is nothing beyond text. Su ggestions for furth er r eading Billeter, J ean-Frarn;ois. The Chinese Art ofWriting. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. Chiang Yee. Chinese Calligraphy: An Introductio to Its Aesthetic and Technique. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. FIGURE IS. K'uNTs 'AN (Ifo2"'73). DETAIL OF SHAN KAO SHU/ CHANG (TALL MOUNTAINS AND LONG RIVERS). FIGURE I7· HUANG SHEN ( I687I766). PAINTING OF A POMEGRANATE. 52 53 �Calculations of Moon Crater Depths * Anna-Clare Milazzo Jill Nienhiser Objective to obtain pictures of the moon that included the terminator, which is the line that approximately separates the" day" from the "night" on the moon. There is no terminator with a full moon and thus, our images were procured during the first quarter. The terminator also takes into the account the angle at which the sun would appear to an observer on the moon. The sun increases in height by one degree for every degree shift from the terminator. An image of the nebula in Orion (M42) was also taken in order to determine the scale factor in the images. The two stars very close to the nebula (SAO 132321 Theta2-0rion and SAO 132322) are convenient since they are separated by one arc-minute. The depth of craters on the moon's surface can be determined with simple geometrical concepts. Using a ChargeCoupled Device (CCD) camera with a telescope, we obtained pictures of moon craters. By using a picture of stars in the Great Nebula in Orion, we were able to find the scale factor between visual distances and the known radius of the moon. The corresponding triangle comprised of the length of the shadow cast by the sun across a crater; the distance of the crater from the terminator, the radius of the moon , and the depth of the crater can be demonstrated. Setup Analysis All images were taken in the St. John's College Observatory. The pictures of the moon were obtained with a 12" Schmidt- Cassagrain telescope and a Meade CCD camera. For some of the images, a dark cover was held over roughly three quarters of the telescope aperture to diminish marked turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. Images of a star were taken to determine the proper focus of the telescope with the CCD camera in place. This focal length is far different than the usual eyepiece used. Twisting the adjustment knob clockwise by quarter turns brought the image into focus. Procedure Once the telescope was focused, we centered the moon in the finderscope and took a number of images. In order to proceed with our calculations, it was necessary x z T enninator For our calculations, it was necessary to treat the sun as a point source at an infinite distance from the moon . The method for determining the depth of the crater required knowing the radius of the moon , the length of the shadow within the crater, and the distance from the crater to the terminator. The diffraction in the atmosphere of the earth and the irregular geometry of the crater were ignored to simplify the calculation. The scale factors between the images of the moon and the actual distance were found in the following manner. The apparent moon's diameter is known to be approxim ately 30 arc-minutes. The unit of an arc-minute was measured from the image of the Great Nebula. 0 Light Somte Figure 2 d Figme 1 Figm-.:. 3 54 terminator (D) =173.81 km. Solving for H with the above equation yields H= 2.67 km. The radius of the moon (R ) is known to be about l738km. Using the diameter, the scale factor between images and t~e actual moon may be determined. Arate which expresses this scale factor is 30 arc-min.:2 *Rkm:: l arc-min: n5.87 km. In figure l, the crater's shadow and the depth are related to each other through the angle at which the sun light strikes the crater. Sin(theta)= H/L. Figure 2 shows the crater (rotated to demonstrate the coordinate system we are using) with the sunlight striking it at angle 8. The center o_f ~he ~oon is our origin of the xyz coordinate system. Combmmg figure l and figure 2, Rand H lie in the xy plane. Land D are parallel to the xy plane and are thus used as straight lines rather than as arcs. Let it be noted that the rotation shown in figure 2 allows us to treat the moon as a disk. However, the results represent a three-dimensional moon. Figure 3 demonstrat~s the relation between the two similar right triangles formed m the crater and in the sphere of the moon. Because Land Dare parallel to one another, sin(8)= DIR. Thus, a proportion b~­ tween the two triangles may be created as H:L::D:R. Our final equation is H= (L *D)/R. The crater we chose to do our calculations upon is located in the picture of the moon attached. The length of the shadow (L)=3/r3arc-min. Thus L=26.74 km. The distance from the Conclusion The method employed allowed us to determine the crater depth using a very simple triangulation. However, there are expected errors in this procedure. Besides irregular cr~ter geometry and diffraction, error is expected from measurmg distances with a ruler and then converting those numbers to kilometer. Yet, the geometry is elegant and gives a reasonable approximation. Acknowledgments We would like to extend our thanks to Hai Sun and Nelson Hernandez for their help. Bibliography Kelsey, Hoff, and Neff. Astronomy: Activities and Experiments. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company: Iowa, 197r. Levy, David. The Sky: A User's Guide. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, rggr. 55 �' he Half-Day T Aaron Pease The cup lay on his lap, bouncing back and forth beween his knees as the bus lurched up the hill. He cradled it delicately as if it were a chalice, his thumbs caressing the raised gold lettering: "William Ripley, Award for Excellence, 2nd Grade." Katie Man done received one too, and he let his head fall back against the seat as the ramifications of that fact drifted past. The bus jolted over a pothole and disrupted his thoughts, much like Miss Dranski when she had pierced through his daydreaming fog to inform him that he had won the award. He had burst with pride as he walked through the narrow columns of desks to the teacher. But that had changed when he turned around with the trophy and realized that all eyes were on him. He couldn 't see them all, but he could feel them, and they burned like searchlights on his reddening face. He knew that some of them were smirking, and he wished he could just fade back into the blackboard. The eyes followed him as he returned to his desk, and he had spent the rest of the morning feeling guilty for having been singled out. The embarrassment was gone now, andhe leaned back in his seat and wondered somewhat abstractly if the trophy counted as a Christmas gift. The bus turned to the left and his lean toward the window was accelerated bythe impact of an airborne body. The boy pushed the cup forward as his shoulder and cheek were squeezed against the window. "Frankie, get off me!" "I couldn'thelpit, Billy, the bus turned and threw me over on your seat." The boy answered in a husky voice as he dropped his equally husky body into the seat across the aisle. He wiped the hair from his eyes and grinned at Billy. "I didn't mean to ." "You almost busted it!" Billy thrust out the cup as evidence and just as quickly pulled it back as the other boy' s hands swiped outward and narrowly missed it. "It's plastic," Frankie sneered. Billy ignored this and scooted over to the window. He watchedintentlyas the close-set houses staggered past, many decked with ribbons of Christmas lights that streamed down the roof and crested over the gables like waves breaking onto the shore. Their porches hung from the eaves like jowls, and they seemed as much fit for Chrismas as a dog wearing reindeer antlers. His reverie was interrupted as Frankie plopped down in the part of the seat Billy had just vacated. Billy turned his head, but in order to shield the trophy he kept his thin shoulders parallel to the window. "You can't see it, Frankie, it's mine!" he wailed. "C'mon Billy, lemme see it," Frankie replied, his hand dis- regarding the frail fortress surrounding the object in question just as his voice had effectively overridden Billy's entreaty. Billy turned away from Frankie's groping hand until his shoulders were pinned between the wall of the bus and the seat. His head, which he could no longer turn toward Frankie, was wedged into the corner to protect against any sorties from above. Frankie's body followed his hand until he lay on top ofBilly, who had slipped down and become a tent folded about his Ark. Frankie rested atop Billy and continued negotiating. "C'mon, I just wanna take one look at it. It'll just take a minute." Billy didn't answer at first, satisfied with his defenses and content to wait for the bus stop to break the siege. He knew that the next stop, which was his, wasn't Frankie's, even though it was only five blocks from his house . Yet, uncomfortable with the silence that followed his own refusal to answer, he howled into the muffled vacuum , "Frankie, get off me! You can't see it! I know you won't give it back!" Frankie leaned his head toward Billy. "What's that, Billy? I can ' t hear you. I just want to see that dumb plastic trophy. " "GET OFF ME!" With this last protest Billy jerked his elbows up, barely missing Frankie's head. Frankie, taken aback by Billy's general convulsion, jumped away. He sat back on his side of the aisle and regarded Billy with a hurt look. "I was just playin', Billy. You don't have to get all worked up over that stupid thing. See ifyou ever get to play football with us again." Billy lay prone on the seat, his head leaning against the side of the bus as he looked over at Frankie. His cheeks were flushed and he still held the gold cup tightly in both hands, a situation that became precarious as the bus stopped suddenly and he rolled forward and almost fell into the leg space between the seats as his pivoting lower half found the floor . He gathered himself into the seat and stood up, trying to save a last vestige of dignity from Frankie' s steady laughter. He stepped into the aisle and pretended not to notice Frankie staring up at him as he moved toward the door. A feeling of elation caught him as he stepped off the bus into the wet snow. The imminence of Christmas washed over the now distant schoolday and the revelation of his newfound link with Katie pierced through the colorless sky. "Wanna race?" This, accompanied by a hard clap on the back, sent a chill down his spine. He cringed as Frankie continued, "The winner gets the trophy." Billy shook off the hand and jumped away. "Frankie, it's notyoursit'smine! Youcan'thaveit! getaway from me! go 56 home! " He had nowhere to go now., and could only spiral fruitlessly to keep Frankie away. Frankie stepped around him and grabbed the trophy. They stood there, Frankie grasping the cup while Billy held the base in his trembling hands. "Go!" With that Frankie took off. Billy was pulled along behindhim but tried to resist. The cup tore away from its base and into Frankie's thick hands. Billy stopped and stared at the plastic square that remained in his grasp. "C'mon , Billy, finish the race or I'll win!" But Billy did not hear him. He looked at the meaningless lettering with an empty gaze. He gave off a low moan and began to run, gripping the remnant tightly in his hand, past Frankie, past the silent houses whose Christmas finery could not assuage the scowl with which they always regarded each other, the street, and now the boy stumbling past. He ran home, shedding muffled sobs into the still air as soon as he had breath enough to release them. He stormed up to the house, flung wide the front door, and charged up the steps, his voice fluctuatingwith his movements until they were both cut off by the slamming of his bedroom door. He had passed his bewildered mother who, alarmed, followed quickly after him . She had been cleaning the house again, as she had just gone to Confession and revealed her many small misdeeds to Father Mitchell. But that didn't help and maybe she had forgotten a few, so she decided one was laziness since vigilance can't be a sin. She was a thin woman, on the tall side with faded red hair. Her features were sharp, much sharper than in her youth, as if time, instead of dulling, had refined and narrowed them, each passing trial and tribulation honing and whetting a blade so fine it soon would be nothing more than an edge. She came up to his room, and managed to filter his story through his sobs. She wiped his tears away, and gave him an embrace that seemed to surround him with the warmth and comfort of the womb. But then she spoke. "Who did this, William?" It was on the tip of his tongue, but, when he opened his mouth to speak, he found he could not answer. He remembered that time when Frankie and his buddy Craig had ambushed Steve and plastered him with snowballs. Steve had gone home and told his mom, and she called the school, and the next day Frankie and Craig got paddled by Sister Elmira. They hated Steve after that, and even Billy felt that Steve had breached some unspoken agreement. So Billy did not answer. His mother pressed his hand tighter and asked again. But there was something else, something more than the mere realization that his friends' punishments could be much worse than anything his parents doled out. He was ashamed that he had allowed Frankie to bully him and take his trophy. He wanted it back. But he realized now that he had to do more than just get it. He didn't want to be the baby who cried until he got his lollipop back. He had to get it back himself, somehow. Even as the thought occurred to him he knew it was wilder than any daydream he could concoct, but his resolve remained in defiance of his child's logic. He remained silent. His mother, caught between an objectless indignation and a compassion that was the hopeless cons01t of justice, abruptly rose and released his hand. She left the room on the verge of anger, not wanting the boy to witness her sudden swing of emotion. Children were so unpredictable , one moment wailing as if they were mortally wounded, the next moment going to great lengths to defend their oppressors. She tried to remember what it was like to be a child, but it was like trying to catch a handful of dust motes wafting through a lonely shaft of sunlight in an old, cluttered room. He spent his solitude lying on his bed, gazing at the bare pedestal of the trophy. The shame was still there, but even now he could not muster any resentment against Frankie. He began to think that, in refusing his mother, he had done something Frankie would understand and sympathize with, and that somehow the indefinable but everpresent connection that bound all children had between them been strengthened. He hadn't tattled, and somehow that salvaged some of the pride he had left at the bus stop. His reverie was shattered by the ringing phone. His mother yelled through the door that it was for him, and he got up reluctantly and went to the phone. It was Craig. Billy gleaned from him there was a football game down at the public school in a half-hour. This was a difficult process because Craig, whenever he became excited or was saying something funny, sounded like a braying donkey. As he hung up the phone, the full import of the call hit him. By now everyone would know that Frankie had taken his trophy, that he was a wimp and a pushover and couldn't stick up for himself. He dreaded what they would say to him, but he decided to go anyway, not so much because he knew that eventually he would live it down, but because he couldn't (and didn't want to) avoid his friends forever. He walked down the street slowly and resolutely, like a criminal being led to to his execution who, with the hope of a reprieve inexplicably fresh in his mind, is determined that, whatever the outcome, he would dignify his own memory and that of others. His head still ached from his previous exertions, and his tears were still caked on his face like dry creek beds. He concentrated on the houses looming before him , filling his mind with their every detail, as if their massive immobilitywould somehow bring him to a halt. They we e huge and rambling and mysterious, monuments to a faded intention of opulence that once crowned the hill overlooking the town. Theywere meant to be a gilded gateway, but were now merely a distraction from the working-class neighborhood which lay beyond. Their images rose up within him, stone bulwarks stemming the emotional tide within. But he kept moving, and one after another they vanished from his imagination like afterthoughts. He was the last to arrive as he half-slid, half-walked down the slushy slope to the field. As he crunched through the ankle-deep snow he was met by a flying football, which he caught despite his thick mittens. He looked hard at each boy there, searching their faces for some shared secret or an unpleasant smile, but he found nothing. Only Frankie seemed to avoid him. Billy was caught now between that simple, deceptive elation that only implies the absence of worry and a 57 �Frankie's sturdy, wideboned face. The only reason he could imagine that Frankie was not astride him and pounding him into the ground was that he had gotten luckier than he would believe possible. He crouched, poised to run, yet he knew full well that he would take his beating in peace. It had not occurred to him that what he had been playing was a game, and that what he had done was not only an essential part of the game, but if done well, could rouse the respect, admiration, and even the fear of his peers. The pride that he had just discovered he possessed he figured everybody else had too , only more of it. Like the child who usually understands the joke too late, he thought that what he had just understood, everyone else had known for a while. This pride would teach him to endure pain and defeat, not because it was the nature of pride, but because he had felt pain and been defeated and probably would continue to be , and he needed a way to cope with it. And Billy, who in his awe of Frankie saw him as the kid in the rocket ship reaching for the stars, like the poster in the hallway at school, knew Frankie must have the same pride, but not the pain , the defeat, or the loss. No doubt Frankie would deal with the pitch and roll in his otherwise steady upward trajectory with the same necessity as a plane lowering its flaps and adjusting its rudder to maintain its altitude. But Frankie did nothing. He was helped to his feet and with merely a glance at him mumbled, " Damn , Billy, you almost broke my neck. " The game didn ' t last much longer. Billy felt again that simple elation but this time gave in to it. He felt indistinguishable from Frankie or Craig or any of the others , and he basked in the anonymity. So he was not surprised when he went with everybody else to Frankie ' s to watch HBO and drink hot chocolate, even though his parents expected him home for dinner. They piled through the side door, throwing off snowcaked gloves, hats, coats, and the damp socks rattling mound in their boots. They tumbled down the steps into the rec r oom; the TV sprang to life , and they nestled into the deep cushioned couches. " I gotta go to the bathroom." "Upstairs to the left." Billywalked up the stairs . The wet, uncomfortable elastic of his sweatpants forced him to shuffle up the stairs with short steps as if a chain was binding his legs together. He stepped out into the reassuring blackness of the hallway, the soft light of the kitchen to his right aglow with the sounds of Frankie's mother preparing food, and to his left a muted blue haze emanated from the otherwise dark living room. He was in the bathroom only for a moment, and he stepped back into the hallway. H e stood there for a moment, enj oying the stillness of the house, the noises of activity remote enough to allow him to contemplate them. He tiptoed into the living room. The television was on, its mahogany casing intricately embroidered, and it crouched in the corner, roaring not with sound but with light, which bathed the room in blue. It was absorbed by the metallic ornaments which hung on the metallic tree . Across from the tree, Frankie' s burly father lay in a lounge chair with his feet guarded, suspicious aspect that he knew he could n ot ignore. No doubt they were waiting for him to mess up (drop a ball, miss a tackle, trip) and then the floodgates would open. He remembered a time over the summer, when theywere all here playing baseball. Somehow he had managed to get a hit, and as he led off first base, he gazed up at the deep blue sky and thick white clouds which had broken free of the encircling trees, and became entranced. One of the clouds looked like a dragon, and he imagined himself a knight rearing his white charger before galloping across the blue expanse to save Katie. Meanwhile, the pitcher had thrown the ball over to Frankie at first base, who had leisurelywalked up to Billy and tagged him out. He had walked back to the makeshift dugout shamefaced, the angry cries of his own team burning his ears. He had messed up in the worst way: he had done something worthy of being made fun of and had hurt his team's chances ofwinning. He had determined then that something like that would never happen again. The teams were picked up. The best athletes in the class, Frankie and Craig, displayed a political savvy that rivalled even the most polished politician of Tarn any Hall. They managed, day in and day out, during recess or after-school, to place themselves and a select few on the same team.Using cajolery, jerryrigging, glad handing, and threats, their dynasty showed no signs of crumbling. Billy, as usual , was on the other team, ready once again to play the New Jersey Generals to their Harlem Globetrotters, although this was an imagined match up between the Steelers and the Cowboys. The outcome was never in doubt, but Billy surprised even himself with his play. He caught all the balls thrown to him and otherwise managed not to be an embarrassment. As the game was winding down , Craig hiked the ball and pitched it to Frankie, who , despite his bulk and the sliding snow, dodged tacklers half his size. Billy saw that Frankie would run his way and began to move forward. As would-be tacklers dove and missed , some intentionally, he realized a collison was inevitable . He realized that he too could dive and miss, but overriding that thought was fear, a fear mixed with a pride that could stomach any outcome but the discovery that he had been afraid. He was running full speed now, and Frankie saw him and made n o effort to spin away. At the last moment Billy threw his whole body sideways , almost on all fours , and hit Frankie directly at the knees. " Fuuck! !" The expletive was quickly muffled in the snow. Billy turned around, his body trembling and weak from the release of adrenalin. Frankie rolled slowly onto his back, his face caked with fast-melting snow that concealed any tears. He repeated his first shocked reaction several times with a low moan. He had landed on his face. "Frankie, are you okay?" "Whoa, Billy, you almost flipped him! " Everyone was torn between looking at Billy and the unfamiliar sight of an upended Frankie, so they reserved their stares for one and their words for the other. That was it, then . Billy clenched his fist and just as quickly unclenched it. He knew how futile it would be against 58 again at his prize. It seemed to be in motion , fading slowly back into the mantle through the double row of pictures whose reflections continued through the mirror. He felt like he was witnessing a procession, the cup a ceremonial grail moving through the everpresent review of courtiers , whose plastic smjles (as always grasping the significance of nothing) and gaudy dress were outshone by the faceless block of wood and its priceless burden. The vision continued to drift regally away from him; he was in the court of a king, he concluded, and the chalice was a gift to the king. Or maybe it was from the king. His back caught the hard edge of the banister, and the vision dissolved into the warm blue glow of the living room. He turned towards the basement door and went downstairs. "Frankie, I gotta go home." "All right, see ya. " The others were glued to the television and didn't bother to echo Frankie. Billy didn't mind, and he pulled on his coat and boots. He sprang up the stairs and out into the night. He walked around Frankie's house to the sidewalk and gazed through the front window into the living room. It flickered still with the soft blue light which Frankie's family would gather around as if it were a hearth. This comforted him, and as he walked down the sidewalk, he thought again about the trophy. Maybe itwasn ' ta king's to give or a king's to receive; maybe it was still his somehow even though it remained in its proper place on Frankie' s mantle. He continued home, wrestling unsuccessfully with the problem as the falling snow caressed his cheeks and drifted peacefully about the haloed streetlamps. up. He was still in his work clothes and he was snoring, head thrown back. The features of his face seemed a foundering ship slowly sinking into the plump expanse of his cheeks. Billy stopped, his breath drawn inward. He saw it. It was on the mantle, reflected in the mirror as if to prevent any initial disbelief. It had been r eplanted on a nondescript block of wood, and was flanked either side by pictures ofFrankie' s several brothers at various dances and proms. They all seemed to be escorting the same girl, a child-woman wrapped in a glittering glovelike dress which revealed more than was intended, and whose mountainous, overarching mass of hair made superfluous the balloons and confetti meant to serve as a backdrop. He was already moving toward it, slipping noiselessly past the sleeping man. He was filled with the hopeless desire which follows hard upon the realization that had he never seen it again he would have been none the worse. Slowly his hand reached upward towards the cup as he raised up onto his tiptoes. "What you doin' boy?" Billy jumped. Frankie's father was sitting bolt upright in his chair, looking at him. He retracted the footrest, got up, and lumbered towards Billy. Billy shrank back, but the cold fireplace stopped him, and as much as he wished to turn and scramble up the chimney, he knew the fireplace was fake. The father was close now, and he reached over Billy's head (so that Billy winced in spite of himself) and took the trophy down. His face softened as he gazed at the gold plastic. "I know why someone like you would be jealous and want something like this. Francis told me he got it from his teacher for bein' the hardest worker in class, you know, bringing his grades up. I think it's important to work hard, 'cause that' s how you get anywhere in life. He got to stand up 'in front of everybody and they all clapped for him . The teacher talked to me a while back about his deficiencies, not puttin' forth an effort and so on, so this time I'm kinda eager to see his improvement. Usually I just throw his report card in the trash, 'cause that's usually what's on it. Francis told me some kids was tryin' to take that trophy from him on the way home but he fought 'em, though there was enough of them that they still managed to break it. He came home on the verge of tears so I went right downstairs and fixed it up as best I could. You wasn't one of them, was you?" "N-no sir." "I didn't think so. You don't look the type. Francis, he gets a hard time of it at home. His brothers are always mes sin' with him, and Maggie and I are so busy at the mill we can't do anything about it. I guess I can be a little hard on him too. I wish I was at home more, and I could spend more time with him, throwin' the football and whatnot, but I'm gettin' old and can't do the things I used to. But I got him a bike and one of them Atari things, so I imagine he'll be too busywith them to notice. I'm proud of him, though, real proud. Now don't you go takin' this now." He placed the trophy back on the mantle, tousled Billy's hair, and walked out of the room, his cheeks billowing with pride. Billy stood quietly for a moment, and then began to make his way across the carpet. Halfway, he turned and looked 59 �Language and Mind: an Examination of the Phaedo and Other Dialogues of Plato * Alan Rubenstein Among the first dilemmas a student of philosophy faces is whether to proceed with the belief that the truth is commensurable with his own intellect. What is the discussion of philosophical topics supposed to achieve? Do we , by making speeches and challenging the ideas of other's speeches, advance ourselves toward any real goal which we can call truth? One might suggest that philosophy is mer ely a game of words or perhaps a means to some other limited end and that our language has n othing to do with reality except perhaps to name it in a superficial way. This dilemma is dearly a crossroads at which a student must decide what philosophy will mean to him-what will be at stake in his study. In this paper, I will investigate Socrates ' position on this question of intelligibility and, as a consequence, explore his ideas on the relationship between language and reality. Socrates believes in the intelligibility of the world. His way of understanding man 's r elation to truth represents a defense against the looming threat of skepticism and misology. It is a peculiar kind of defense, h owever. Belief in th e intelligibility of the world is not a conclusion to which one comes from an argument. It is, itself, the foundation of argumentation. In th e Phaedo, the intelligibility of the world becomes a central, although often implicit, issue at stake in the discussion. Socrates explains what it really means either to assert or deny that some truth can be gotten at through argumentation. The defense of the notion that our world is intelligible is , in part, the plausibility and attractiveness of the arguments which rest on it as their foundation. Another aspect of its defense is the ways in which it contributes to and stems from a more virtuous lifestyle. The first task of this paper will be to make explicit the implicit issue of intelligibility in the Phaedo and show the ways that Socrates convinces his interlocutors (including us as readers ) that believing in intelligibility is permissible as well as beautiful. The second part of this paper will focus on the difficulties which accompany holding such a position. Socrates mentions Anaxagoras as one of his early influences, but claims that his adherence to intelligibility led him to an extreme position on what could be apprehended by a human mind and an extreme denial of the role of sensible phenomena in causation. This denial forced Anaxagoras into hypocrisy when he tried to explain the specifics of how things come to be and pass away. Socrates' view is that the extreme of Anaxagoras is in need of reconciling with the facts of everyday life , yet this is difficult to accomplish without abandoning intelligibility and once again placing truth in the ever-moving sea of sense-experience. Socrates manages to accomplish this reconciling, however, by positing a system where words, or 'A.oym ', are at the center of the cause of generation and corruption. Unfolding how this can be so will be the goal of the third part of this paper. Language is an activity of the r ational intellect and it is an image of the reality that truly is to the same extent as are the sensible objects. Part of Socrates' system is an assertion that we, as limited beings , can n ot commune directly with reality, its ~lf, and thus we must r ely on images of that reality. In this way, truth is commensurable with our minds but not limited to what they can encompass. Which images we make use of, however, is the crucial question . Our avenue to truth lies not in the images which are the sensible objects , but in the images which are our language, our speeches, our A.o yot , which express them an d, at the same time, point to the something universal and eternal. I will make extensive use of the Republic in order to investigate what it means for there to be images of reality which are different in kind. At the end of this third section of the paper, I will look specifically at the relationship between the A.oym and the forms , or ,,. nori'. This is a necessary task as the forms are obviously crucial to Socrates' idea of what the reality is which language images and also what the truth is at which argumentation aims. In this sub-section, I will refer to the Parmenides, in the hope that by addressing Parmenides' challenges to the young Socrates and his idea of the forms I can find an avenue into understanding the mature Socrates' idea of forms and language. This section on the nori will be somewhat more speculative than what proceeds it. What I intend is to give an interpretation of the relationship between the A.oyot and the El.Ort which will make sense of Socrates' system of an intelligible world articulated through language. r. The Attractiveness oflntelligibility Introduction The explicit issue at stake in the Phaedo is the immortality of the soul. This issue is set in the dramatic context of an account of the last day of Socrates' life. At one point, Socrates says, "I do not think that anyone who heard me now ... could say that I am babbling and discussing things that do not concern me. " (Phaedo 7ob) The issue of whether the soul perishes at the death of the body is, obviously, a critical issue for Socrates and his friends at this moment. There is another issue, though , which is central to the argument in the dialogue and which also fits into the dramatic context. This is the issue 60 of whether or n ot the world is intelligible; whether one can get at truth through argumentation . As the interlocutors , especially the Thebans Simmias and Cebes, find problems with Socrates' argument, the implicit question is raised whether any answer to such an important question as immortality can be convincing or comforting. This issue of intelligibility is appropriate to the dramatic events of the dialogue because on it depends the question of whether debating with one's colleagues into the meaning of things is the right activity for a man about to die and, moreover, for any man who wants to live rightly in the ultimate sense. To put it bluntly, if the activity of argumentation is not directed toward a truth which is real in the deepest sense then Socrates has wasted his final hours and the majority of his life. Thus , the Phaedo becomes another defense of the philosophic way oflife. The activity of dialectic rests on the notion that the world is ultimately understandable. If it is not, then all that is left is the activity of the contradictor: spite his distance in spac.e and time , Echecrates feels this anxiety. We , as readers, feel it as well. By means of this interjection, Plato temporarily removes the walls between the levels of the dialogue. It is appropriate that he should do so at this moment because it is here that the second main issue of the dialogue comes from out of the background to the fore of the debate . As living beings, Socrates' listeners at every level feel the importance of the issue of immortality. As students of philosophy, the same importance exists for every listener in regards to the intelligibility of the world. The two possibilities which Phaedo suggests are (a) that we are worthless critics or (b) that the subject admits of no certainty. Either of these options amounts to a confession of the incommensurability of our intellects with the truth. These two possibilities will resurface as the alternatives to intelligibilitywhich loom over the discussion at all times. What is at stake is the way oflife of all those who search for truth through argumentation. Mi so logy The interjection of Phaedo's narrative voice allows us to see Socrates' reaction to the anxiety into which his interlocutors have been plunged. Phaedo describes him as " sharply ... aware of the effect the discussion had on us. " (Phaedo 8ga) When Phaedo returns to his recounting of the events in the cell, it is significant that the discussion he takes up is between Socrates and himself. Phaedo is a participant in the jail-cell argument only at this place- only when what is at stake is argumentation , itself. The man who disappears into anonymity as the narrator of the dialogue takes on a real dramatic personae for this discussion only. This is another case of blurring the division between levels of the dialogue in order to examine argumentation directly. Socrates begins his rebuttal of the Thebans ' objections by stating how much is really at stake in them. The following interchange shows where he believes one' s priorities should lie: "You know how those in particular who spend their time studying contradiction in the end believe themselves to have become very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument" (Phaedo gobc) Socrates' task in responding to Simmias and Cebes is twofold. He must convince them that their objections do not disprove that the soul is immortal and he must convince all those present that dialectic is not a worthless endeavor because the world is ultimatelyintelligible to the mind of man. The former task is the more explicit. What I will first demonstrate is that the latter task is implicitly present in the dialogue. Iri doing this, I will show wh at it means to Socrates for the truth about things to be ultimately intelligible. Socrates' innovations regarding language , which will be the focus of the succeeding sections of this paper, can be better understood with this meaning as a backdrop. "Tomorrow, Phaedo, (Socrates) said, you will probably cut this beautiful hair. Likely enough , Socrates, I said. Not if you take my advice, he said. Why not? said I. It is today that I shall cut my hair and you yours, if ou a gum nt di es on us, and we cannot revive it." (Phaedo 8gbc) Simmias and Cebes' Challenge to Intelligibility Plato uses the multi-leveled nature of the dialogue to present the issue of intelligibility. After Simrnias and Cebes raise their objections, Echecrates and Phaedo-the men in the town of Phil us discussing Socrates' final hours long after the events occurred-re-enter the dialogue for the first time. The action of the dialogue is moved to one level up -on ~ level closer to the reader's point ofview. This happens when Phaedo says, By suggesting that Phaedo cut his beautiful hair, Socrates expr esses his belief that the death of the argument is more worthy of mourning than the death of a man. He also suggests that if the argument dies , beauty will somehow be sacrificed with it, implying a close connection between truth and beauty. This is on e indication that the issue of what is beautiful h as a proper role in developing one's opinion regarding the n ature of argument. It is not the rebuttal of any single argument, of course , which should occasion such mourning, but rather the death of argumentation , itself. Simmias and Cebes introduce a state of perplexity by presenting arguments that seem reasonable and convincing. More important than the particulars of the Thebans' objections , the interlocutors are discouraged by the very fact that there seem to be two mutually exclusive "When we heard what they said we were all depressed, as we told each other afterwards. We h ad been quite convinced by the previous argument and they see med to confuse us again , and to drive us to doubt not only what had already bee n said but also wh at was goi ng to be said, lest we be worthless critics or the subject itself admitted of no certainty." (Phaedo 88c ) Phaedo was present in the jail cell, feeling the anxiety at the prospect of unintelligibility. Echecrates, hearing about the discussion at second hand, feels the same anxiety, as is made clear in his response, "By the gods, Phaedo , you have my sympathy, for as I listen to you n ow I find myself saying to myself: "What argument shall we trust?'" (Phaedo 88c) De- 61 �ideas which are both appealing. If things are left in the state of confusion which they introduce with their alternative arguments, it will seem to indicate to all that argumentation is a worthless enterprise and the only 'wisdom' lies in skepticism and distrust. After promising to fight the objections raised "as long as the daylight lasts," (Phaedo 8gc) Socrates introduces this danger of skepticism or ' misology. ' Misology arises factory answer. They are fearful that their objections may really be devastating to Socrates' argument. Consequently, all the interlocutors would be hard pressed to believe in the productivity of any argument regarding such an important matter as immortality. However, belief in intelligibility inspires much courage, as Socrates shows them. He tells them that he, like the swans of Apollo, is gladly singing before his death. Socrates' song is his argument and he will not be so fearful as to leave it halfcompleted because of the threat that any objection would be too strong for the argument to bear. Therefore, he says, "you must speak and ask whatever you want as long as the authorities will allow it." (Phaedo 85b) Simmias responds to this with a statement which shows that he , too , has a tendency toward believing that the world is intelligible and that this is cause for a courageous attitude: "When one who lacks skill in arguments puts his trust in an argum ent as being true, then sh only afterwards believes it to be fal se- as sometimes it is and sometimes it is not-and so with another argument and then another ." (Phaedo gob) This experience, common to all students of truth, forces one into a decision . Either one can become a skeptic, believing that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliabilityin any object or in any argument, or one can maintain their trust in the intelligibility of things and therefore continue to search for truth through argumentation . Socrates tells Phaedo that one is not compelled to accept the first of these alternatives. He explains this when he says, "I believe, as perhaps you do , that precise knowledge on that subject is impossible or extremely difficult in our prese nt life, but that it shows a very poor spirit not to exa mine thoroughly what is said about it, and to desist before one is exha usted by an all-round investigation ." (Phaedo 85bc) It is no matterthat 'precise knowledge' (aa q>cc; w)Evm) is near impossible on matters like immortality (a position which Socrates also maintains , as I will discuss later) . One must have the courage to pursue the matter with his intellect as far he are capable. This courage is a product and a cause of the notion that the truth which is sought is commensurable with our minds. Despite Simmias' invocation to courage, the interlocutors, including Simmias himself fall into the fearfulness I described earlier when both The bans put forward their piercing objections. Thus it is necessary for Socrates to, in Phaedo 'swords, " (recall) us from our flight and defeat and (turn) us around to join him in the examination of their argument." (Phaedo 8ga) Courage, again, stems from belief in intelligibility. During the discussion of misology, Socrates gives one more exhortation to the courageous behavior which the search for truth represents. He says, " If there is any system of argument which is true and sure and can be learn ed, it would be a sad thing if a man .. . should hate and revile (arguments) all the rest of his life, ande deprived of the truth and knowledge of reality." (Loeb, Phaedo god)' The possibility of there being a true and sure system of argument, Socrates suggests , should keep one from becoming a misologist. It is because Socrates will not accept the possibility that the world is unintelligible that he tries so fervently to deter his listeners from becoming mere contradictors and not seekers of truth. Courage, Beauty and the Choice oflntelligibility Plato does not present his readers with any solid proof upon which Socrates stakes his belief in intelligibility. Instead, he creates events an d speeches which suggest that the search for truth is a worthy endeavor because it is beautiful and because it is connected to ethical virtues such as courage. One point at which he suggests the connection between courage and the belief in intelligibility is immediately before Simmias and Cebes make their objections. The Thebans are hesitant to bring up their objections, for which Simmias offers the following reason: "We should not allow (µl] napwiµEv) into our minds the conviction that argum entation has nothing so und about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take co urage and be eager to attain soundness." (Phaedo goe) The hortatory subjunctive, 'µri naptwµcv' indicates that Socrates is delivering an exhortation to act in a certain way. He is saying 'let us not pass into our mind the hatred of argument.' Given the choice-and it is a choice, not a compulsionbetween believing that argumentation is faulty or believing that argumentation is the only avenue to the truth, Socrates indicates that the latter is the choice made by the courageous man and the lover ofbeauty. This position is consistent with the one which Socrates puts forward in the Meno when he says, "Both of us have been in difficulty for some time, and each of us has been urging the other to question you because we wanted to hear what yo u would say, but we hesitated to bother you, lest it be displeasing to you in your present misfortune ." (Phaedo 84d) Simmias is expressing a lack of confidence in Socrates' courage to take up their objections given his present circumstances. This can, of course, be understood as simple politeness to a man who has only hours left to live. However, there is more behind the Thebans' hesitation than Simmias says. These men know that they hold a threat to all of the interlocutors' trust-including their own-in the possibility of a satis- "I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search 62 for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it isnot possible to find out what we d9 not know and that we must not look for it."(Meno 86bc) Cebes, for it requires a thorough investigation of the cause of generation and destruction" (Phaedo 95e) It is here that Socrates again raises the issue of intelligibility, this time presenting the difficulties and limitations which accompany it. Here, as well as in the Phaedo, the essential connection between holding that the world is intelligible and leading a virtuous life is made evident. The view that truth is intelligible to the mind of man is an idea too close to the foundation of all argument to be proven in the conventional sense. One would have to use argumentation to validate argument. To understand this difficulty, one only needs to imagine a conversation with a 'true' and uncompromising skeptic. The would-be proponent of the proof forintelligibilitywill always be accused of ' sophistry' orwordmixing and will never get off the ground unless it is agreed upon, in an axiomatic way, that some sort of truth is accessible through discussion. This axiom (from 'asw~,' worthy) does not compel its acceptance. However, it attracts acceptance with its beauty and its inspiration to lead a courageous intellectual life. Socrates makes the case for accepting this axiom not only by the things he says, but by the very act of spending his last hours in philosophical conversation. For that matter, he makes the case by the way oflife he has always led, centered as it was around dialectic. If Socrates' life has an appeal to us and to his listeners, then the axiom of intelligibility will attract acceptance. Natural Science In this investigation, Socrates gives a brief autobiography of his struggles with causation early in life. The earliest part of this struggle was his interest in natural science' (n:cpL <j>uocw~ LO't'op1..av). Socrates describes the fruits of this early experience when he says, "This investigation made me quite blind even to those things which I and others thought that I clearly knew before." (Phaedo g6c) Socrates became disillusioned with natural science because its net effect was to confuse him. Even the simplest problems came to be puzzles. For example, Socrates says, "I will not even allow myself to say that where one is added to one either the one to which it is added or the one that is added becomes two, or that the one added and the one to which it is added become two because of the addition of the one to the other." (Phaedo 96e) Socrates' account makes it clear that he became disillusioned with this method of inquiry into nature because it led away from intelligibility, whereas he was convinced that the proper method of explaining generation and corruption should lead toward intelligibility. The axiom of intelligibility forced Socrates to look elsewhere for the final answer to this question of cause. It is important to understand what this method of inquiry referred to as 'n:Ept <j>uaEw~ LO't'Optav' is and why it should lead one to confusion as it did for Socrates. There is an indication of the answer to this in the image Socrates describes of an eclipsing sun. He says, II. The diffi.cultyofintelligibility Introduction "Thus prepared, Simmias and Cebes, (Socrates) said, I come to deal with your arguments." (~ g1b) Socrates, as he proceeds to deal with the explicit challenges which Simmias and Cebes have raised, maintains this notion of intelligibility as an accepted axiom from which he will make his counter-arguments. The issue of intelligibility recedes to the background during his rebuttal of Simmias' objection. However, it comes to the fore again when Socrates deals with Cebes'. Cebes has potently challenged Socrates by assenting to much ofwhat he has said but maintaining that immortality has not yet been established from this. This partial agreement makes his objection more plausible to the listeners and therefore more threatening to their sense that an understan'dable answer can be found. Socrates restates Cebes' objection saying, "I thought that I must be careful to avoid the experience of those who watch (moJtouµEvm) an eclipse of the sun for some of them ruin their eyes unlessthey watch (mcoJtO>Vtm) its reflection in water or some such material. A similar thought crossed my mind, and I feared that my soul would be altogether blinded ifl looked (~AE Jtwv ) at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses" (~ ggd) The method of investigating nature that confused Socrates attempts to understand it through the act of perceiving sensible phenomena. The verb 'OKon:£o.>' has the meaning of to look about' and also 'to contemplate or consider.' (cf. Liddell and Scott) The image gets its power from the ambiguity of looking with the eyes as opposed to look.ingwith the mind. As is the case in many places throughout the dialogues, vision and contemplation, seeing and knowing, are paired in an imagistic way. However, this ambiguity is dropped in the second sentence when the word '~AEJtcov' - a looking which is unambiguously with the senses- is used. This word, and generally the image of looking into the sun, suggests why natural science confuses: it looks for truth through instruments of the body, making secondary the role of intellect. A further indication of this is the image of an eclipse of the sun, in particular. An eclipsed sun, unlike that which we see day to day, is "To prove that the soul is strong, that it is divine, that it existed before we were born as men, all this, you say, does not show the soul to be immortal but only long-lasting ... indeed, its very entering into a human body was the beginning of its destruction." (Phaedo 95cd) In order to convince Cebes, Socrates must show him that the soul is not a more durable thing of the same kind as the body, i.e. long lasting,' but that it is something eternal. Socrates does not address Cebes' objection directly at first. He says, "This is no unimportant problem that you raise, 63 �r I obscured in a way that can mislead one to believe it can be looked at without causing damage. Only during an eclipse, when it seems safe to look, could one be blinded. Looking at an eclipse of the sun is analogous to investigating the truth of things by means of the facts of daily life which we perceive with our senses. It does not seem that one is being blindedi.e. losing their ability to make things intelligible-yet this is what is happening. Any thinker who seeks to challenge the notion that knowledge is perception must convince his challengers that they are deceived. After all, the most commonly held and intuitive' view is that those things which we perceive are the most true things of all. Natural science, the mode of investigation which Socrates shies away from, is blinding to his soul. It leads to un-resolvable confusion. The question remains, however, why should investigating truth through visible phenomena lead to such confusion? Socrates only gives a few examples of the kind of causes which natural science yielded for him. One of these is the addition of one and one, cited above. Another is the idea of growth being caused by food, for food "adds flesh to flesh and bones to bones." (Phaedo 96d) The difficulty Socrates might have had with these explanations of cause is that they are simply additive. They point out that where there were two things there is now one or where there was one there are now two, but they do not answer the question of why? in the way that a true theory of causation should. Socrates says of the natural scientists' kind of answer to the placement of the earth in the heavens, rect everything and arrange each thing in the way that was best." (Phaedo 97c) This is the activity of the rational intellect-to aim at what is best-and therefore, ifMind is the cause of all things, the cause of generation and destruction is reducible to the most advantageous way things can be arranged: I never thought that Anaxagoras, who said that those things were directed by Mind, would bring in any other cause for them than that it was best for them to be as they are." (Phaedo 98a) Socrates claims, however, that this theory of cause fails in its application. Anaxagoras himself was unable to explain the generation and destruction of things without abandoning Mind and ascribing material causes to them: "The man made no use of Mind, nor gave it any responsibility for the management of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things." (Phaedo 98bc) These material causes hearken back to the additive causes of the natural scientists. Socrates gives an example of the difference between what Anaxagoras should have said and what he actually said when he explains cause in respect to his own rational mind. Rather than say that Socrates is in his jail cell because his bones and sinews are arranged in the way that they are, Socrates rightly points out the real cause of his being there: "One man surrounds the earth with a vortex to make the heavens keep it in place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid ... they believe that they will some time discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together more." (~ 99c) If Anaxagoras really means that Mind directs all things, then Socrates believes he should be able to offer an explanation for their generation and decay, not by reference to ether and air, but by reference to what Mind considers more right and honorable. Anaxagoras' suggestion leads one to hope that the cause of all things can be explained relatively simply based on the principle that Mind on the grand scale functions like mind on the individual level. This hope is the one that Socrates would not have exchanged ... "for a fortune." (Phaedo 98b). These hopes are nonetheless dashed, however. Mind may be the cause, but it is by no means simple to sort out the best and most honorable reasons for all the events we experience. Here, again, the image of the eclipsing sun is instructive. On the one hand, as I discussed above, the image points to the mistake of trying to grasp truth through the senses. The image also points to the futility of trying to comprehend (CJKontw) the source of all truth. This source of all truth is, in Anaxagoras' system, Mind and, in the metaphor, the sun. Mind may be-even, perhaps, must be-the cause of all things, but it can not be apprehended directly. Recall Simmias' comment about the difficulty, or even impossibility of gaining precise knowledge about a subject like immortality (cf. Phaedo 85c). The Greek there for 'precise knowledge' is aaq>t~ nOtvm, which can also be rendered 'to see clearly.' To Socrates' thinking as well, it is impossible, or at least only possible for a very few, to see the sun or to understand the ordering Mind clearly. This is, perhaps, why Anaxagoras fails in the application of his system. It does not mean, however, "For by the dog, I think these sinews and bones could long ago have been in Megara or among the Boeotians, taken there by my belief as to the best course , iflhad not thoughtitmorerightand honorable to endure whatever penalty the city ordered rather than escape and run away." (Phaedo 98e-99a) Looking for answers to such questions in the visual phenomena always simply yields more observations and more questions. No material answer will ever be 'strong and immortal' enough to answer the question, 'why is the Earth held together?' or 'why does food add flesh to flesh?' The type of answer which is appropriate to such questions becomes clear in the next section of Socrates' autobiography. Anaxagoras and Mind Socrates says that, after renouncing the method of natural science, he developed a new method of his own. His account of this new method begins with a description of his encounter with the theory of Anaxagoras who assigned Mind as the cause of all things. Socrates describes his response to finding this theory by saying, "I was delighted with this cause and it seemed to me good, in a way, that Mind should be the cause of all." (Phaedo 97c) It should not be surprising that Socrates was excited by this idea. In it, one has intelligibility of the world at its purest. If the cause of all things is the working of a rational mind, how could our rational intellects not be commensurable with the truth about reality? Here was a suggestion that would not yield endless confusion. Socrates explains, logically, that, "If this were so, the directing Mind would di- 64 some such material.' This is, first of all, another subtle indication of the mixing, the furw,' he is accomplishing. The sun, representing Mind, is reflected in water, representative of always-moving visible phenomena. It is still the sun that is being seen, indicating that the system is, first and foremost, intelligible. However, it is only capable of being seen in the water, indicating that the facts of everyday life are not without impact on the true system of understanding. They are, in fact, the location' of truth, in that they are what occasion language. In the dialogue Timaeus, the claim is made that the true value of our sight is that it leads to philosophy: that a system which makes the truth intelligible to our minds is impossible. Socrates' new method has the task of preserving the intelligibility of Anaxagoras' system without pretending that reality can be apprehended directly. He must describe a way that our minds can remain commensurable with the truth without having the capacity to apprehend it directly. III. Socrates' Solution to Intelligibility: The cpupoo Method' and Language Mixing Wet and Dry Socrates introduces his new method of investigation by saying, "Sight, then, in myjudgmentis the cause of the highest benefits to us in that no word of our present discourse about the universe could have been spoken had we never seen stars, Sun and sky." (Timaeus 47a) "I do not any longer persuade myself that I know why a unit or anything else comes to be, or perishes or exists by the old method of investigation, and I do not accept it, but I have a confused method of my own." (Phaedo Sight occasions language and language is the articulation which points to the truth beyond any visible things, to reality, itself. Kinds oflmages One misconception Socrates anticipates in putting forth the image of the eclipsing sun is corrected when he says, 97b) The words 'confused method' are interpreted from the Greek verb used in this sentence, q>'Upw . This word has the primary meaning of "to mix something dry with something wet." (Liddell and Scott, author's emphasis). Socrates' system is a mixture of the dry stability of Anaxagoras' Mind with the fluid unpredictability of the visual phenomena with which natural science concerns itself. He accomplishes this mixture by positing language as kind of 'medium' for Mind and visible things. Language becomes for him a new kind of cause of generation and destruction. To begin to explain how this is so, I return to the image of the eclipsing sun in the Phaedo: "However, perhaps this analogy is inadequate, for I certainly do not admit that one who investigates things by means of words is dealing with images, any more than one who looks at facts." (Phaedo 99e-rooa) Taking the sun to be representative of the truth, language is not an image of this truth any more than facts are. The means ofinvestigating reality that is language is no more distant from reality than the means of investigating things that is the use of 'facts'-i.e. the use of sensible phenomena. The words 'anymore than' in Socrates' statement are significant as he is not denying the imagistic character of either sensible experience or language. They are both images of pure reality, though language is clearly the one which represents an avenue to truth. In order to understand why this is so one must consider what the nature and kinds of images are for Socrates. All of the dialogues are filled with images of different kinds which are meant to convey truth to Socrates' interlocutors. The claim made in the Phaedo is that all language is imagistic, not just the part ofit which announces itself as an allegory, a metaphor or a myth. Moreover, the claim is made that the sensible phenomena of our daily lives are also images and even images to the same extent. Clearly, however, language and visible objects are not images in the same way. Other places where Socrates discusses images and their relation to that which they image are in the divided line and cave analogies of the Republic. An excursion into these images will be helpful in order to understand how the A.oym are a refuge from un-resolvable confusion. In the divided line image of the Republic, the second and third segments of this line correspond to, respectively, the visual objects and the intelligible objects conceived through the use of hypotheses (sometimes referred to as mathematical objects). These segments are equal in length, however, meaning equality in the amount of truth in which they par- "I feared that my soul would be altogether blinded ifl looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses. So I thought I must take refuge in words• and examine in them the truth about things ." (Phaedo 99e) Taking refuge in words or 'A.oym' means fleeing from the danger of un-resolvable confusion by basing one's understanding of truth on language. Language is, in the sense in which I am using the term, the articulation of the mind's encounterwith reality. Socrates, by putting language at the center of his understanding of causation, is putting the human mind into the equation of the natural scientists, and, conversely, he is putting the multitude of phenomena that the natural scientists observe into the intelligence-based system of Anaxagoras. He affirms the existence of the many visible phenomena and returns to them their role in the system of causation. The truth is not attained by the observation of visible phenomena, themselves, but rather by the contemplation and manipulation of their expression in language. Through this expression, the visible phenomena have a role in our understanding of generation and corruption. In harmony with Anaxagoras' system, though, Socrates retains Mind as the primary factor because language is, after all, an activity of the intellect. Socrates suggests in his image that one can look at the sun without being blinded by looking at its reflection in water or 65 �ticipate. The connection between natural science and the second segment of the divided line is clear enough: both occupy themselves with visual phenomena in order to gain understanding. The correlation between the mathematical knowledge and Socrates' investigation through A.oym, however, is not immediately clear. After presenting the image of the eclipse, Socrates says, Both of them differ in significant ways from the images in the intelligible realm. The artifacts and statues in the cave are similar to the real objects in the world outside the cave in a way that the reflections in water are not. They are three-dimensional, solid things with a kind of being in their own right. In contrast, the reflections in water are more obviously images . However, the artifacts and statues are 'phony.' They are mere copies of real things, separated from their source and separated from the light which illuminates the outside realm. If these two things are taken as corresponding to the second and third segments of the divided line, then it is possible to understand how they can be equal in length, yet different in kind. Language is, indeed, more obviously imagistic than sensible things which have a deceptive real-ness about them. However, language is an inhabitant of the intelligible realm. It retains its kinship to the realities it images in a more connected way. For this reason, the observation of the artifacts in the cave only advances the seeker of truth a small amount, while observation of the images in water trains the eyes for observation of the realities themselves and provides an experience of them , albeit distorted. If, on the other hand, one takes the shadows cast on the wall as indicative of the visible phenomena (these are that which all of the prisoners see and judge) then one gets theidea of a two dimensional, colorless projection of a copied objectagain separated from the illuminating sun-as opposed to the kind of colorful, and dimension-retaining reflection one sees in a lake on a sunny day. The difficult question remains as to how we can say that sensible objects are images to the same extent as words. These objects seem real enough for most people never to question whether there is a reality beyond them. One solution to this question lies in the Timaeus, when Timaeus says, "I started in this manner: taking as my hypothesis in each case the theory that seemed to me most compelling, I would consider as true, about cause and everything else, whatever agreed with this, and as untrue whatever did not so agree." ( Phaedo rnoa) The description in the Republic of the third segment of the divided line is very similar: "One part of the soul, using as images the things that were previously imitated, is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and makes its way not to a beginning but to an end." (Republic 5rnb) In both cases, some degree of truth is gained through the use of hypotheses and argumentation. Both the second and the third segments of the divided line are equal in length and they both stand for affections arising in the soul which are images ofreality. Nonetheless , the way in whic.h the visible phenomena are images differs from the way in which language is. The images represented by the second segment are a 'dead-end' in terms of finding truth . This is true, first, because the idea of truth has no real meaning in terms ofvisible objects considered 'in isolation' (to whatever extent this is possible). Onlywhen visible objects are named and in some way considered through language by a rational mind do they obtain a truth value. In other words, it is intelligible objects, not visible ones, which are either true or false. This is reminiscent of the failure of the mode of explanation of natural scientists. They fail to address the question 'why?' because they speak in terms of visible rather than intelligible objects. Still, more needs to be said about the difference between noetic images of reality and sensible images. In the analogy of the cave , the visual phenomena are strictly limited to what is perceived inside the cave, while the intelligible obj ects are those experienced in the fully illumined outside world. The rocks and trees and astronomical bodies in the world outside are the realities and they cast their shadows and are reflected in water in the outside realm. These images are the first level removed from the realities and correspond, I would say, to language and the third segment of the divided line. The man who leaves the cave must occupy himselfwith these images in order to accustom his eyes to the real world. Inside the cave there are two sets of things which are clearly images of the realities. One of these is described by Socrates when he says, see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals." (Republic 514c) The other type is.the shadows which are cast by these artifacts and statues on the cave wall. One, or perhaps both, of these sets of objects correspond to the visible phenomena and the second segment of the divided line. "Nor must we speak of anything else as having some permanence , among all the things we indicate by the expressions ' this ' or 'that,' imagining we are pointing out some definite thing. For they slip away and do not wait to be described as that' or this' ... We shouJd not use these expressions of any of them but that which is of a certain quahty and has the same sort of quality as it perpetually recurs in the cycle."' (Timaeus 49e) Even the most seemingly solid objects around us are only temporarily in the state in which we experience them . To say that a table is a real thing is to ignore that it is a thing in the process of changing into something else. In this way, visible things are images. They are transitory instances which we perceive and with which we interact. On the other hand, to say that the word 'table,' by itself, is a real thing is also abchords or the letters placed surd. The sound made by the vocal_ next to each other on the page are clearly an image of something beyond themselves. Both of these thiugs being images, however, it is clearly the latter, the words and accounts, which have the capacity to advance the soul toward the truth. By speaking orwritingwords we can engage in rational discourse. We can create and explore truth. Language and the Forms When Socrates finishes with the image of the eclipse, he 66 anticipates that still more needs to be said to the interlocutors to make them understand what his system means.It is at this point that he draws out a connection between the A.oym and the forms , the w)ri. The forms , or things-by-themselves, perform a dual function in his presentation . Socrates says, not answer the question why' a certain quality exists by simply refe:r;ring back to that quality in its universal sense. Here lies the key to Socrates' solution. His suggestion amounts to uniting the universal idea with the particular object through the medium of the intelligence. There exists in the intelligent mind an idea of beauty which applies to many different objects. This idea has an articulation in language even before it is ever spoken. When a certain object is recognized as beautiful, the cause of its beauty is the fact that it is something to which the idea ofBeauty is applied and this application is accomplished through language, i.e. by calling the object 'beautiful.' To put this another way, it makes sense to say that all of the different things which we call beautiful have something in common. This common 'something' is signified by the word 'beautiful.' Socrates is asserting that it is better to refer to that which is common to all beautiful things in order to explain why they are beautiful than to try to find the answer in the particulars of the object. It is for this reason that language can refer back to itself in order to explain causation. It is because of our intelligence that we recognize 'common things,' or universals, and it is by our language that we articulate them. The fact that it seems like Socrates is begging the question leads him to call his method 'simple,' 'milve,' and 'foolish.' In truth, however, the method removes the divide between objects and universals which mistakenly leads one to expect a more sophisticated' answer. He is able to remove this divide because of his emphasis on the role of language and intelligence in the being of an object. In one manner of speaking, the forms, such as the Beautiful, itself, are universals. This is how we usually think of them when we relate them to sensible objects. In another manner of speaking, however, the forms are intelligible realities of such a nature as to never undergo change. Only they are eternal and immune to the process of becoming and for this reason they are the only things which truly are. This is the crucial way in which they are unlike those things Timaeus refuses to grant the status of a 'this' or a 'that.' For this reason, the forms are not images, though we only have discourse with them by articulating their images, in one sense, through speech and observing their images, in another sen se, through perception. In the Parmenides, the aged Parmenides challenges the young Socrates' theory of forms which are separate unto themselves by suggesting that such a hypothesis places an unbreachable divide between the eternal realities and the temporal things. Parmenides tells Socrates, "you have, so to speak, not even touched upon how great an impasse (anopLa) there is if you try to posit each form as one, somehow distinguishing them from the beings." (Parmenides 133ab) The word 'rucopw' has a clear spatial connotation. It is formed with the alpha-privative and the word :n:opo~, whose primary meaning is " a means of passing a river" (Liddell and Scott) Besides the explicit meaning of a difficulty which faces Socrates, this word carries with it the implicit meaning of a chasm, or divide, between the elements ofthetheoryofforms: the temporal and the eternal. Parmenides' final objection most clearly makes this chasm manifest. He says, "I am going to try to show you the kind of cause with which I have concerned myself. I turn back to those oft-mentioned things and proceed from them . I assume the existence of a Beautiful, itself-by-itself, of a Good and a Great and all the rest. Ifyou grant me these and agree that they exist, I hope to show you the cause as a result, and to find the soul to be immortal." (Phaedo rnob) Socrates just explained that his new method involves seeking truth through arguments based on hypotheses. On the one hand, the Beautiful, 'itself-by-itself and the other forms, serve here as an example of hypotheses which , iftheir consequences are adequately explored, will lead to certain conclusions. One such conclusion, Socrates claims, is the immortality of the soul. On the other hand, however, the forms are themselves the cause which Socrates' autobiography meant to uncover; they underlie theA.oym into which he fled. He goes on to say, "If there is anything beautiful besides the Beautiful itself, it is beautiful for no other reason than that it shares in that Beautiful and I say so with everything ... I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated causes , and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons-for these all confuse me." (Phaedo rnocd) Socrates rejected the kind of causes which the natural scientists put forward because they did not adequately address the question, 'why?' . By suggesting this alternative, Socrates is asserting that his 'simple-mi~ded' idea-that beautiful things are beautiful because of the Beautiful, itself-is somehow a more adequate answer. It is an answer which goes beyond finding 'a stronger Atlas' and answers the question in a deeper way. I suggest that the reason it does this is that ascribing the Beautiful, itself, as cause means that the language we use signifies reality in a more direct way than is commonly thought. Neither the word 'beautiful ' nor the description of the color and shape of a beautiful object fully describe the reason that object is beautiful. In this way, they are both images. However, the word points to something universal- to the quality ofbeautywhich adheres in all ofthe things which are described as beautiful. The description of color and shape confuse Socrates in the samewaythat the whole method of investigating truth through visible phenomena did. Nothing about the color of an object points to anything universal. The same color may make another object ugly. The word, and the articulation that follows upon it, however, are images which point to the universal. This should remind one of the reflection of the sun in water outside of the cave. The reflection is not the sunnot as clear or as bright-but it points directly to its heavenly source. How does this answer keep from 'begging the question', however? One might criticize Socrates by saying thathe does 67 �"Although one and the same, then, (the form's ) whole will be in many separate beings at the same time, and so would be separated from itself. Not if it is like a day, (Socrates) said, which, although one and the same is many places at once and is not at all separate from itself... Socrates, he replied, how nicely you make one and the same thing many places at once! It is if after covering many men with a sail you would say that it is one whole over many." (Parmenides 131b) "The things among us, then, these things which take the forms' names, are themselves related only to themselves, but not to the forms, and they belong only to themselves and not to whatever things are named the same." (Parmenides I33d) If eternal things are distinguished from the temporal, what intercourse can they possibly have? The young Socrates is unable to answer this objection. I suggest, though, that Socrates at the end of his life has come to a resolution of this problem based on language as a medium of both the eternal and the temporal. The key is to understand language as an image of the true realities that points to those eternal realities from the vantage point of an intelligent mind living in a world of visible phenomena. The eternal and the visible seem hopelessly separated only if one underestimates the faculty oflanguage and thus intelligence. Parmenides suggests that only Knowledge, itself, can know what Truth, itself, is. This may be true in the strictest sense of knowing, Socrates would say. However, this does not preclude our minds and our knowledge from understanding that part of truth that lies within their scope. This understanding begins with pointing to the eternal by means of our words and proceeding to develop our articulation byworking from hypotheses to conclusions. Parmenides, after pointing out the anopw which lies ahead of Socrates makes a concession of sorts regarding the young thinker's idea of the forms: Parmenides sees the forms, including their articulation in language, as being like a sail. They are overlaid on top of the reality which actually is. For this reason, they can be necessary for discourse but, nonetheless, not real. On the other hand, Socrates, even in this rudimentary stage of his ideas of the forms, believe them to be like a day. They are ever-present in and inseparable from every aspect of reality. As in both the Phaedo and the Republic, sunlight shining on the visible realm is used as an image of truth making intelligible objects intelligible. The sunlight cannot be separated from the objects on which it shines as the A.oym can not be separated from the reality which they articulate. Conclusions Language as Cause I have attempted to articulate in this paper the wayin which Socrates develops language as a new way of explaining causation, or a new way of answering the basic question of why?' Before recapitulating the argument for his having done this, the question should be brought to the surface, what does it mean for language to be a cause?' The immediate intuitive reaction to such a statement is to assert that in no way can the objects of reality come into being as a result of our speaking of them. Surely they are, in some crucial sense, before our minds or our language enter the picture. Thus, the cause or responsibility (mna) for them must be something else. In order to overcome this initial reaction, one must first try to imagine what it could possibly mean to speak of an object without any mind to observe or encounter it. The only objects, whether sensible or intelligible, that we encounter are ones that are articulated or, at least, demarcated in our minds. From this perspective it is not so absurd to say that the word 'chair' or 'elephant' is the cause of the furniture or the animal I am encountering. Of course, it is not the sound which falls off the tongue or the particular characters written on a page which are important. Something underlies that sound or those characters, however. What it is which underlies our language is not at all crystal clear. It is here that one starts to speak of 'things-in-themselves' or' essences' These things are only pointed to, or indicated, by our accounts-the more so, the more in-depth the investigation is. Nonetheless, when the participation of the observer is taken into account in the observation of things, it becomes evident that his activity of pointing to universals is crucial to the observed thing's coming to be. "And yet, if someone, in turn, Socrates, after focusing on all these problems and others still, shall deny that there are forms of the beings and will not distinguish a certain form of each thing, wherever he turns he'll understand nothing, since he does not allow that there is an ever-same idea for each of the beings. And so he will utterly destroy the power of dialogue." (Parmenides 135bc) Parmenides is suggesting that the forms are essential to speech and understanding, but nonetheless they do not have the sort of true existence which would convince Parmenides that there exist many things. There is a similarity here between Parmenides' opinion and Anaxagoras'. Where Anaxagoras seems to deny the sensible phenomena a role in causation, Parmenides denies them existence in any sense. If one assigns language its proper role in the generation and destruction of the world, the distinction Parmenides makes between being necessary for dialogue and being truly existent vanishes. If the forms exist in speech and, moreover, are the realities which underlie all our efforts to articulate the being of things, then that is enough existence for Socrates. Our indication of the forms comes through our words, but the forms are by no means merely words, nor merely necessary for dialogue. The forms have a real causal role in the being of things. In order to make this last point clear, it is useful to look at one more interchange between Socrates and Parmenides. At one point in their discussion, both men put forth a simile for the forms which expresses the way they are inclined to think about them. The interohange, beginning with Parmenides speaking, reads, Review of Major Arguments 68 The first step along the line to undetstanding language as a kind of cause is to grasp the nature of the proposition that the world is intelligible. If one denies this proposition than one would not be inclined to look to language, an activity of the intellect, for causation in any sense. Language, under this supposition, would have nothing to do with what is real and true because what is real and true is not available in anyway to our minds. Plato shows in the Phaedo, however, that to accept the proposition of intelligibility is to recognize it not as a proposition, in the sense of something compound and provable, but as an axiom, something basic and foundational. It is to be accepted not because there is no other alternative, but because it is more beautiful than its alternative. It is the choice made by a courageous thinker who emulates Socrates and his valiant activity in the face of death. Proceeding with this axiom that the world is intelligible and that dialectic is a fruitful activity, Socrates describes a tension which exists between two ways of developing an understanding of this intelligible world. One way is the way of the natural scientists, who see in sense-experience the onlyrealitywhich is to be uncovered and explained. Investigation and description of the things we see and hear is meant by them to get to the truth about why things are the way they are . Anotherway of working toward understanding is the (first) way of Anaxagoras. He sees the workings of a Mind behind the generation and destruction of things but, apparently, does not find any way for that Mind to relate to our day-to-day experiences. Socrates' brilliant image of the eclipsing sun finds its first application in this tension. Both the natural scientist's way and Anaxagoras' way are blinding to the soul. This former because of the inappropriate use of the instruments of the body, the latter because of the over-ambitiousness of the source upon which it sets its mental gaze. More concretely, the natural scientists can only give additive answers, they can only push back the question of 'why?' to less and less proximate material causes. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, treats the source of truth, the Mind, like simply another intelligible object to be examined and understood. Considerthewaythat the sun, the source of all light and therefore all things being visible, is, itself, not really a visible object. The tension between sense-experience and Mind can be approximated by considering the tension between 'knower' and the thing known. Both must be accounted for, and some medium described, in order for a way of achieving understanding to be satisfactory. Socrates finds in language the medium he needs. In the words of the image, he takes refuge in the A.oym. Language depends on the diversity of sensible things. It is their expression, occasioned by encountering them. It is the mind, however, that does this encountering. Thus, I have understood language as an articulation of the mind's encounter with reality. One difficulty which might be intuitively present for a listener of Socrates, but must be overcome, is the idea that language is simply' an image. This idea would lead one to dismiss language as something not essentially present in the cause of things. Socrates overcomes this difficulty, in part, by showing that not only is language an image, but so are the sen- sible phenomena to which we so fervently cling as real. The true realities are outside the cave and not at all simple to commune with directly. Therefore we must have commerce with them through their images. Interpreting the cave and line images of the Republic, I find more credence for the view that language and sensible phenomena are images of reality to the same extent, but in different ways. Language is an image illuminated by the light of the intelligible realm, however, and this, in particular, makes it the more fruitful one to concentrate on in the search for truth. If the difficulty of language as 'merely' an image is overcome, one can begin to understand its true value in terms of its kinship with the forms, or HO'YJ. Language is the path which leads us from particulars, e.g. this bookinfrontofme and this beautiful thing, to universals, e.g. book and Beauty. In doing this, it makes for a more satisfying answer than the natural scientists are able to give when they delve deeper and deeper into the specifics of their objects. Still, it does not explain how each thing is ordered in the bestwaythatitcan be, as the most perfect type of answer would. It is, after all, a "second best" version of the explanation that Mind as cause (Phaedo ggd). Nonetheless, the power of language is not to be underestimated. While it is expressing particulars, it is pointing to the underlying eternal things which never undergo change. In this way it is a medium between the eternal and the temporal and the fear of Parmenides that these will be hopelessly separated is assuaged. Final Thoughts There is one more tension which is present in the dialogues and in this paper which needs to be brought to the surface. This is the tension between intelligibility and mystery. Socrates does believe in the intelligibility of the world and he does believe that our minds are commensurable with the truth. However, his retreat from Anaxagoras' pure reference to Mind and his prolific use of images i~dicates that this commensurability may be like the kind that one finds between a drop of water and the ocean. The dialectic process is the proper way for us as humans to proceed toward understanding our world but it does not arrive at straightforward answers to every question, no matter how great. It is likely that the question of the immortality of the soul exemplifies this fact. With this in mind, one can better understand why Socrates at times throughout the Phaedo and especially at the end leaves the process of rational argumentation somewhat behind and uses logoi in a different way. I am referring, of course, to the use of myth. Socrates enters into the myth at the end of the dialogue after Simmias tells him that, although he is convinced by Socrates' account, "In view of the importance of our subject and my low opinion of human weakness, I am bound to have some private misgivings." (Phaedo 107ab) Socrates' first response is to tell Simmias to continue with the dialectic process of working out better hypotheses and their conclusions. After saying this, however, Socrates launches into his µv8o~ about the nature of the heavens (expressed here as the true earth) and the underworld. Socrates must feel that something 69 �Footnotes more than rational argumentation is necessary for his listeners. He must give them a story which they can "repeat (to themselves) as if it were an incantation" (Phaedo n4d) Why is this necessary, given all that has been said? One message of the myth which is entirely consonant with the account that proceeds it is that man stands as a kind of middle-term in the proportional relationship between obscurity and clarity of knowledge. We do not live in the murky sea, but neither do we live on the surface of the earth surrounded by the ether. Socrates' recourse to myth may be the natural extension of what I have already said about language being a pointer, in the form of an image, to something eternal and beyond our grasp. When, as Simmias says, "the subject is so important" 'µEyE8ouc;', which can be better translated as 'great' ) we must use our imaging power to the fullest and create stories to soothe our fears. The philosophic way oflife can extend beyond simply the enjoyment of discussion to a pursuit of moral and spiritual excellence. Much ofwhat the dialogues teach us is how to think about virtue and justice and courage so that we can act in accordance with them. Before this instruction can begin, however, one must deal with the issue of intelligibility. One must put their trust in words and arguments as a guide before they step onto the road with "many forks and crossroads." (Phaedo 108a) Socrates believes in the intelligibility of the world. He lives his life with a true respect for what can be accomplished in arguments and discussions. We are meant to understand that it is as a result of this that the officer of The Eleven who brings news that it is time to drink the poison calls Socrates, "The noblest, the gentlest and the best man who has ever come in here," (Phaedo n6c) and Phaedo concludes his tale with the comment, "Such was the end of our comrade, Echecrates, a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright." (Phaedo u8a) The first step on the path to living a life of such nobility is a choice. Socrates offers us a way of viewing the coming into being and passing away of all things based on our power of language to mediate between our- minds and what they encounter. We have a choice about whether this way is worth pursuing. There is no better reason to respond affirmatively to this choice than that which Socrates gives when he tells Simmias, "The reward is beautiful and the hope is great." (Phaedo n4c ) 1. For this quotation, I used the Loeb translation rather than the Grube. Grube begins the passage," When there is a true and reliable argument..." (my emphasis) The Greek reads, "EL ovwc; OYJ uvoc; aA.ri8ouc; Km ~E~mou A.oyou Km ouva-tou Kat Ka-tavorioat ... " For reasons I hope to make clear, I felt that it is crucial to retain the conditional sense of this sentence. 2 . The Grube text actually reads: "I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of things by means ofwords." However, the Greek says simply, " EOO~E OYJ µm XPYJVat ci~ -rov~ A.oyov~ Ka-taqmyovta Ev EKnvmc; CTKOJtELv -rwv ov-rwv LYJV aA'YJ8ELav. " This translation, therefore, is my own, though it is mostly a combination of Grube's and the Loeb's. Virgin Mary (Mother of God): Photograph of a Painting Marianne Thompson 70 71 �excerpts from: ''Paradox and Evolution: Images of the Demands of Modernity" * Matthew Braithwaite The Reality of Physical Ideas continued to call atoms atoms, even when they turned out not to be atomic-but the idea that theywere the fundamental components of matter remained. And , I suppose , even that has ch anged. Now it is clear from history that physical ideas can be deprecated but not destroyed. It's not that we don' t wantto destroy some ideas: if one is trying to un-think a perspective that seems undesirable , there is a powerful temptation simply to try to banish it from language, hoping, perhaps , that thought will follow. There is a sense in which this desire can be achieved: one could plausibly banish "phlogiston" and "flowers of zinc," for example. There are theoretical advances that remove the want we have of these words-or rather, redirect it, for the words are answers to specific phenomena to which we cannot close our eyes. Things still burn , even though we don 't use the idea of phlogiston to explain the phenomenon any more-but we could. We cannot remove the utility of a physical idea. We can see this in the fact that banishment from the scientific vocabulary only makes the usage of a word wither and die, but does not at all affect our ability to understanditthat will forever be possible! So one cannot un-think an idea; one must settle for a partial success, that of making the idea less tempting, or less complete. And we do this by introducing another idea that is more revealing. What is even more interesting is that there can be evolution and change within (if that is the right word) a single concept. We might look at what Wittgenstein says about Moses (I. 79) in this connection. He begins by pointing out that " if one says, 'Moses did not exist' , this may mean various things"; and he goes on to list what some of them are. What is critical is that the word, Moses, in some way means all these things and in some way means none of them in particular . Certain parts of our idea of Moses can be removed from our understanding while still permitting the word, Moses , to have had a historical bearer. This is what happens, when, for example , we say " Moses was not the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt. " Or we couldkeepusingthewordeven though we hold it not to have had a bearer, as when we say that Moses was a historical fiction. If we were asked to give a definition of Moses we might list a number of characteristics, and say that Moses was their sum-but this would not reflect our use of the word. Nor can we point to any one thing as the essence of our use of the word. Wittgenstein puts it thus: " But where are the bounds of the incidental? .. .I use the name 'N' without a fixed meaning. (But that detracts little from its usefulness ... )" (l.79) Similarly, in science we might observe the continuity of the word "atom" or "electron" as it comes to be understood differently. (Consider for example the argument overwhether "electron" should mean a particle or a unit of charge.) We At som e point in history, th e live qu estion was , " are there atoms? " When the answer to that was agreed to-and this is inseparable from the experiments that produced that agreemen t-it b ecame p ossibl e to ask about the nature of atoms in a way that was not possible before. And the answers that we give to questions about the nature of atoms can go on changing forever, because we have "decided what an atom is" in the sense that we decide which experiments " show" atoms to us . This fixes the denotation of the word, in a way of speaking, but its sense can change as we learn more about the thingso to speak-denoted. In the same way, we could now potentially do exp eriments on light using only invisible frequencies, because we h ave now decided what exp erimen ts and apparatus tell us about the presence and characteristics oflight. Wittgenstein' s me taphor of a skein of threads is th e only way of describing what goes on in this changing. I But we can contrast these shiftily-defined objects of physical thinking with the ob jects of dire ct ob servation : in a marginal n ote Wittgenstein quotes Faraday as saying, "Water is one individual thing- it n ever changes." To put it another way, a physicist' s knowledge of what water is is in one sense identical with anybody else's: water is that thing there . In anoth er sense , the physicist has a unique under standing of water, based on his advan ced concepts of atom s, and so forth. But as soon as we think hat the hypothetical h idden structure of water that is revealed to science is the same identical thing as thewaterwetouch and feel, we have com mittedthe errorthat leads us to belief in a hidden reality. We have, one might say, " sublimed our hypoth eses" -forgotten th eir truly hypothetical character. This suggests another link , which came up much earlier, between physics and Wittgenstein 's philosophical ideas. The aim of logic which Wittgenstein criticizes was to produce a logically clearunderpinning for all utterance . We might now re-ask the question of how this is different from the task of physics, which seeks a mathematically clear description of all phenomena. To begin with, Wittgenstein points out that logic does not seek to learn anything new about language. Hence , he says, its workings are uninvolved with phenomena. In answering the question " In what sense is logic something sublime?" he comments: 72 a reality that lies between appearances and our attempts at physical laws. We can dismiss reality as the same kind of imagined ideal; we might say, " it is apparentwhat the world does, and apparent what the law prescribes.-So what more could you want to know?" "For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth-a universal sig nificance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.-For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that.---It takes its rise , not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connexions: but from an urge to under stand the basis, or essence , of everything empirical . Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand." (I.89) The analogy between reality and meaning (or signification) is fairly precise, really, and what I mean to suggest is th t we can dismiss them in the same way. We cannot find meaning in the phenomena of language. One of the cautions that Wittgenstein makes is that we should avoid introspection if we want to understand language. Instead, we should look only at how others use language, and see what we can say based on that alone. Rhetorically, this suggestion assumes what it is trying to show; namely that language is to be understood by looking at its use. But the similarity to the rhetoric of language-games ends there: the prohibition on looking within is not an appeal to imagination but to our scientific instincts. From a properly cautious point of view, nothing living only within the mind can be considered a phenomenon. The way people use words, on the other hand, does admit of phenomenal description . So if we are being scientists, usage is the only material that we have on which to base a theory of language. And the number oftheories neither suggested nor supported by usage alone includes: that every word is correlated with a meaning, that the intelligibility of an utterance can be tested according to articulable rules, that all names signify objects, and so forth. And similarly, in the philosophy of science, we would have to say: ifyou wanttounderstanda physical idea, look at the way it is employed. There is neither necessity, justice, nor indeed any sense in inventing a reality for the idea to describe. The content of the idea is no more nor less than its use in working with phenomena. This is the sharpest possible contrast to physics; but it is interesting that the final suggestion-that we somehow do not understand what is right before us-is common between logic and physics. So let's ask, " in what sense is physics something sublime?" Or on a plainer level, does the physicist really know more about what water is, or only a whole lot more about how it behaves? We can observe, first , that physics is the exact opposite of logic in its approach: we do seek to learn something new in science. Wittgenstein accuses logic of not wanting to look at the world, and hence of thinking that we can know how things are merely through a terrific act of contemplation. But by contrast, physics believes that its advancement is secured only by trying to look through the world. As scientists we do believe that the world has hidden but intelligible features, but we also believe that they can be revealed through ingenuity-not discovered by thinking. But by revealed, can we mean anything other than, revealed in the phenomena; revealed by a clever experiment that tricks nature into giving up a secret? We cannot escape the roots of physics in ourperception, because even the most formal descriptions of the invisible world must include the ordinary senses of some words like length, position, color, pitch, time, motion , and so forth. In so far as there is a general principle here , it is that the only certainty we can have about phenomenal things is their description.2. If we describe reality through the use of a coherent group of concepts that are merely formally defined, we still do not overstep the bounds of description. But when we attribute intuitive ideas, or any kind of reality, to these concepts, we have overstepped the bounds of description (in the former case) or sense (in the latter). The only certain statements we can make about physical phenomena are predictions of their behavior, because these are the only statements that can be falsified. Statements about what underlies phenomena have, therefore , the status of rhetoric-again not an insult in diguise. This makes us understand that a sense of the word, reality, that is distinct from the sum of all appearances doesn't really fit into science. The descriptions that physics gives of objects that underlie appearances do indeed transcend phenomena, but they are also hypothetical. We cannot, and can never, be certain of those objects. We need only look back to our examples to see this. We might have a sort of certainty that atoms exist, but our idea of their nature is always changing. And as with the example of ether, we must keep in mind that we have never seen an atom. Saying that " there are atoms" is a proposition about use and experiment; and reflects So we ought to follow Wittgenstein's thoughts a little further, before we gain too much confidence about the power of physics to tell us about the hidden. By the " subliming of logic ," he has in mind something specific: "' A proposition is a queer thing!' Here we have in germ the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assu~e a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts ... For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras ." (l.94) That is , we get into trouble when we become confused in a case where we should not. The suggestion here is that he ought to refuse to see anything mysterious or strange about logic and logical symbols. We are to say, simply, "it is apparent what the world does, andapparentwhat the sign does, because our use of the sign , too, is an observable phenomenon the world.-So what more could you want to know?" And this illuminates our search for reality or truth in physics. The tendency to assume an ideal interposed between a propositional sign and the sensible fact it refers to is analogous to assuming 73 �ing configuration," with wonderful formality but nothing that could be called a justification-save that the formalism agrees with experiment (and of course no other justification should be asked). The idea of a wave is intelligible on the assumption of a medium; and this, in turn, reduces to a mechanical explanation. But having no proof of the medium , we are certainly forced to say that the wave explanation oflight is merely a formally correct description . Similarly, if we had to account for mass in mechanics, we would be forced to give a merely formal description of how the things to which we attribute mass behave. We do not need to do this, because intuition assumes the role of formal specification . We know how mass behaves in intuition, so we assume we know "what it is." Similarly, we know "what a wave is." This is not to say that electrodynamics and mechanics lack rigor, because it would certainly be possible to replace their intuitive ideas with formal descriptions; as indeed we do for light by describing it with differential equations. But as the fact that we have never seen the wave that we think light is suggests, whatever is formal can be no more than formal. Mechanics is a description of how phenomena behave, simply; and the fact that it invokes concepts derived from intuition is irrelevant to its accuracy. However, when it becomes the case that experiment calls the intuitive part of a purely mechanical description of the atom into question, by suggesting that intuitive mechanical concepts simply do not work, then the derivation of mechanics from intuition ratherthan formalism becomes very important indeed, as a hindering rather than a helping force! That is to say, an intuitive account is very difficult to abandon, because intuitive explanations make us think that we have grasped the "what-ness" of things . But we have already said enough about the grammar of the statement, "light is a wave," to know that this sort of grasp is quite illusory. Evolution of Concepts: I ntuition and Formalism Because we are interested in phenomena, the first thing to observe about physical ideas and concepts is their behavior. I mean by this that we ought to regard physical ideas on the biological model. The truth or correctness of a physical idea, as suggested above, can have the grammar of" descriptive" -or, we might add, even of"useful." We might say, on the basis of the preceding, that physical ideas are use-valued rather than truth-valued. Hence, they exhibit the biological characteristic of growth or attenuation according to selective pressures. In part these pressures can be seen as coming from us, in so far as we choose between competing physical accounts of things. But we could also see these pressures as coming from experiment, as for example when interference phenomena force us away from the emission theory of light. But all experimental pressures on our physical ideas are mediated by us in a very real way: witness that doomed concepts have never been without their champions. The separation between our influence and the influence of experiment is thus a very real one, because we can see them conflicting. We are free, then, to examine our own role in the changing of the concepts that we use. We have to look at the question of what we should find satisfactory, or coherent, in an account. One of the ways of stating the impossibility of the metaphysical is that we have an inability to escape our nature. We want to escape language in doing philosophy; we want to escape phenomena in doing physics. These desires are psychologically and formally the same, and there are similar arguments against them. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues through the inability to construct another language from the one we have. In physics we may point to the ability of an experiment to puncture our pretensions of having described reality accurately. Classical electrodynamics and Newtonian mechanics represent beautiful and simple projections of our intuition onto the world, as Euclidean geometry beautifully captures the projection of our intuition onto a (mostly) formal deductive system. But in both cases we could even have said in advance that they had not the completeness they pretended to. Mechanics made no attempt to give an account of mass. Similarly, electrodynamics incorporates the idea of a wave, a "moving disturbance" or "mov- culmination of the paper is what one might call a solution , albeit a mystical one, to the initial problem that he poses of the relation between the world and the ideas that occur to us about it: " ... are we to conclude that these various departments of nature in which analogous laws exist, have a real inter-dep endence; or that their relation is onlyapparentandowingto the necessary conditions of human thought?" This is the question that perplexes us in doing physics. So we might say of intuition that although it needn't and shouldn't play any formal part in physics, it plays a powerful psychological part. It is important to the coherence of a body of theory-the word we are trying to understand. We should own that the intelligibility of both of the above-mentioned physical theories seems to have much to do with their analogies to the sensible. The wave account oflight is not desirable simply because it is descriptive, but because it is also imaginable. Similarly, Rutherford's mechanical description of the atom is no mere formal account, but appeals strongly through sensible analogy. This is in part what is meant by saying that science has a rhetorical component-and of course, it is possible to be deceived about the truth by rhetoric, as the difficulty of abandoning these intuitable theories shows. the fact that we are inclined to look at experiment as a kind of seeing. But we only think we see: how do we "see" that light is a wave , when we see interference phenomena? Well, we see it with our imagination , with our analogic faculty; something on that order. We see, with our mathematical eyes, patterns of dots on a screen that are intelligible as the footprints of the interfering ofwaves. The wave is the idea that the phenomena produce in us. The idea that there is areal wave causing the patterns that we see is a statement which must, in our analysis, have the character of a story to which we are led by phenomena. There is no test of its truth. We must, following Wittgenstein, simply say: here the pattern on the wall, there the descriptive equations-and nothing more. Something like this idea seems to be at the root of the following obscure paragraph, which I take to be an oblique mocking of meta physicians: Maxwell's essay, Are there Real Analogies in Nature, is I think meant to address this subject among others (it is, as he says, somewhat "diffuse and confused"). But about one thing in it he is clear, and that is the analogical component of so much that we do in physics. Two results of his paper are especially important to us: first, that he points out how broad the reach of analogical thinking is; and second, that he gives us some means of dealing with its tendency to deceive us. The 74 where we see the interactions of force more visibly manifested. So one question that arises from these worries is that of what sorts of thinking properly belong to physics. The suggestion that "the analogy between reasons , causes, forces , principles, and moral rules, is glaring, but dazzling," is helpful to seeing how great and wide are the dangers of using the wrong sort of analogy in physical thinking. We are inclined, by force of analogy, to lump together what are really separate things under the name of cause , or even of force. But when we are inclined to identify cause and force this leads to a poor and incomplete understanding of nature: Maxwell seems to have a few things in common with Wittgenstein in the way he looks at words , in that his idea of analogy suggests Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance among words. Maxwell presents ideas in a biological way, by showing us the analogies through which they arise in us. His account of cause, in keeping with this, is not metaphysical but historical: "But there are other laws of nature which determine the form and action of organic structure. These are founded on the forces of nature, but they seem to do no work except that of direction. Ought they to be called forces? A force does work in proportion to its strength . These direct forces to work after a model. They are moulds, not forces." "We cannot, however, think any set of thoughts without conceiving of them as depending on reasons. These reasons, when spoken of with relation to objects, get the name of causes, which are reasons, analogically re ferred to objects instead of thoughts ." This I take to be a reference to our use of the word, formal cause. But these moulds, as Maxwell calls them, are not phenomenal: he says twice that they merely seem to use the visible forces of nature to their ends. Following this we might suggest that physics is interested in what Maxwell calls events, which are to be distinguished from actions (a term that belongs to the moral realm) , as well as from any employment made of these events by formal and final causes-the reality of which, it is important to note, Maxwell does not doubt in the least. Despite this, though, he reminds us: Now the thought that the word " cause," in its employment in physics, is our projection onto the world of the fact that thoughts follow one another according to reasons, is not one that would ordinarily occur to us. But put in this way, the suggestion sounds both plausible and somewhat disquieting; for as Maxwell says later," cause is a metaphysical word implying something unchangeable and always producing its effect", in contrast to force, which "is a scientific word, signifying something which always meets with opposition \ldots" Looked at in this way, we might wonder if it is right to use the word "cause" in science at all; for Maxwell seems to be suggesting that the term has its origin in the observing subject. "Again, if we know what is at any assigned point of space at any instant of time, we may be said to know all the events of Nature. We cannot conceive any other thing which it would be necessary to know; and, in fact, if any other necessary element does exist, it never enters into any phenomenon so as to make it differ from what it would be on the supposition of space and time being the only necessary elements." The thought behind the phrase, we cannot conceive ofany other thing which it would be necessary to know, deserves to be looked at unflinchingly. It is identical to Wittgenstein's suggestion that we should look, and not think. In a sense, once we have observed, we have done all there is to do- assuming, that is, that we are only interested in explaining (in Bohr's sense) the events of nature. And the phrase has, too, some of the same content as the reminder that comes up in quantum physics that all experiments must ultimately express themselves in mechanics. These reminders draw a border between the phenomenal and the hypothetical. It seems to me that one might, following this, suggest that the task of physics is to make rules that describe all the events of nature, using whatever means are available or necessary. And looking at the other side of that coin, we must say that physics must be interested in nothing but the events. "This conception of cause [I take it he means the idea of force as a sort of cause], we are informed, has been ascertained to be a notion of invariable sequence . No doubt invariable sequence, if observed , would suggest the notion of cause, just as the end of a poker painted red suggests the notion of heat, but although a cause without its invariable effect is absurd, a cause by its apparent frustration only suggests the notion of an equal and opposite cause." I believe his suggestion is that invariable sequence belongs to observation, whereas cause belongs to the connection of reasons; so that the identification of them is a forced and false one-a bogus attempt to relate metaphysics to observation. The idea of cause could perhaps be prompted by observation, but the circumstances givingrisetotheideaare no more identical with the idea itself than the red-painted end of a poker is with heat. And he seems further to be suggesting that invariable sequence is not the observed fact that we carelessly take it to be: striking the earth with a tiny object has n o effect that we can see, for example. The idea we have of what happens in this situation arises through analogical reasoning from cases Now the poverty of this restricted vision is plain throughout Maxwell's paper. And yet it does reflect a certain valuable discipline: for if we allow ourselves to be interested in more than mere events, we run the risk of being misled about the events themselves. Maxwell suggests this in his brief statement about final cause-which is also a natural history of how 75 �a metaphysical concept arises through analogy: next represents the same problem that Kant called the Third Antinomy, but Maxwell appears to be content with simply saying that the matter is a very confused and indefinite one. And yet there is order in the confusion. When we see an event as an act, we are twice perplexed. First we see mechanics taking up where will left off (" ... another set oflaws , the operation of which is inflexible once in action, but depends in its beginnings on some act of volition"), as, for example, ifl were maliciously to throw a rock at someone. And second we believe that actions have what we call moral consequences, an idea that employs the physical language of cause and effect. But we cannot see these consequences in the world, and so, "we connect the idea of retribution much more with that of [human}justice than with that of cause and effect." And so we are confused by our having thought of moral consequences in causal terms, on the one hand; and by our tendency to "regard retribution as the result ofinteiferencewith the mechanical order of things, and intended to vindicate the supremacy of the right [moral] order of things." This refers to Maxwell's earlier statement that we find moral laws to be supreme laws in one sense, but contingent laws in another sense , because we do not see them always acting in the world. "Perhaps the next most remarkable analogy is between the principle, law, or plan according to which all things are made suitably to what they have to do, and the intention which a man has of making things which will work. The doctrine offinal causes, although productive ofbarrenness in its exclusive form, has certainly been a great help to inquirers into nature; and if we only maintain the existence of the analogy, and allow observation to determine its form, we cannot be led far from the truth." Now what this seems to be saying is that in doing physics, we ought not to use the doctrine of final cause to determine what we see: we may only apply it to what we find-a prescription that we can hardly violate if we restrict ourselves to seeing only events. And one might say similar things about beauty: we may certainly identify the true and the beautiful, but what this means in doing physics is that we have to find beautiful whatever we discover to be true. The identity is not a permission to allow our sense of beauty to legislate what we believe about nature. For indeed, in so far as the word, nature, represents a hidden reality, it is a confused word. If nature is to have a meaning in physics, it must mean the sum of all phenomena, which simply are, without being beautiful or ugly. And our laws, too, are what they are; their beauty belongs to us, and is also our choice. To say, "if the laws are not beautiful they cannot be true" is meaningless, because the grammar of the word true, when applied to a physical law, is identical with that of the word accurate, as suggested above. And the accuracy of the laws has no relation to how they appear to our aesthetic sense. The most that can be said is that if the laws are not beautiful, we will try to improve their beauty. But the phenomena will decide whether we are able to do so. If the phenomena do not permit it, it would be better to revise our idea of the beautiful such that it fits what we have discovered to be true, i.e., accurate (and perhaps this means that physics is now done by a different sort of person than before, owing to the historical change in the sort ofbeautythat physical theories exhibit). Otherwise history might number us among those who labor against the evidence of experiment, and count us on the same side as those who denied the movement of the earth. Maxwell gives a description of this muddle that is both metaphor and resolution: "The theory of the consequences of actions is greatly perplexed by the fact that each act sets in motion many trains of machinery, which react on other agents and come into regions of physical and metaphysical chaos from which it is difficult to disentangle them. But if we could place the telescope of theory in proper adjustment, to see not the physical events which form the subordinate foci of the disturbance propagated through the universe, but the moral foci where the true image of the orginal act is reproduced, then we shall recognize the fact, that when we clearly see any moral act, then there appears a moral necessity for the trains of consequences of that act, which are spreading through the world to be concentrated on some focus, so as to give a true and complete image of the act in its moral point of view. All that bystanders see, is the physical act, and some of its immediate physical consequences, butas a partial pencil oflight, even when not adapted for distinct vision, may enable us to see an {\em object}, and not merely light, so the partial view we have of any act, though far from perfect, may enable us to see it morally as an act, and not merely physically as an event." This is saying that our state of confusion is inevitable; fo we can only see the occasional footfalls of the moral and the voluntary in the world of appearance, just as all sensible objects appear to us only with the help oflight. The possibility of being able to see the whole chain of moral consequences of which physical events are the "subordinate foci" is closed off to us because we do not have the means to see it-except with partial and imperfect vision. And this in turn suggests the following idea about analogy in science: the world of events can be circumscribed, and so we can exclude analogy from our thinking about it. Ifwe please we can talk about events and only events (whats, wheres, and whens), using the formal language of mathematics. We have complete vision of the whole world of appearances-a statement that would almost be a tautology, were it not for the contrast with our imperfect vision of the world of acts. Physics is thus not the complete understanding of the world, but only a line drawn around what we I want to return to the subject of the poverty of this worldview of physics. It is plain from what Maxwell says that the world of physics, the world of events, is not the whole world to our minds. Indeed, establishing this appears to be one of the principal goals ofhis essay, as we may infer from what appears to be a repudiation of universal mechanism: "Now the question of the reality of analogies in nature derives most of its interest from its application to the opinion, that the phenomena of nature, being varieties of motion, can only differ in complexity, and therefore the only way of studying nature, is to master the fundamental laws of motion first, and then examine what kinds of complication of these laws must be studied in order to obtain true views of the universe. If this theory be true, we must look for indications of these fundamental laws \ldots among those remarkable products of organic life, the results of cerebration (commonly called 'thinking')." This passage appears to be not even trying hard to mask amused contempt. We can note in passing that what he says 76 is ident~cal to the question , implied by Wittgenstein (l.54) , of how we tell when a game is being played according to a rule; and it depends on our prior ability to pick an object out from the world. Maxwell's answer to this question, with which he closes his essay, is a mystical one: can sense, considered as mere events , and the question, "what can we say about that?" We have no requirement for sensible intuition, aesthetics, or metaphysics in that investigation, because the formal description that we can give ofevents is complete within itself. In one way this is obvious; the question is entirely of whether it is a useful way to think. "And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity, and telling us neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance,-nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excl uded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter." One way in which it might not be is as a concealed insult: if we meant simply to divide statements into physical and nonphysical for pejorative purposes, we would not accomplish anything. But this suggestion about how to view physics is a useful one, because it permits us to understand physics better. We have a hard time accepting theories that are contrary to our metaphysical preconceptions, to sense intuition, or to our ideas about beauty. But even more do we desire to be free of any impediments in learning about the world: the state we want is best described as perfect and clear receptivity to anything that describes the phenomena. And this is what the circumscription of physics is good for: when we say that we must take seriously any true (agreeingwith experiment) theory, we are really just reminding ourselves of am eans where by we can raise our vigilance against non-physical ideas impinging on our physical understanding. Bearing the circumscription of physical ideas in mind makes it easier to say, "I accept the use of non-mechanical ideas, because mechanical description is only a requirement of my intuition." Or, "I accept the use of a probability function without any other justification, because determinism is only a requirement of my metaphysics." Or, "I accept this ugly wave-particle hybrid, because its ugliness is only due to my aesthetics, and its unintelligibility to my weakness." Since physics can be circumscribed, we.will the more nearly perfect our understanding of it the less we permit the non-mathematical, or the sense-intuitive, to leak in and corrupt the focus that our "telescope of theory" has on the purely mechanical aspect of all phenomenal things. If we do not employ sense intuition, aesthetic sense, or metaphysical ideas in looking at physical ideas, there is only the mathematical sense left to us. It is a relief to note here the existence of mathematical analogies: without them there would be no procedure at all for us to use! But we might have known this already; because it is only the quantitive part (or one might even say, the quantitative expression) of a physical idea that can be tested. To say that in physical thinking we should try to stay within the phenomena is equivalent to saying that we should try to remain within the mathematical in our descriptions; our procedure should be to seek out and accept readily all analogies between nature and the math ematical that we can find-using elegance, metaphysics , or sense intuition as decision principles only where there is a choice to be made between equally predictive laws. For indeed, as Maxwell reminds us , the characteristic of an event is that there is nothing to be known about it besides what is where at what time; and hence nothing about the objects involved needs a language other than mathematics for its expression. And yet his mysticism is highly satisfying in some odd way1 suspect because there is not much more to do about the relation between mathematics, the mind, and the world, beyond simply noting their harmonies and goggling at them. To suggest, as Maxwell does, that the harmony is in fact an identity, is an answer in words; but it is mystical in its import. The only phenomenal statements that we can make, in the end, are that we certainly seem to have a faculty for picking mathematics out of nature; and that nature, in her turn , certainly seems to have a propensity to behave mathematically. The mystical answer to this incomprehensible observation must, I think, be the correct one, because it is the only one possible. Consider, for example, the way Newton lays out a purely mathematical science of motion before even speaking about phenomena. Does not the mathematics seem a separate thing, to which nature is like? Similarly, we can look at the way the definition of a wave shifts over the history of natural science, perhaps by conjecturing a history along the following lines: The idea of a wave begins life as a disturbance in water. Noting certain features, we generalize to find the idea of a periodic undulation, to which we are capable of giving some degree of mathematical description. Finally we eliminate intuition entirely: our most potent and useful idea of a wave is any function that satisfies a certain differential equation. Does it not seem as though the things we call waves, now, are not sensible but mathematical analogies to one another, things that have their essential being and relation in the mathematical formalism? Maxwell seems to suggest something like this, in what seems a good description of the characteristics of our employment of analogy: "This supposes that although pairs of things may differ widely from each other, the relation in the one pair may be the same as in the other. Now, as in a scientific point of view the relation is the most important thing to know, a knowledge of the one thing leads us a long way towards a knowledge of the other. If all that we know is relation, and if all the relations of one pair of things correspond to those of another pair, it will be difficult to distinguish the one pair from the other, although not presenting a single point of resemblance, unless we have some difference of relation to something else, whereby to distinguish them. Such mistakes can hardly occur except in mathematical and physical analogies ... " This is consonant with the above suggestions about waves: it seems as though the physical motivation behind a formalism can be lost as the latter takes on a mathematical life of its The question of the perception of a mathematical analogy 77 �own, enriching itself in utility and generality, and becoming the essential aspect of the thing for us. Waves are in some sense real to us as physicists only by their exhibiting the relations prescribed by our formalism. And this is the sort of thing that leads us right into the tenacious jaws of the "reality blunder," because we let the formalism take on a transcendent life. Footnotes I. Indeed, in l.79 he comments: "The fluctuation of scientific definitions: what to-day counts as an observed concomitant of a phenomenon will to-morrow be used to define it." The possibility of characterizing all physical concepts with mathematical analogies strongly suggests to us that we ought to aim for a completely mathematical understanding of nature; that is, one that is formally specified in its entirety. The desire for formalism in physics should be understood to be identical with the same desire in mathematics, discussed below: when we say that everything in geometry should be formally specified, we do not mean to eliminate intuition. We only mean to distrust it. And by doing this, we are in effect saying that formal or logical certainty is of an entirely different kind from intuitive certainty. They have functional similarities, yes-but they are not comparable. One might say they belong to different language-games. Intuition and inspiration are the only modes of invention and progress that we have-ofcourse! No one would have us change the way we do mathematics and physics, even if that were possible. But there is a sinister philosophic intent rooting mathematical formalism, which from the description given so far might seem to be just a harmless waste of someone else's time; and that is the identification of the inconceivable with the contradictory. Maxwell wryly remarks, of our tendency to make analogies, "if [nature] is not a 'book' at all, but a magazine, nothing is more foolish than to suppose that one part can throw light on another"; meaning, I gather, that we should train ourselves in total readiness for surprises. As, in mathematics, all statements against non-Euclidean geometry that do not show a contradiction in it are void; so, in physics, should agreement with experiment and mathematical coherence be the only principles by which we decide what sorts of descriptions to admit as being possible ones. 2.. Recall Wittgenstein's saying, "we must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place." (l.iog) This tangled search for physics can be summarized, or rather gathered together, as follows. We stand a better chance of being able to succeed in physical thinking if we follow therein a principle of mathematical thinking; namely, that anything formally possible which appears useful, or interesting, is unworthy of being dismissed. As increasing use of mathematics squeezes sense intuition out of physics, the only . intuition that can remain is mathematical intuition. We thus become better physical thinkers in proportion as we are good mathematical thinkers, and as we allow our mathematical intuition total freedom in suggesting answers to the questions posed by phenomena. For as we descend deeper into the unseen, it may be that mathematical intuition is the only kind that has the answers. Maxwell's mysticism suggests a final justification for this, in that it is a strong implication of his last paragraph, quoted above, that nature is capable of anything we can think within the right laws of our minds, which are mathematics and logic-because, indeed, these laws are identical with nature's capabilities. 78 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 78 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tabela, Danielle (senior editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 1998 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 1998. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 1998 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2399b256d21cedeb254cdccd40ee949e.pdf 9d396685e69b6547bf5dee1bf35c3a47 PDF Text Text - SPRING 1996 ~-I . . ~_.' : . '· ' . ·.' · �ENERG E I A: The activity in which anything is fully itself. fi ...vou EVEpyELa(wv ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) SENIOR EDITOR Christopher Anderson JUNIOR EDITOR Lydia Polgreen FACULTY ADV I SO R Abraham Schoener S P EC I AL THANKS To the Print Shop: Marcia Baldwin Chris Colby Vernon Magee Don Smith also to: Eva Brann Jennifer Coonce Lynette Dowty Cindy Lutz Seth Milliken Adrienne Rogers Jennifer Swaim Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published once a year and distributed among the students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis. The Energeia staff welcomes submissions from all members of the community - essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. �TABLE OF CONTENTS John Singleton September 17, 1995 .............................................. 1 Carla Echevarria Joyce's Ulysses: The Quest for Paternity ............. 2 Matthew Braithwaite Magical Politics and the Perfection of Nature ...... 7 Jesse Berney Haiku on the Motion of a Stretched String ........ 16 Eva Brann Translation of Hermann Hesse's An Evening At Home With Doctor Faustus ........ 17 Beatrice Robbins Form of Language .............................................. 20 Dawn Star Shuman They Do Not Understand: A Discussion of the Heracleitus Fragment Number 12 ..... ........... 24 Janice Cater "For He Unlocked the Hidden Treasuries of Truth" Entertaining Ourselves with the Delightful Contemplation of Newton's Principia ............... 26 Peter Smith Heroism in Racine's Phedre ............................... 34 Alexa Van Dalsem Lyric Narrative ................................................... 37 �September 17, 1995 By John Singleton February 1996 First-born son and Sunday born, Blue-lipped, in fits he kicked and hit, A wingbeat flutter in my arms, He sung to me in squeaks and clicks. Like yeast and flour, the doughy flesh, Rose round, lamb-soft, and toasty white, His vernixed skin baked oven fresh, Eyes fixed upon the simple light. He'll go - and in his journey find, A young man's passion, folly, joy. A father measures his decline, In set-jawed stances of the boy. My own song then, I do extend. A relic father to his son. That wet lipped at the breast again Hot fisted under sabbath sun: Dance chanting in the star-lit night, Stomp blessings 'round its fires, Bend low beneath the kindred light, Sons crowned, unbound, unbriered. "Sing kindness in life's mystery, Beat praises to adventure, Sculpt rhythms to its history, Painting beauty at its center." �J 0 Y CE ' S ULYSSES : THE QUE ST F 0 R PATERNITY Joyce's Ulysses: The Quest for Paternity By Carla Echevarria Of "many-faced" Odysseus' many faces, one of those we glimpse least is that of him as a father. Among his multiplicity of personas throughout the Iliad and Odyssey are the sailor, the captain, the soldier, the trickster, the king, and of course, the mighty hero. In the latter poem, we also get a chance to see him as a husband: his long journey home and the bloody battle to reclaim his household finally find their conclusion in tl.ie arms of his beloved Penelope. But what of Odysseus' relationship with his son, Telemachus? Comparatively little is written about the reunion of the father with the son he left as a child, and found a young man. The result of their reunion is not a profound "mingling in love," filled with nostalgia and story-telling, but a strategic military alliance. They unite, but as soldiers, not family. Joyce's Ulysses is a hero in a much-less-thanmighty sense, and he is not at all a sailor, a soldier, or a king. But Leopold Bloom, at the end of the day, holds at least the potential for fatherhood. His odyssey through the Dublin of June 16, 1904, past dead men, drunks, whores, and Catholics, is one well worth considering with an eye to this potential end. When we first meet Bloom, he is the Odysseus of he Calypso episode: chained in domestic servitude to a goddess. Newly risen in the morning, his first concern is to prepare his wife's breakfast while she sleeps, and serve it to her in bed before attending to his own meal. It is clearly a regular morning ritual which Molly no longer even appreciates. Over the course of the morning, he displays signs of his marital servitude as he takes great care in running small errands for his wife: buying her favorite kind of soap at the druggist's, even picking out a sufficiently smutty romance novel to suit her reading tastes. While in another marriage these might be construed as little gestures of love, the fact that Bloom obviously does them out of habit and that Molly obviously doesn't care transforms them instead into shackles of slavery. Bloom must escape this ''Calypso's island" in order to realize the goal of his odyssey to fatherhood. The episode that follows ends with Bloom taking a bath. The organs corresponding to this episode in Joyce's schema 1 are the genitals, and it is here that we first get an explicit look at the sexual Bloom. His organ of fatherhood is described as he sits contemplating it in the bath: sheds much light upon a re-reading of this episode, for it marks the beginning of Bloom's odyssey toward fatherhood. At this point, he is "limp," and only the "father of thousands" by a remote potential, one that he brings closer to actualization by the end of the day. The Nausicaa episode [Book II, Ch. 10] describes a significant turning-point in Bloom's sexual process. It is 8 p.m., at the end ,of Bloom's working-day, and he has come to take a walk on the beach. An entire conversation of non-verbal flirtation-from-afar that takes place between him and the Nausicaa figure of the episode, a young girl named Gerty MacDowell. She coyly shows off her undergarments to him and awakens his sexual desire. Joyce uses the description of the fireworks display to hint at what is happening to Bloom, as the tumescence technic of the episode swells and climaxes with him: And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and 0 ! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of 0 ! and everyone cried 0 ! 0 ! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, 0 so lovely! 0 so soft, sweet, soft! [Book II, Ch. 10] He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemon yellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. [Book II, Ch. 2] We do not learn until much later that his "languid floating flower" has been languid for eleven years; he has been impotent since the death of his infant son, Rudy, at the age of eleven days. This information, however, 1In his "schema" for Ulysses, Joyce lists the Title, Scene, Hour, Organ, Art, Symbol, Color, and Character Correspondences that correspond with each chapter, or episode, of the novel. For example, let us take the first episode of the Book II: it is Titled the "Calypso" episode, and narrates a Scene which takes place in Bloom's house at the Hour of 8 a.m. The Organ of the kidney plays a prominent and interesting part in this episode, and because it concerns Bloom's domestic matters, the Art corresponding to it is economics. The Title alone makes it clear that the central Symbol of the episode is the nymph. Joyce chooses to identify this episode with the Color orange; he has written the episode with a Technic he chooses to describe as a "mature narrative". And, finally, the Correspondences between Joyce's characters and Homer's are listed as: "Bloom= Odysseus, Molly = Calypso". glish, to Middle, to Elizabethan. The transitions are seamless, and the reader feels as though he is witnessing somehing changing and growing with time, like a child in the womb. It is the Oxen of the Sun episode, and oxen are one of the age-old symbols of fertility. It is in this episode that Bloom's quest for fatherhood finds its first concrete object, in the form of Stephen Dedalus. Stephen, whom Joyce's schema explicitly lists as the Telemachus figure to Bloom's Odysseus, is in this episode sitting in a waiting-room at the hospital drinking with some rowdy, young companions. What we know about him has been established by the first three chapters of the novel, which Joyce names the Telemachia, and by the story of his early years as told in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. We know him as a charismatic young man whose status as an "artist" has yet to be firmly established; we have seen into his mind, saturated with a mess of unorganized bits of erudition, and acutely conscious of itself. But his role as the "son" of Bloom is yet unclear (their paths have not even crossed except in indirect encounter), and will only come to fruition over the course of this evening which has just begun. The conversation that the young men are having over their drinks is largely concerned with sex and pregnancy. At one point, Stephen condemns contraceptive intercourse and masturbation, asserting, in Thomistic argument, that the true end of sex is parenthood: "Gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, our lust is brief. We are but means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we." The setting of this episode in a maternity hospital serves a purpose other than symbolism: Bloom, hearing the cries of women in labor, recollects the birth of his own son, Rudy, and it is the recollection that becomes an important segue into his paternal focus on Stephen: His onanism demonstrates that Bloom has regained his virile capacity for fertilization, and he is one step closer to fatherhood. From here, Bloom proceeds to the maternity ward of the National Maternity Hospital on Holles street. This episode [Book II, Ch. 11], one of the most stylistically difficult, opens with three incantations, each · reapeated thrice. They are delivered in the manner of the Arval Hymn, a chant which was part of a ceremony performed by the Fratres Arvales, priests of the Roman goddess of fertility. 2 This, along with the less subtle hint of the maternity hospital, are Joyce's signals to the attentive reader that this chapter will deal with fertility and reproduction. . This theme is reflected even in the technic which Joyce uses. In an impressive display oflinguistic capacity, he has written the chapter in a style that evolves slowly over the course of the episode, from Old En- But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terror-causing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day had died and no 2 1 owe this information to Ulysses Annotated, by Don Gifford, p. 408. 3 �ENERGEIA to "she." Bella/Circe is the central figure of this episode, and she represents the emasculating powers that Bloom must face and overcome. The madam herself switches back and forth between being Bella and Bello, and in her masculine aspect she is cruel and tyrannical like the Homeric goddess, holding dominion over Bloom with the words, "Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke." She then makes him put on women's clothing of "shot silk". She and her whores then hold Bloom down to the floor and torture him with physical sadism as she recites a litany of his womanlike weaknesses. These turn out to be multiple and rather surprising. Made to don a corset, petticoat, and garters, he confesses to being a cro~s­ dresser: to having tried on his mother's clothes, and to having been turned into a "true corsetlover" by playing a female impersonator in a high school play. He is also revealed to have masochistic tendencies, linked to his fear of women: "(Cowed.) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination." "The Sins of the Past" parade by in a medley of voices, telling of his deeds with whores and strumpets, his having masturbated in phone booths and over used-pieces of toilet paper, having written pencilled messages in pub1ic places offering his wife's services "to all strong-membered males". His subjugation to his wife is brought back to our attention by Bello: "The missus is master. Petticoat government." To this, Bloom can only reply, "That is so." His gender reversal and Bella's is symbolic of the reversal of traditional roles that has taken place in his marriage. We are reminded of our very first look at Bloom, eleven episodes ago, when he began his day by bringing Molly breakfast in bed. Bello completes the symbolism when he places a ring on the female Bloom's finger and says, "With this ring I thee own." The bizarre mess of hallucinations is finally shattered by Stephen, toward the end of the chapter, when he shatters the chandelier with a blow of his ash plant. With this sudden return of reality, Bloom regains his masculi nity by taki ng control of the situation. Bello, before whom the female Bloom once cowered in fear, reverts to being Bella, and she in turn cowers before the male Bloom, shrieking in fear when he raises the ashplant as if to strike. Having thus overcome the symbol of his emasculation in the form of Bello, Bloom is ready to take an man of art could save so dark a destiny ... and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his friend's son ... so grieved he also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores. [Book II, Ch. 11] From Bloom's train of mental association, we can see that Stephen is to somehow become a replacement Rudy, at least for one night. This, finally, is the first explicit hint at the relationship between the two men, predicting a crossing of paths which, by the end of the evening, will have changed three lives forever. From the hospital, Bloom follows Stephen and his crew of "wastrels" to Dublin's red-light district, and the Circe episode begins [Book II, Ch. 12]. It is probably the weirdest of all the episodes, written as a "hallucination" by Joyce's description, and it reads like a surreal nightmare. Here, in the sordid setting of a lowclass brothel, we get a more intimate look into the candid workings of both Bloom's psyche and Stephen's, and the foundation of their relationship is cemented. Essential to paternity is masculinity, and one of the most formidable obstacles in Bloom's path to fatherhood are the forces which seek to emasculate him. In order for him to overcome his impotence and become a father, he must first overcome is emasculation and become a man. The division between the sexes is examined, contorted, ripped apart, and utterly done away with in this episode, and it is the process by which Bloom regains his manhood. One of the most bizarre things about Bloom's "hallucination" is the mess of gender-reversals that take place in the episode, following the entrance of the brothel's madam, Bella. She is the Circe figure of the episode, and we are reminded that in Homer's epic, Odysseus is warned by Hermes against this particular goddess, "lest you find yourself unmanned by her". In Homer's context, the warning is intended to mean that Circe's magic turns men into swine, but in Joyce 's, unmanned has a twofold meaning. Bella turns Bloom not only from a man into a pig, but from a male into a female. There are only the smallest, and rather confusing hints that this is so: Bloom falls to the ground "on all fours" and cries "Truffles!", and at the same time the personal pronoun pertaining to him switches 4 JOYCE'S ULYSSES: THE QUEST FOR PATERNITY active, real step toward paternity. This he does by rescuing Stephen from the redcoats who assault him. As Bloom stands over the younger man, waiting for Stephen to regain consciousness, a figure appears to him, an eleven-year-old boy in a school uniform, reading a book. It is the figure of his son, Rudy, who died at the age of eleven days, and is here seen by Bloom at the age he would haV'e been had he lived. The white lamb's wool coverlet that his mother knitted for his burial is transformed into a white lambkin peeping out of his waistcoat pocket. The delicate apparition hovers over Stephen, like the Holy Spirit above Christ in the waters of Galilee, and serves to symbolically "baptize" Stephen and, finally, make Bloom a father. Thus begins the Nostos, the homecoming [Book III]. United with his father in Ithaca, Telemachus must now help Odysseus conquer and slay the suitors who overrun his household, that he may regain his position as master of his home. Joyce spent a lot of time acquainting us with Stephen Dedalus not because he is the essential figure in this novel - else the novel might have been titled Telemachus - but because he is the necessary component to Bloom's nostos. No other character in the novel, not Buck Mulligan or Lynch or any other young man, could have fulfilled the role that Stephen does in Bloom's odyssey. This may be because of the reciprocative nature of their interaction: Stephen acquires from his evening with Bloom something that no one else could have given him, if only because no one else would have been willing to be a father to him for one night. In any case, the relationship that develops between Bloom and Stephen, adpotive father and son, though it endures for only the remainder of the night, would require an entire other essay to examine completely. I will not examine it incompletely here, because it is not the end of Bloom's odyssey toward fatherhood, but only the penultimate step. Once father and son have stolen back into their house, Telemachus bars the door behind them so that the suitors may not escape. But most of the slaying is left up to Odysseus. Likewise, after Bloom sneaks into his house via the window (having forgotten his keys), he lets Stephen in by the front door, and the younger man locks the door behind him. But the "slaying" of the "suitors" is a task that Bloom must do alone. The slaughter begins when Odysseus proves his identity to the suitors by stringing the great bow that none of them were able to string. Joyce lists the bow in his schema as a symbol for reason, and it is through reason - that is, rhetoric - that Bloom persuades Stephen to quit the company of Buck Mulligan. Mulligan corresponds in Joyce's schema to the first suitor who is slain, Antinous. The second suitor who is slain is Eurymachus, who corresponds to "Blazes" Boyland, Molly's lover. Bloom "slays" Boylan in his mind by rationally examining his emotional responses to his own cuckoldry (envy, jealousy, abnegation, and equanimity), and examining his options for retribution in a likewise very rational manner: Assasination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witness), not yet. Suit for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of injuries sustained (selfinflicted), not impossibly. [Book ill, Ch. 2] Finally, he justifies the affair and his own feelings by a process of reasoned "reflections" : The preordained frangiblity of the hymen, the presupposed intangibility of the thing in itself. .. the fallaciously inferred debility of the female, the muscularity of the male: the variations of ethical codes. . .the continual production of semen by distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars. [Book III, Ch. 2] Just as the aegis of Athena appears as a heavenly portent in Odysseus' hall in the midst of all the slaying, Bloom and Stephen simultaneously observe a "celestial sign" in the form of "a star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament" as they stand outside urinating. When all the slaughter is done, Telemachus is sent away and Odysseus fumigates his house, just as Bloom does after Stephen's departure. Bloom has offered him the guest bedroom of his house, but Stephen declines. They have made plans between them, for voice lessons and Italian lessons, for "static, semistatic, and 5 �ENERGEIA peripatetic intellectual dialogues" in the future, but Bloom forsees difficulties in realizing these plans. He recalls how: once at a performance of Albert Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland Square, Dublin, an intuitive particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had publicly declared to an exhilirated audience that he (Bloom) was his (the clown's) papa. [Book III, Ch ..2] We learn that the clown was not, as a matter of fact, Bloom's son. This memory is an illustration of what Bloom calls "the irreparability of the past." The past stands as it has happened, with Bloom's biological son dead and Stephen's biological father being someone else. It is for this reason that Stephen and Bloom go their separate ways at the end of the evening. Bloom may "adopt" Stephen for one night, as he has, but adoptive fatherhood is not true fatherhood, and his odyssey is not quite over yet. Throughout the slaughter, Penelope lies unaware, sleeping. When she awakens and.Odysseus presents himself to her, she is skeptical, and after ten years of separation, is reluctant at first to accept the "beggar" in rags as her lost husband. What finally secures her belief is Odysseus' knowledge of the unique construction of their marital bed. The final episode of the novel takes place in Bloom's marital bed, where Molly lies sleeping. He climbs into bed, she awakens, and they converse a little before falling back asleep. Two very important things happen, however, and together they constitute Bloom's final step towards fatherhood. The first of these is that Bloom, in kissing his wife's rump, gets an erection. This would not be a spectacular event, were we not alert to the fact that it is the first he's had while lying with his wife in eleven years. Traumatized by the death of his only son, Bloom was unable to have sexual relations with Molly for over a decade. This, his first instance of arousal in her presence, signals the beginning of a new episode of fatherhood for Bloom. The second important event is that Bloom, before he falls asleep, requests that Molly get him breakfast in bed the next morning. As she falls asleep, she reflects that "he never did a thing like that before", and we again remember how, for time immemorial it seems, Bloom always brought Molly breakfast in bed. The event of Bloom's erection, a figurative return to his marital bed after a long hiatus, is the culmination of the sexual process of revolution that has taken place over the day: from his limpness in the bath, to his masturbation on the beach, and finally to the beginnings of real sexual intimacy with a real woman, his wife. His request for breakfast in bed is the culmination of the psychological process of revolution that took place mainly in the Circe episode: the conversion of his marriage from a condition of domestic servitude and inequality into a real union of love _ nd a partnership. Bloom, with these apparently-inconsequential gestures, completes his odyssey and his homecoming. Just as Odysseus must now rebuild his kingdom on Ithaca and restore the familial bonds of his home, Bloom has begun the rebuilding of the both the physical and psychological foundations necessary to raise a home. He is ready to face a new marriage and a new fatherhood. It will be a fatherhood not only in the adoptive sense, but in the true, biological one. And as she drifts off to sleep, Molly responds to this proposition, yes I will Yes. • 6 Magical Politics and the Revelation and Perfection of Nature By Matthew Braithwaite The Tempest is a play the whose structure seems knit together by political events. Prospero's betrayal is the catalyst for the action of the play; his reinstatement its conclusion. Yet it is impossible to read the play as the tale of a wronged duke regaining his dukedom. This is mostly because there is much of the play that is more than political, and more to Prospero's actions than is necessary to his dukedom and Miranda's marriage. Furthermore, his magical powers allow him to achieve whatever ends he wishes with much less delicacy than he in fact devotes. By being as delicate as he is, Prospero manages wholly to avoid coercing others to do his bidding: even Caliban gets a measure of freedom. Prospero does form illusions and false impressions as guides,,but the characters' actions are their own. What is more, the situations Prospero creates prompt their actors more fully to express their natures in their actions: his illusions allow the light of truth to shine on whom they charm-a valuable gift for a philosopher. The decisions that most clearly enable this to happen are the division of the characters on Alonso's ship into groups according to Prospero's aims, and the manner in which Prospero appears to each group. To Ferdinand he appears directly (since Ferdinand needs no encouragement to fit into Prospero's plan; far from it), and to Stephano and Trinculo through Caliban's report. But he reserves his strongest use .o f magic for Alonso (who needs prodding to find his conscience), to whom he appears through the speech made by Arie1's "figure of a harpy" . The first scene of the play typifies Prospero' s treatment of Alonso and his company: he gives them pressures to endure, and all but Gonzalo take them poorly. Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio are absurd in their interference with the boatswain's office: they try to command what they cannot, and obstruct those who know better than they what to do. They are leaders who, by not recognizing nature for the rightful authority during the tempest, show that they do not know how to be led. When the boatswain says that they "assist the storm" (l.i.14) 1 he is of course unaware that the storm is Prospero's hand, but this is not lost on the reader. This is the first of many wonderful such ironies: these three wicked men by their very character cannot but assist the action of Prospero's justice upon them. When they are exposed to "state of nature", it becomes clear that Sebastian and Antonio do not have nobility within them but thrust upon them, as their viciousness here and later shows. Despite Gonzalo's urging them to behave as befits civilized men, it is clear that they do not consider anyone's case to be as their own. From Prospero we shortly learn that their evil has some history to it. The political arts that Prospero disdained, he cast upon Antonio, in whom they "awak'd an evil nature" (I.ii.93): Being once perfected how to grant suits, How to deny them, who t' advance, and who To trash for overtopping, new created The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd em, Or else new form' d 'em; having both the key Of officer and office, set all hearts i' the ' state To what tune pleas'd his ear (I.ii.79-85) What Antonio learned, that is, were the arts of favor; and with them he re-created Prospero's court in his own image. The license granted Antonio by this power is like that granted by the island: in most men, law 1 All quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, Vol. II, G. Blakemore Evans, ed. All citations to the play are made within the text in standard form. I am grateful to Dean Brann for her guidance; and particularly for the suggestion that I write on a work of literature, which, taken, has provided good instruction. �ENERGEIA fects nature, has so done, or merely gives the appearance thereof. Prospero's exchange with Gonzalo shows that he is acutely and painfully aware of the horrors that a civilized veneer can conceal: may be relied on as a counterweight to wrongful desires; but a ruler must rely on conscience to serve in that office, and Antonio has none. Like Caliban, he gives free reign to his desires (though they are of a different kind than Caliban's), subject only to practical obstacles; and so, like Caliban, he is slavish-the most unfitting condition for a-ruler. If Gonzalo's statement that "our case is as theirs" (l.i.55) is metaphorical, meaning that the state of the subjects is as the state of the sovereign (as we might suspect from Prospero's metaphor of subjects being "new created" in the sovereign 's image), the case of Antonio 's Milan is truly miserable. The most terrible example of Antonio and Sebastian showing their true colors comes when Prospero puts all but this evil pair to sleep. Prospero clearly anticipates what in fact occurs, as is clear from Ariel's words to Gonzalo: Gon. Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of Our human generation you shall find Many, nay, almost any. Pros. (Aside.) Honest lord, Thou hast said well; for some of you there present Are worse than devils.(III.iii.32-6) The illusion created by Prospero for these "three men of sin" that they are sole survivors on a desolate island is completed by Ariel's appearance in III.iii. Alonso, despairing of ever finding Ferdinand, is prepared to enter into the dream that Prospero has made for him: that nature has requited his past injustices through the death of his son. Though this is not, strictly, true, one might well wonder if it makes a difference. Gonzalo, despite his not having seen Ariel, sees nothing peculiar or inexplicable about Alonso's guilt. Nor does Alonso himself think his own guilt to be a temporary insanity, as his penitence does not vanish with Ferdinand's restoration: he has undergone, Scroogelike, a curative dream. Unlike his brother, Alonso is not beyond redemption, and it is this that Prospero's illusions cause him to reveal. When Prospero breaks his charms, Alonso has expiated his guilt, and is minded as Prospero wishes him to be, suggesting himself the very solution to all problems that Prospero has planned: My master through his art foresees the danger That you, his friend, are in, and sends me forth (For else his project dies) to keep them living. (II.i.297-9) Exactly as one might expect, Antonio's evil wells to the surface, and resonates in Sebastian. Both in this scheme and in his betrayal of Prospero, Antonio counts on two things: the absence of strong men opposing him, and the means to crush any opposition swiftly and decisively. In deposing his brother, the first of these requirements is met by Prospero's preoccupation with study and by the malleability of his subordinates; the second by Naples' army. In plotting to do away with Alonso, he counts on being able to do in Gonzalo as well (whom he had previously ridiculed, but here takes seriously), and again on the weakness of his victims' subordinates. The things Antonio fears are men of strong conscience and outraged mobs. What the island provides is a means of avoiding these difficulties: there Gonzalo is easily killed, and a tearful Sebastian can tell the Neapolitan army and citizenry that his brother and nephew perished at sea. That is to say, by its isolation the island gives aid chiefly to the concealment (rather than to the perpetration) of an evil deed. The fact that Gonzalo's waking does not weaken Antonio's resolve suggests exactly this; that by means of the freedom its isolation provides, the island tests whether nurture, taken as that which per- A daughter? 0 heavens, that they were living both i Naples, The King and Queen there! That they were, I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies. (V.i.148-52) But of course this neat end, which moves Prospero's cherished daughter into the world, and in so doing, restores Milan from its "most ignoble stooping", is like Alonso's penitence in respect of its cause: though Prospero creates a setting in which the two may fall in love, it is their own natures that draw them together. Ferdinand's isolation, like that of Antonio and Sebastian, gives him a degree of liberty. He takes 8 MAGICAL POLITICS Miranda for his bride, as he says, "when I could not ask my father for his advice; nor thought I had one" (V.i.190-1) (the pain of which thought Ariel's music has softened). Miranda, for her part, is encouraged by Prospero to disobey his commands and show her love for Ferdinand: his own laborious trial tries her also. Though Miranda thinks her father sleeps when she converses with Ferdinand (III.i), both of them withstand their supposed freedom from his eyes with propriety. Indeed, Ferdinand's first request to Miranda is that she "will some good instruction give on how I may bear me here" (I.ii.425-6). Ferdinand carries his nobility with him, and so Miranda's reaction to him, Prospero knows, though, that she cannot forever inhabit his artificially pure and dream-like world; that he must release Miranda from being a daughter so that she may become a queen. His statement that she is ignorant of what she is (which fact she is aware of) means, I think, that Miranda belongs also to the world and that he can no longer keep her from it. Ferdinand's wish that they may keep Prospero's wise company in his island paradise is impossible, if for no other reason than that it denies a duty to rule. Miranda's upbringing on this island is, as Prospero says, blessed. To him the world of the political is suspect, since it conceals nature and breeds falsehoods: how could his child know the true from the false in such a setting when even he did not? Better to let her be exposed to truths: the only imperfections which Miranda has seen are Caliban's, and his nature is not evil, but simply not human. Nothing of Caliban is concealed; his very appearance speaks his nature. Against him Miranda can measure what it means to be a perfected human being. So by experi~nce Miranda knows the distinction between animal and cultivated, about which it is impossible to be deceived; but she is not for her innocence ignorant of the subtler corruptions particular to political man, as her question to Prosper_o, "Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?" (l.ii.137-8) shows. Miranda is free from the clouded vision engendered by the political world, and this may help her survive in it. The forthrightness of her mind may be seen in Ferdinand's courtship of her. They speak between themselves with directness and purity. Miranda's admonition, "Hence, bashful cunning, and prompt me, plain and holy innocence!" (III.i.81-2), is the prerogative of her nature. She and Ferdinand are such as to banish suspicion and banter from each other's minds: to see is to love. Prospero's illusion for Ferdinand and Miranda is the same as that he creates for Antonio and Sebastian: freedom from watchful eyes. But the plain difference between the two pairs is captured perfectly m Ferdinand's defense of his virtue: There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with 't. (l.ii.457-9) and his to her, show great clarity of mind, though some might cynically remark that it is only Miranda's naivete that makes her speak thus, and that it was a lucky thing for her that the first young man she set eyes on was Ferdinand. This suggestion has an unfortunate hereditary parallel in the fault which lost Prospero his dukedom. But this is too ugly a thought to be true; it is both better and more plausible to take their "changing eyes" as the result of beautifully clear perception: they see each other's spirits made flesh in each other's appearances. It might at first seem paradoxical to say that Miranda exhibits this kind of sight. She is, after all, entirely innocent of human affairs. But her wholeness and intelligence say that she is not as ignorant as her isolated upbringing might suggest. Prospero has devoted no small amount of care to his daughter's education, and the education of a scholar and magician must be rich with teaching stories and dreams, and other noble lies. Miranda has been in some measure formed by Prospero's Art; she is a created thing, of whom Prospero is justly proud: Here, afore heaven, I ratify this my rich gift. 0 Ferdinand, Do not smile at me that I boast her off, For thou shalt find she will outstrip all praise And make it halt behind her. (IV.i.7-11) ... the murkiest den, The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion Our worser genius can, shall never melt Mine honor into lust... (IV.i .25-8) And in fact, both pairs were given "the most 9 �ENERGEIA opportune place" to act wickedly, but while opportunity exposes baseness in Antonio, it makes Ferdinand's purity and devotion all the stronger. Prospero's description of Caliban as "a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick" (IV.i.188-9) illustrates the difference between these types neatly: it is clear that nurture has done more than stick to Miranda and Ferdinand. While Antonio's evil is concealed by his civilized garments, Ferdinand's and Miranda's natures incorporate the perfection of nurture, and so require no revealing. This last can be said also of Caliban, for when he is given opportunity he reveals nothing of himself that was not obvious. Caliban and Miranda are antitheses: the one animal and the other perfected, but both true. But while Prospero calls Caliban a devil, he rightly calls Antonio worse than a devil, because he is nurture perverted. So Caliban is at the center the play, for against him its foulest evil and most perfect beauty are both opposed .. Caliban has a deep connection to the island. Not only was he born there, but he is, we assume, left alone there at the end of the play. Where Prospero and Miranda are guests on the island, Caliban is its sole native. He knows the island's every corner, so much so that the island provides for his sustenance. He is infused with the island's nature. Strangely, misshapen creature that he is, he speaks beautifully. Even his curses are delivered in neatly-turned phrases. While uncivilized and crude, Caliban is capable of feeling, and is a lover of beauty, as this wonderful passage reveals: Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. /Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments /Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, /That if I then had wak'd after long sleep, /Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming, /The clouds methought would open, and show riches /Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak' d /I cried to dream again. (Ill.ii.135-43) It is no mere beast that dreams and takes delight in music. What is, in a small way, tragic about these capacities is that Caliban is not sensitive merely to natural beauty, but also to human beauty. He has an expression of wonder for nearly everyone in the play: "These be fine things, and if they be not sprites. That's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him." (Il.ii.116-7); "But she so far surpasseth Sycorax as great'st does least." (IIl.ii.102-3); "O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed! How fine my master is!" (V.i.261-2). But if he finds beauty in Stephano, it can only be in comparison to his own ugliness. He is driven to serve Stephano simply because he sees him as something wondrously superior to himself (though, to his credit, he eventually escapes this misapprehension). Though it may be tempting to call Caliban a natural slave because of this, natural slavery requires that it be better for the one in question to be ruled. But Caliban is no better for Prospero's rule over him, since the latter's "humanly taken pains" cannot soften Caliban's inhuman nature. The idea of natural slavery depends on rule improving on the state of nature, but a human nature seems to be required to be susceptible to this improvement. When Prospero embarks for Naples, and Caliban is left alone as he was before Prospero came, he will be just as he was before, but with consciousness of his own inferiority and of beauties he will never attain. If ever enlightenment were cruel it is so here. The apparent contradiction between this picture of Caliban on the one hand, and that of the ill-mannered and bestial slave on the other, wants explanation. Certainly it is not merely an animal that speaks in unrhymed iambic pentameters. Caliban owes what he is to three things: his bestial nature, which he inherits; the island on which he grew up; and his association with Prospero and Miranda. Caliban has had from these two the gift of language. Though he says that his only profit from it is cursing, this is far from the truth. Without speech, there would be nothing curious about Caliban: the creature Miranda describes (l.ii.355) sounds truly like an unreasoning brute, an animal. The reverence we have for speech causes us habitually to assume that the abilities which we see expressed in speech, such as reason and poetry, are inseparable from the faculty itself. In Caliban, we find speech separate from humanity, so it pays to examine what in Caliban is due to speech, and what is independent of it. Such a division would also be the division between things that (in speaking creatures generally) are learned, and things that are required to be susceptible to that learning. 10 MAGICAL POLITICS Caliban first describes Prospero's teaching him language thus: different from an animal, but does merely that make him rational as we understand the term to apply to ourselves? If there is anyone in the play who typifies the man in whom reason has its rightful place, it is Prospero. His first words, "be collected", neatly summarize his behavior throughout. Even in seeing Miranda's and Ferdinand's love for each other he maintains his reserve, saying that he cannot be so glad as they because of the requirements of his designs. But his exchange with Ariel shows he is far from immunity to passion: [Thou wouldst] teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; (l.ii.334-6) If the most fundamental act of language, that of naming, had to be taught to Caliban, then Sycorax must have died when he was very young, else she would have done this. But more interesting is that Caliban's own account of his learning language stresses his ability to name. Miranda's account is similar: Ari. Him that you term'd, sir, "the good old Lord Gonzalo", /His tears run down his beard like winter's drops /From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em /That if you now beheld them, your affections /Would become tender. Pros. Dost thou think so, spirit? Ari. Mine would, sir, were I human. Pros. And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling /Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, /One of their kind, that relish all as sharply /Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd that thou art? /Though with their high wrongs I am strook to th' quick, /Yet, with my nobler reason, gainst my fury /Do I take part.(V.i.15-27) When thou didst not, savage, know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like I A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes /With words that made them known. (l.ii.355-8) So both accounts of Caliban's learning, in other words, describe his being given words for what he already has. But Miranda says that prior to being given language, Caliban did not "know his own meaning". It seems to me that this is the first of at least three aspects of Caliban concerning which the influence of language ought to be investigated. The second is his human aspect, expressed by such abilities as emotion and dreaming. The third is his rationality-is there any sense in which Caliban can be called rational? Concerning these things, it is useful to rephrase the above conclusion more formally: Miranda implies that prior to language Caliban is capable of intent. Similarly, Caliban's own words ("how to name the bigger light...") suggest that prior to language, he was capable of seeing things for things and (hopefully this is not stretching a point) of seeing relations between things: the roots of rational behavior. And Caliban's plotting against Prospero (IIl.ii.87-103) looks a great deal like the genuine article. One could, however, observe that animals exhibit behavior that seems rational in the same way: if a wolf seldom attacks waking victims, can't we say that it forms unspoken syllogisms, for example "defenseless animals are easier to kill, a sleeping animal is defenseless, therefore a sleeping animal is easier to kill"? In other words, how is instinct given language different from what we call rationality? Caliban's use of language makes him In this speech Prospero is held in the grip of two passions, fury and sympathy, with reason occupying its proper role as arbitrator: the very paradigm of human rationality. But the very fact of his sympathy is worth noting, since Prospero has somewhat turned his back on humanity. The chapters of his life with which the play acquaints us are his solitude with his books, his solitude on the island, and the solitude of his eventual retirement to Milan. The first _ these was clearly of willful; and though his banishment was not, neither does he look forward to his return to society with any apparent relish-understandably so, since Prospero has no very great reason to be fond of humanity in general (though he certainly holds some of its particulars dear), for he is acutely and painfully aware of the spectrum of human natures that runs from Gonzalo to Antonio. This speech makes it difficult blithely to attach to Prospero that most odious of scholarly stereotypes, 11 �ENERGEIA the unfeeling automaton. Prospero more resembles the philosopher-king, in that most of his joys in humanity, though lesser than those of the intellect, are not precluded by the latter (and like the philosopherking, he evades his duty to rule). Miranda, in contrast to her father, has none of the gloom or cynicism that presumptively underlie his withdrawal. Humanity's novelty to her makes it as wondrous to her as to Caliban. Her reactions to the dark underbelly of mankind are therefore a strange mix of youthful emotion and innocence made potent by a mature intellect. Her joy in her "brave new world" is a gift of Prospero's upbringing, which may save her from his disillusionment. Ferdinand is another, for he and Miranda are two of a kind, and so will keep each other from receding from the world. But Prospero has no equals to call his companions, only his daughter and the insubstantial Ariel (who shares his secret designs but not his humanity). In addition to all this, Miranda has a genuine love of humanity. Though Prospero's stories leave evil known to her, her first words to him show that she is perfectly unreserved with "the very virtue of compassion" (I.ii.27). Taken literally, as we are precisely to do ("I have suffered with those that I saw suffer" (I.ii.5)-the most precise evidence the subject admits of), compassion could be called the fundamental social instinct. It is certainly remarkable in Miranda, since she has only known the society of her father and Caliban. It is doubly remarkable in that her life has been uncommonly free from suffering. Her compassion, which we could say is due to something like nurture (acting on a good nature), is exactly what is absent in Caliban. Caliban is driven by desire, and if he has a conscience it is surely vestigial, being bothered by attempts at neither rape nor murder. But we are obviously not meant to take Caliban as an evil nemesis, since his attempt to do away with Prospero is entered into with drunken buffoons: the contemplation of murder is mingled with the comic relief. Caliban's animal nature, the way his actions flow directly from his desires, is precisely what mitigates his contemplation of murder, even as carefully as he plans it (Ill.ii.8795). If an act is not just unless it is done with just intent, then we may say that an act is not evil unless it is done with evil intent. And if one cannot intend to act justly without some knowledge of the just, one cannot have evil intention without some knowledge of evil. Most would agree that evil acts are so by nature. We take it that this implies that all men know what an evil act is. That is, to say that evil acts are so by nature is equivalent to saying that man naturally knows what acts are evil, or more generally, that man naturally knows what is by nature. But Caliban clearly does not have this knowledge (or has it in a different way), since he seems wholly to lack evil intent. This prompts the question of what difference between Caliban's nature and man's nature underlies his ignorance and our knowledge. Reflexively, one leaps to suggest man's rationality as the distinction. But Caliban appears to confound this idea, as he is in some way rational, and yet does not seem to know what is by nature. Then we must say whether man is rational in a sense that Caliban is not, or whether knowing by nature what is by nature is due to some other property that belongs to man but not to Caliban. If we were to adopt the first of these alternatives, namely, to conclude that Caliban is not rational in the proper sense, there arises a difficulty. If his rationality is to be distinguished from that of man, it must be done on grounds other than that of the ability to reason (since he appears to have that), and it seems like there are only two (related) options: the objects to which he applies reason, and the manner in which his reason is applied. The first of these alternatives certainly looks inviting, since one would imagine that there are objects about which Caliban would have difficulty reasoning. The difference could perhaps be captured by defining proper rationality as the capacity to reason abstractly, or as the capacity for intellection. The second of these alternatives is likewise appealing, since one could say that reasoning applied only to the satisfaction of desire is merely animal instinct given language, and so define proper rationality as the ability to reason with the desire to know. The two alternatives are nearly equivalent, so they may both stand as the consequence of assuming that Caliban, though he can reason, is not rational in the fullest sense. But neither illuminates why man knows by nature what is by nature, since when we say that man by nature knows what is evil, we do not have in mind a reasoning process, but as said before, something like an instinct for what is by nature. The ability to reason abstractly, therefore, or the ability to reason 12 MAGICAL POLITICS desiring to obtain knowledge, does not completely account for man's advantage over Caliban. The other alternative, then, is to name the property of man, deficient in Caliban, which allows him to know by nature what is by nature. Since we see Caliban's deficiency in this regard manifested in his asocial nature, it seems right to examine compassion, taken as the fundamental social virtue. Compassion (in the sense of knowledge of the likeness of others to oneself), when found in a rational creature, can be seen as a kind of knowledge: it makes the likeness of other men to oneself an intelligible fact, from which reason may proceed; in other words, compassion is what permits man knowledge of his own nature. It is the source of man's capacity for intellection about man. And so I think if compassion is natural in man, it is what permits man to know what is by nature (inasmuch as it permits him to know his own nature). But Caliban is not a man, and he knows it. Therefore, lacking compassion, he is not.by nature social, and so good and evil natures (which belong to man as social) have no meaning with respect to him: he has potential for neither. This makes it seem that Caliban is not fully conscious of himself: whereas man is naturally introspective, Caliban is not. Thus it may be that it was more right than it first appeared to suggest that human rationality is distinguished by its objects or its motivation. Caliban's lack of understanding of his nature is perhaps the strongest argument that he is not human, for when we speak of being rational, we mean rational and conscious of that rationality. If ther~ is any sense in which Caliban is rational, it is not a self-conscious one: he has neither the means nor the inclination to reason about himself. So it seems that he does not "know his own meaning", but only his purposes. Language puts Caliban somewhere between a syllogistic wolf and the self-consciously ration.al being (for a mere animal could not have understood the necessity of seizing Prospero's books) in that understanding language only gives him access to more information. Since he only uses the information gained from language to vent his desires, he is not rational in the same way that man is. Something like awareness of nature is probably still at the heart of this: man delights in language and reason for their own sake (rather than merely to serve desire) exactly because he is aware of these faculties in himself. In one respect, Antonio is much like Caliban, in that neither has a conscience to obstruct the satisfaction of his desires. But while Caliban has no pretensions to humanity (though perhaps he has hopes), Antonio tries to hide his lack of human compassion under the skin of a social creature. In his speech to Sebastian he shows that he understands himself perfectly on this point: Here lies your brother, No better than the earth he lies upon, If he were that which now he's like-that 's dead, /Whom I with this obedient steel, three inches of it, /Can lay to bed for ever; whiles you, doing thus,/To the perpetual wink for aye might put /This ancient morsel, this Sir Prudence, who /Should not upbraid our course. For all the rest, They '11 take suggestion as a cat laps milk; They' 11 tell the clock to any business that We say befits the hour. (Il.i.280-9) Prospero's comment on Antonio, "You, brother mine, that entertain' d ambition, ex pell' d remorse and nature ... Would here have kill'd your king, I do forgive thee, unnatural as thou art." (V.i.75-9) illuminates this disparity. "Unnatural" is precisely the right word, for the compassion that causes men to act well to each other (and so makes man social) is exactly absent in Antonio and Sebastian. Despite this, they preserve the appearance (but not the reality) of a social creature, using it to satisfy a desire that is peculiarly social: power. This concealment, which Prospero undoes, is perhaps the most awful perversion of civilized man. Miranda and Antonio are opposites in that they represent high perfection and low corruption, but are alike in that they are "nurtured". In other important respects, however, Miranda is very like Caliban. Both are the offspring of magicians expelled from human society, and both have had nearly no contact with mankind as a result of having been brought up on the island. Their island is a paradise: it furnishes fresh water and food (as we know from Caliban's account of his services to King Stephano), and the climate is presumed hospitable. Nothing in Caliban's various accounts suggests that the island's magical properties result from Prospero, so we assume they belong to the 13 �ENERGEIA island itself. I recall no mention of any remotely harmful thing residing there- nor, in fact, of any animals whatsoever, save small edibles. There are only magical creatures, who fill the island with music and sound. The foremost feature of the island is thus, I think, its unreality, and this taints Miranda, making her perfection strange. Despite her embodiment of the finest characteristics of nurture, she, unlike Antonio, is not the product of any society, but of Prospero's careful education: Here in this island we arri v' d, and here Have I, thy schoolmaster, make thee more profit Than other princess' can, that have more time For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful. (I.ii .171--4) In its general form, this resembles the suggestion I think implicit in the Republic that the perfection of nature comes about through a deliberate act of reason (in this case Prospero's), and not by chance: not simply by nurture, but by design. As Prospero intends her to rule (and hopefully better than he), this care is doubly appropriate. Both he and his brother "new create" others with an eye on political aims, but while Antonio 's creation breeds vice, Prospero's stories have bred a virtuous ruler. This perfection of nature through reason is the aim of Prospero's Art, as Ariel's speech to the "three men of sin" indicates: But remember, (For that's my business to you) that you three From Milan did supplant good Prospero, Expose' d unto the sea (which hath requit it) Him, and his innocent child; for which foul deed The pow'rs, delaying (not forgetting), have Incens' d the seas and shores-yea, all the creatures, Against your peace. (IIl.iii.68-75) Prospero, that is, has animated the hand of nature according to the demands of justice and reason, motivated by love for his daughter. While nature of her own strength will reward sloth, overindulgence, and the like, the "cankered mind" finds its reward from such human (and hence unreliable) sources as law and vengeance. Ironically, Alonso calls the events of the play's end "unnatural", the more unnatural viciousness of Antonio and Sebastian having escaped him. Contrary to his opinion, the nature of The Tempest, embodied by Ariel, is both animate and has a conscience, though perhaps it is apolitical: Antonio's betrayal has its natural reward only in the slavishness it requires; its temporal reward must come from Prospero. It is nature's conscience that makes it at once susceptible to Prospero's guidance, and, sadly, unreal. It may be this that accounts for Prospero's tone at the end of the play. He doesn't seem exactly sad, but he doesn't seem truly happy either. Mostly, he seems ready to die. His famous speech: You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort, As if you were dismay'd; be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors (As I foretold you) were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself; Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded /Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff I As dreams are made on; and our little life /Is rounded with a sleep.(IV.i.146--58) is tinged with the unmistakable melancholy of a lonely man. Prospero cares for two things in all the world: Milan and his daughter. But Prospero knows that he must return Miranda to the world of men, where he cannot himself live. As he acknowledges, he is at the end of the play engaged in a departure which will mean the end of his life . His great human drama is so dedicated also to ensuring that the things that are important to him are well and orderly disposed. Prospero appears to be substantially unchanged from the time, twelve years past, that his "library was dukedom large enough" (I.ii. I 09-10). Prospero's return to society entails the renunciation of his magic, which does not belong to the world of men, and by means of which he found a satisfying kingdom in the island. By his magic, natural power serves the just rule of man's reason, transmuting Alonso's submerged guilt into redemptive penitence, Ferdinand's and Miranda 's apparent nobility into graceful matrimony, Antonio's and Sebastian's hid- 14 M AGIC A L POLITICS that no long~r need serve him, nor will; to fall back on the hands of humanity, which will hopefully bear the careworn mage gently to his grave. His island has been a meeting place for nature and nurture, wherein all the possibilities are explored: the perfection of Miranda, and the imperfection of Caliban; the hopelessness of Antonio's evil, and the hope implied by Alonso's penitence and Gonzalo's nobility. The two worlds never really meet: Prospero is left with the memory of a paradise that could not fully be a kingdom, since nature's spirits belong ultimately to her, not to man; and Caliban is left with the memories of "brave spirits" that he can never become, and of a beautiful woman whom he cannot love. We can picture the two of them ending their lonesome days in their respective kingdoms, the brief touch of which leaves each impossibly wanting what belongs to the other's world. • den and hollow inhumanity into clear and gruesome treachery, and Prospero's own banishment into the opportunity to achieve these ends. In the island, "temporal royalties" and what may be termed "philosophical royalties" are one. Miranda's question, "What foul play had we, that we came from thence? Or blessed was't we did?" (l.ii.60-1) seems to imply that nobody would willingly relinquish temporal rule, but also that ruling the less "temporal" kingdom of the island surpasses it. Though Prospero always held the source of rightful authority in Milan (the love of his people), he effectively relinquished temporal rule by putting it in Antonio's hands, thinking that love and trust would protect him. In Milan, Prospero had to choose between the two sorts of royalties, but on the island he does not. The practical administration of that kingdom requires only the application of true Art and learning. 2 Magic is the means to all this, the agents of which Prospero addresses as: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, I And ye that on the sands with printless foot /Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him /When he comes back, you demi-puppets that /By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, /Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime /Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew... (V.i.33--40) There are no elves of cities, it seems, nor sprites of houses and fairies of roads. As the agents of magical power withdraw from the concentrations of men, Prospero must do so also to rule the perfect kingdom, a kingdom which is consequently small-though while it endures, an ideal, where music may be had for nothing. Prospero's island does not depend on him for its essence; and there is certainly something to Caliban's claim that he is an usurper, for Caliban belongs there more surely than he. Prospero's tenure on the island is inevitably temporary-it serves a purpose, but he must leave ; and leave there the instruments of magic 2 0f course, the island is made in the image of other rulers also. To Prospero's rule of reason we may compare Gonzalo's kingdom (II.i.144-69) of innocent and ignorant primitives, Stephano's coalition of murderous but essentially carefree drunkards, and Caliban's simple and undemanding anarchy. 15 �The Motion of a Stretched String: A Series of Haiku and Equations An Evening At Home With Doctor Faustus 1 By Jesse Berney By Hermann Hesse Translated by Eva T.H. Brann The taut striMg vibrates. We must describe its motion. But how? Equati011s. We describe two curoes. Two ratios are the same, Formed by ordinates. On these string-like curves Displacement and curvature Are in proportion. Acceleration Of any point on the curve Is as curvature. 2 2 2 d y/dx ad y/dt 2 All points on the string Reach the axis at one time. How is this explained? It is like our curves: Displacement and curvature Are in proportion. A function of "x," The curve is sinusoidal: Crest to trough to crest. d2y/dx2 = -k y y :i= A sin(kx) Our function describes The string still in one instant, Not its whole motion. Acceleration Proportional to distance, A function of "t" Combine our functions. Our equation now has both Time and displacement. Curves move down a line. This is a function of both Displacement and time. The speed of this "wave" Is determined by the string: Its tension and mass. More derivations Discover all the constants. Complete equation. d 2y/dt 2 = -roy ; y = B cos(cot) f(Jt,t) = C sin(kx) cos( rot) y = g(x-ut) Doctor Johann Faustus was sitting in his dining room together with his friend Doctor Eisenhart (the great-grand-father, incidentally, of the physician who later on became so famous 2 ). The sumptuous evening meal had been removed. From the heavy gilded goblets rose the bouquet of an old Rhine wine. The two musicians who had performed at dinner had just disappeared - a lutenist and a flautist. "Well, now I will give you the promised sampling," said Doctor Fa~stus and poured a draught of the old wine down his gullet, which had grown somewhat fat. He was no longer a young man; it was two or three years before his frightful end. "As I already told you, my assistant sometimes produces these droll apparatuses, by means of which one can see and hear this and that - things far off from us, or long passed away, or yet in the future. Today let us try out the future. The fellow seems to have invented something very amusing and curious, you know. So just as he has often shown us, in magic mirrors, the heroes and beauties of the past, he has now invented something for the ears, a sound funnel. It allows us to hear the noises which will be heard in the distant future in just the same spot in which the sound apparatus is positioned." "Might it perhaps be, my dear friend, that you serving spirit is swindling you a little?" "I don't think so," said Faustus. "For black magic the future is not at all unattainable. As you know, we 1 u 2 = S/µ 1928-30. In translating it, I disclaim any reflection on the sounds enveloping our quad on a balmy spring afternoon. 2 f(x,t) = C cos(cot) sin(2n/A.)x This vignette was revised by H. H. for publication in the years A reputed quack who lived from 1663-1727 and was memorialized in a German children's song as "the Doctor Eisenhart who cured the folk by his own art." When I was little I confused him with the serial killer of wives, Bluebeard, who was invented about that time. have always proceeded on the assumption that events on earth are, without exception, subject to the law of cause and effect. Therefore nothing about the future can be changed, anymore than about the past: The future too is fixed through the law of causality. Thus it is already there, only we do not yet see it and taste it. As the mathematician and the astronomer can calculate the occurrence of an eclipse accurately far in advance, just so any other part of the future we please could be made visible and audible to us, if we had invented a method for it. As it happens, Mephistopheles has invented a sort of di vining rod for the ear; he has built a trap in which tones are captured. We have tried it out repeatedly. Sometimes, to be sure, nothing becomes audible at all, because we just happened to come on a void in the future, on a point of time at which nothing audible is taking place in our room. At other times we have heard all kinds of things; for example, we once heard some people, who will live in the far future, speak of a poem in which are sung the deeds of Doctor Faustus, that is, my own. But enough; let us try it out." At his call the domestic spirit appeared in his customary gray monk's cowl. He set a small machine with a sound funnel on the table and urgently enjoined the gentlemen to refrain from all comment during the whole process. Then he cranked the machine, which began to work with a low, soft buzzing. For a long time nothing was heard but this suspenseful buzzing, to which the two doctors listened expectantly. Then suddenly a tone, never before heard, shrilled forth: an evil, devilish howling, of which it was impossible to say whether it stemmed from a serpent-monster or perhaps from a raging demon. Impatient, warning, angry, commanding, the evil tone screamed, repeating itself in short, fierce pulses, as if a hunted dragon had come whistling through the room. Doctor Eisenhart grew pale and breathed in relief when �ENERGEIA the horrid scream, having frequently repeated itself at ever increasing range, faded into the distance. There followed a silence, but then another sound became audible: a male voice, coming as from a great distance, in an urgently preaching tone. The listeners could understand fragments of the speech and take them down on writing tablets that had been placed ready to hand, for example the sentences: " ... and so, following the shining example of America, the ideal of economic enterprise marches irresistibly toward its victorious perfection and realization. .. .While on the one hand the standard of living of the worker has reached a height never heretofore experienced, ... and we can say without presumptuousness that by means of present-day production techniques the childlike dreams of paradise dreamed by earlier ages are more than ... " Again silence. Then came a new voice, a deep, earnest voice, which spoke thus: "Ladies and gentlemen, I request you lend an ear to a new poem, a creation of the great Nicholas Underwhelm3 of whom it may well be said that he, as no one else, has turned inside out the innermost recesses of our time, has most wisely discerned the sense and non-sense of our existence: He holds the chimney in his hands. From either cheek a flipper's hung. According as the mercury stands, He climbs the ladders without rung. So up along long ladders climbs He. Clouds are lining for his cloak He longs to save a life betimes. He's overcome with nolicroak. Doctor Faustus was able to write down the larger part of this poem. Eisenhart too took notes assiduously. A sleepy voice, without doubt the voice of an older woman or a spinster now became audible. It said: "Boring program! As if the radio had been invented for that! Well, at least here comes some music." And, indeed, some music now broke out, a wild, lascivious music with a very steady beat, now blaring, 3 The poem by Underwhelm ("Unterschwang") is in the style of Christian Morgenstern, a zany surrealistic poet writing early in the twentieth century. now languishing, a totally unfamiliar, alien, indecent, malevolent music of howling, quacking, and cackling wind instruments, vibrating with the banging of gongs, overridden now and then by a singing, howling vocalization, which ejaculated words and verses \nan unknown language. In between, at regular intervals, was emitted the mystifying verse: The world will marvel at your hair If you use Go go for its care! That first, malevolent, furious,, warning tone, too, that dragon-howling full of torment and rage, audibly interjected itself from time to time. When the domestic spirit had, with a smile, brought his machine to a stop, the two scholars looked at each other curiously, with a painful feeling of embarrassment and shame, as if they had unintentionally become the witnesses of an indecent and forbidden occurrence. Both of them reviewed their notes and showed them to each other. Finally Faustus said: "What do you think of it?" Doctor Eisenhart drank a long draught from his beaker. He looked at the floor and remained thoughtful and silent for a long time. Finally he said more to himself that to his friend: "It is horrifying. There cannot be any doubt about the fact that that humanity out of whose life we just heard a sampling is insane. These are our progeny, the sons of our sons, the great-grandchildren of our great-grand-children whom we heard saying such dubious, sad, confused things, who emit such dread-inducing screams, who sing such unintelligible idiot verses. Our progeny, friend Faustus, will terminate in insanity." "I don't want to assert that so definitely," Faustus said. "Your point of view has nothing unlikely about it, to be sure, but still it is more pessimistic than necessary. Just because here, in one single, limited spot on earth, such wild, despairing, indecent and indubitably insane tones are heard, that does not actually have to mean that all of humanity has become mentally ill. It could, after all, be the case that on this spot where we happen to be a madhouse will be located in a few centuries and that we got to hear fragments from it. Or it could be that a party of total drunks treated us to their brain-storms. Just think of the bellowing of a merry crowd, perhaps at a carnival. That sounds quite similar. But what takes me aback are those other tones, 18 AN EVENING AT HOME WITH DOCTOR FAUSTUS those screams, which cannot have been produced either by human voices or by musical instruments. They sound, so it seems to me, absolutely devilish. It can only be demons that utter such tones." He turned to Mephistopheles: "Would you possibly know something about this? Can you tell us what sort of tones we have just heard?" "We have indeed heard," said the domestic spirit and smiled, "demonic tones. The earth, gentlemen, half of which is, to be sure, already today the property of the devil, will within a certain time belong to him altogether and will form a part, a province of hell. You have expressed yourself somewhat harshly and negatively about the tonal and verbal language of this earthly hell. To me, however, it seems at any rate noteworthy and nice that in hell too there will be music and poetry. That is the function of Belial, to whom this whole department reports. I think he does his job rather nicely." • 19 �FORM OF LANGUAGE The Form of language By Beatrice Robbins Socrates claims thatthought is internal discourse. (Thea. 189e) Therefore, language is as necessary to thought as it is to conversation. But not all words mean the same things to all people. A word might have a standard definition which, given the existence of the Platonic forms, is wrong. So it seems that the intent of almost every dialogue is the creation of true language. A term is picked: be it justice, knowledge, or table. The rest of the dialogue is spent on comparing per.:. sonal definitions and eliminating false notions in an attempt to find each word's true definition. This perfect definition, were it ever to be found, would, by virtue of its truth, be accepted by and mean the same thing to everyone present. The word in question would be truly standardized, and from there thought would evolve towards understanding truth. The need to standardize language is demonstrated by the dialogues being multi-person conversations, not monologues. Because each participant is an individual there is no assurance that any particular word has the same meaning for him as for anyone else. One knows his own definition of the term in question, but because language is not completely standardized, he can not know exactly what the word means to anyone else. The Sophist' s Stranger explains the problem thus: At present you see, all that you and I possess in common is the name. The thing to which each of us gives that name we may perhaps have privately before our minds, but it is always desirable to have reached an agreement about the thing itself by means of explicit statements, rather than be content to use the same word without formulating what it means (Soph. 218c) 1• 1 Quotes from The Sophist, Theatetus, and Timaeus are to be found in: Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton, ed.,(New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1989). Sophist - pp. 958-1017, Theatetus - pp. 847-919, Timaeus - pp. 1153-1211. For the discussion to work as an interchange of ideas, the terms involved must mean the same thing to all those involved. To reach any meaningful conclusion, the thought and communication must be done with terms for which the standardized definition is the true definition. This need leads to the format of and material in the dialogues, most noticeably in the Theatetus and the Sophist. , In each dialogue, the quest for each true, standard definition begins with a question. Socrates provides examples: "But if our guest wil1 allow me, I should like to ask him what his countrymen thought and how they used these names ... sophist, statesman, philosopher (Soph. 217)," and, "Then knowledge and wisdom are the same things (Thea. 145e)." The question clearly and simply provides the terms which are to be the focus of the dialogue, and asks for their definitions. Because this is the obvious commencement of philosophical dialectic, one might claim that at this point thought begins. Perception, however, must be prior to thought of any type. Before one begins to think he must have something to think about. It need not be a sight, as suggested in the Timaeus, where vision is recognized as the foundation of philosophy (Tim.47a-b), although sight seems the most easily acceptable of the perceptions. Smell, taste, and hearing work just as well . That the perception is is the only necessity; there is nothing else to spark man's though process. Only after he has perceived something can he name it and begin to inquire about its nature. Thought will be further affected by later perceptions. Perception never stops causing and mutating thought. But it is from questioning the original perception that thought begins. Philosophy 's reliance on perception raises the problem of the forms: how can man inquire about the forms when he surely can not perceive them? No man's inquiries can start with the forms. He can ask, "What is Justice?" only after having perceived and identified some act or acts of justice or injustice as such. Whether or not he identifies them correctly is we' follow or get left behind (Soph. 243b)." In other words, Euclid is using terms whose standard definitions are not commonly understood. And, even the modern notion of defining a plane by three non-colinear points is confusing. For to understand that idea, one must understand exactly what a point is. So, while higher math and geometry are standardized, at their roots one finds the same problem that Theatetus, Socrates, and language face: irrelevant at this stage; he has merely found something about which he can begin to inquire. And, after recognizing that same property inherent in many actions, he might begin to guess at the existence of imperceptible forms to provide an explanation for the various perceived similarities. Perhaps the overwhelming dependence in perception is responsible for a general dependence in metaphors. When a concept seems to elevated, vague, or difficult to grasp, it is often made easier to understand by metaphorical transformation into perceivable images. Because metaphors force one to call an image of a concrete entity to mind, it becomes possible to 'see' the relationship in question. From that internal perception, thought about the abstraction develops. For the same reason, some concepts are so elevated one can only begin to attempt their comprehension through metaphor. Hence, Socrates uses them constantly in The Republic's allegories of the cave and the divided line. The need of metaphor, while painfully apparent, is troublesome to one attempting to standardize a true language. For, what could be farther from using each word as its one true meaning demands than using a seemingly random selection of words to illustrate various other, unrelated words? Metaphors are nothing more than a "common use of words and phrases, which the vulgar twist into any sense they please (Thea . 168c )" . In a true and standardized language, there would be neither metaphors, nor any need of them. Math may be taken as the closest thing to a model for standardized human language. The closest one may come to a figure of speech is an analogy, or ratio, between like terms. Terms are either precisely defined or defined as unknowns. There is only one meaning of scalene triangle. It is a triangle with no sides equal. There is only one meaning of triangle: a three sided figure on one plane. But, what is the exact definition of a plane? Euclid calls it "a surface which lies evenly with the straight lines on itself (Elem . bk. 1, def. 7)2," for which he, like the great ancient philosophers, might be faulted with "showing too little consideration for ordinary people like ourselves ... (and) pursuing his own argument to the conclusion without caring whether the first elements of which we and all other things consist are such that no account can . be given of them. Each of them just by itself can only be named; we cannot attribute to it anything further. .. (Thea. 201e-202) This, too, is one of the paradoxes of language. The most simple concepts, the elements, are undefinable but necessary to all that follows. Perhaps this similarity between the language of math and philo.sophy is one of the reasons Socrates puts the mathematical world 'immediately before the philosophical on his divided line (Republic . 510a5 llc)3. Perhaps, also, one must learn from the standardization present in the maths what he is searching for with philosophy. Math shows one mostly standardized language in a purely theoretical world, while, through philosophy one hopes to gain a standardized, true language which will work even in its starting place, the perceivable world. But the dependence on perception remains, presenting a difficulty. In the Sophist, the Stranger suggests that: "thinking and discourse are the same thing, except what we call thinking is precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound. (Soph. 263e)" And in the Theatetus, Socrates himself claims that the process of thinking is: "a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering ... 2 Euclid, Elements,translated by Sir Thomas L. Heath, Robert McHenry, ed., In Great Books of the Western World, vol 10, 3 Plato, Republic, translated by Allan Bloom, (New York, HarperCollins, 1991. ), 190-191 (USA, Encyclopedia Brittanica Inc, 1990). 21 �ENERGEIA when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes and no ... So I should describe thinking as discourse, and judgment as a statement pronounced, not aloud to someone else, but silently to oneself. (Thea. 189e-l 90)" In other words, by Socrates' definition at least, thought is purely internal dialogue. As said briefly before, if this is so, thought demands language. Man must have a language in order to identify, name, and ponder his perceptions. But he must have perceptions before he can develop a language naming them. Perceptions give rise to names. Man saw rock, food, fire, before he began to try to communicate their existence to his fellow creatures. But surely as he was able to recognize his food for himself before he was able to name it. Isn't that thought? Perhaps rather than being thought, the recognition of food is an instinct or the beginning of an action. Urges to action and reason, although often coincidental, are not the same thing. One dances by muscle memory, eats and dodges oncoming cars by instinct. Impulses to action are not decisions. No internal dialectic is involved,. They are immediate reactions to the situation, an ability shared by all men and most animals. Thought, however, even if it be thought towards an action, is a slow, deliberative process: "Knowledge does not reside in the impressions, but in our reflection upon them (Thea. 186d)." But what provoked man to develop language, and how could he think to do it without already having begun? Further, accepting the definition of thought as being internal dialectic, how does one account for the strange difficulty of explaining ideas to others? Even Socrates must "try to put (his idea) into words. (Thea. 165e)" This simple phrase suggests that ideas or thoughts are not recognized in coherent groups of words but need to be structured into them to be communicated, which does not follow if the mind thinks by "simply talking to itself (Thea. 190)." That the mind thinks in its own variation of the common language is only a partly valid explanation. One must speak the language he thinks in. The two processes feed off each other; neither can develop without the other. On the other hand, it is not necessary that the mind use with itself exactly the same manner of speech that it uses when communicating with others. External language must be much more standardized than internal language, because, while one is sure to understand one's own thoughts, for others to understand these same thoughts as they were conceived they must understand the organization of and the terms used. Hence the need for the standardizing tools of grammar, punctuation, and common vocabulary. The more abstract and complicated the thought is, the greater the need for precise, comprehensible language. Man can not point at Truth the way he .can at food. He must be able to comprehend it with thought and explain it with words. The better standardized the language, the greater the chance the explanation will be understood. Hypothetically, truly standardized language, meaning language in which the one true definition for each word was know and understood, would allow perfect knowledge. Because it would be the only possible perfect, exact language, it would be the form of language. As such, it would allow absolute knowledge of the forms. One would actually know what Virtue was. One would know all Truth. But, as previously stated, language can never be truly standardized because it is based on ideas too fundamental to be explained. Just as Theatetus has far more difficulty in explaining letters than syllables, so one can explain a sentence or paragraph far more easily than the terms it uses. And, other words must be used to explain the terms in question, creating the need for further explanations in an ever-growing, meaningobscuring cycle. Additionally, because language is a human, bodily function, it can not ever actually 'reach' the forms. Humans, being a conglomeration of both body and soul, are not perfect creatures and can never reach perfect understanding, "We have intercourse with becoming by means of the body through sense, whereas we have intercourse with real being by means of the soul through reflection (Soph. 248)." Reflection, or internal dialectic, is the only way to use the soul. But, the perfect soul is shackled by the imperfect body, and so, the form of language as well as the rest of the forms, can never be reached. Language can never be completely true and completely standardized. Completely standardized language in the modem sense is not 'true language'. It is what computers speak. It is inhuman language for the lowest common 22 FORM OF LANGUAGE denominator. The emphasis is on standardization and not on truth. All that matters is that everyone understand the one definition for each term in the same way. What the definition is has little significance. And, because it allows no room for spontaneous expressions, for emotion, for the ever-changing connotations of words, it can only be the almost meaningless language of machines, a dead language. Attic Greek is far more standardized in the twentieth century than any current language, but one must use his own language to define Greek terms. So, while most Greek words have an accepted English definition, the translations themselves are part of the ever mutating English language, and thus are not completely standardized. No spoken human language can be because human thought is not stagnant. One grow, encounters and perceives new images and ideas, and his though process changes. No two people go through exactly the same metamorphosis, so no two manners of thought, and thus, no two personal dialects, can be exactly alike. And so, while Socrates strives towards both standardization and truth, even his lesser goal is an impossibility. "True" language, too, that seems the goal of philosophy, must be eternally static. Rather than subhuman, it must somehow be superhuman. "True" language can easily be imagined as the language of the gods. But, for the same reasons completely standardized human language is impossible, completely true language is impossible. "True" language faces the additional difficulty of at once being responsible for · and acquiring absolute knowledge. To create the language of the gods, the form of language, one must know all perfectly. To fully know all, one must use the form of language. So, the best one can hope to do is as Socrates does: attempt to purify and make more true his own, ever-changing language while reaching towards the forms. The problem of thought dependent on language is a clear paradox: neither can exist without the other, neither can begin without the other. Dialectic is the best path towards the forms, but grows from base perceptions. Language is necessary to thought, but must evolve with mankind. But if language evolves, how can it hope to reach the changeless, eternal forms? The effort is doomed, but necessary and noble. One must attempt to understand. "To rob us with discourse would be to rob us of philosophy. That would be the most serious consequence. (Soph. 260)" • 23 �THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND They Do Not Understand: A Discussion of the Heracleitus Fragment Number 12 By Dawn Star Shuman The translation of the Heracleitus fragment number 12 in the series of fragments read for Freshman Language may not be the most difficult of these fragments. However, the nuances of meaning in some of the words are lovely, and the understanding of these nuances makes the meaning of the entire sentence both clearer and more complex. The sentence is as follows in Greek and in my English translatlon: ou ~uvLCiaw ws 8LacpEpoµEvov EauT0 6µoAOYEL. TTaALVTOVOS apµov(a WO"TTEp TO~OU KaL AUTTES They do not understand that in being rent asunder a thing agrees with itself; just like the back-stretched harmony of a bow and of a lyre.. This sentence makes sense grammatically, both as a translation of the Greek and as fluent English. What may not be immediately apparent is that it also makes very good sense as a statement of an idea. Some questions about the idea might be: how does a thing agree with itself? What is this thing? What kind of understanding are they failing in? The answers to these kinds of questions lead to a possible explanation of what the sentence means. cvvLCiaw is a form of the verb CJ'UV-L11µL, meaning "to bring or set together, in hostile sense ... mataph. to perceive, hear... 2. to understand." 1 This adds the idea of opposition to the more basic sense of perception and understanding. In this sense, understanding Except where otherwise noted, definitions for the Greek come from: Intennediate Greek-English Lexicon, Liddell and Scott, 7 ed. 1 might be the setting together of a prior knowledge in a person's mind with a fact or perception of the outside world and thereby coming to a new idea or knowledge about a thing. It is important to detail the relationships between the three verbs in the first part of the sentence. ~uvLCiaLV is the main finite verb. 6µo)..oyE'Lis also a finite verb which is modified by the circumstantial participle 8LacpEpoµEvov . The manual gives the meanings of6µ0)..oyE'L1s "agree, admit, or allow." Although I do believe it to be the most concise translation, there is something awkward about saying that a thing agrees with itself in English. It carries the sense of something maintaining internal consistency. But another possible meaning of 6µo)..oyEL is "simply to make an agreement, come to terms ... with another." With that meaning, agreement with itself might imply a process of reaching internal consistency rather than maintaining it. It is clear that Heracleitus is attributing this process of agreement directly to the circumstance of being rent asunder, not simply describing two concurrent events. I have translated apµov(a as harmony. This meaning is given in the Lexicon as the third possibility. Harmony in English does have some of the same connotations as apµov(a: in Greek, and I feel it is important to notice them. One meaning in Greek is "a fastening to keep ship-planks together, a clamp ... a joining, joint, between a ship's planks." This kind of joining is literally what is necessary for a stretched bow or lyre to remain whole. Another meaning given is "a covenant, agreement, settled government, order." In a bow, this might be a metaphorical covenant between the frame and the bowstring not to part. These meanings are consistent with the English connotations of harmony, which can mean "1. agreement; accord; harmonious relations. 2. a consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity ." 2 Beyond the details of what each word means by itself is what they all mean together. I do not know who They are, but I do believe I understand how Heracleitus means that they do not understand. Understanding is the setting together of two possibly contradictory things in a person's mind and through examination finding their common purpose or meaning. A question that cannot be answered by looking at the text is what this thing is. Because the sentences in general are aphorisms, it seems likely that the thing is supposed to represent any particular thing a person might think of, including the people who do not understand. They do not understand how it is that they themselves could ever understand in his meaning of the word. Being rent asunder is compared to a bow being back-stretched. Thi~ means that the rending is not a destruction but something that allows the thing to do what it is supposed to do. When a bow is stretched, the wood and string are wrenched apart and a strong fastening at the point of connection is what allows the bow to impart energy to an arrow. What the thing is supposed to do depends upon the thing. They do not admit that they themselves can only be and function as whole things, as units, because they contain contradictory parts or ideas which play against each other. I am willing to admit that possibility, and to really consider it by comparing the differing ideas on the subject, which They apparently were not.• 2 Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, s. v. "harmony" I fl 25 �".F O R HE UNLOCKED THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF TRUTH" ton puts forth the fundamental aspect of his method: In this philosophy [experimental philosophy] particular propositions are [deduced2] from the phenomena, and afterward rendered general by induction. (Ibid, 547) "For He Unlocked the Hidden Treasures of Truth" Entertaining Ourselves with the Delightful Contemplation of Newton's Principia By Janice Cater With his preface to the first edition of the Principia Newton gives to the student of his system unusual insight into his ideas of geometry and mathematics as a whole. He says in this preface that his purpose in writing is to explain mathematically the natural forces of the world. In putting forth this statement of intent, he implies that he believes natural forces are governed by mathematics, for what purpose would it serve to explain something mathematically that is not in fact ruled by mathematics? Such an explanation would be no more than an interesting account, one no more valid than any other. This important aspect of Newton's thought is frequently misunderstood. Often his approach is described as giving only a mathematical analogue to nature. By this analysis his method has three parts: first, a presentation of nature simplified and idealized, creating a system in geometric space in which mathematical entities move in mathematical time according to specific conditions expressible as mathematical laws or relations. Consequences are deduced by mathematical techniques and then transferred to the physical world. Second, a comparison of these results with experiential data and the results from such data. Successive attempts at correction of the original mathematical construct, which in turn alter the second stage, lead to a more accurate representation. Third, an application of the results of stages one and two to natural philosophy, in order to elaborate the entire system of the world. This stage applies results to the entire system rather than to individual objects, i.e., applying them to all planets rather than just to Jupiter. Even objects which are very dissimilar are included. For example, the same laws govern the forces of the planets in orbit as do the motions of falling bodies on earth. While the above account is perhaps a plausible reading of the Principia, it does not truly capture the spirit of the work or of the man behind it. From his words in the Preface and his letters to Oldenberg and Cotes, it is clear that Newton has something greater in mind. He believes that mathematics rules the world, that it is universal and basic to all beings. Hence, an explication of the system of the world must necessarily be a mathematical one. The Principia is not a mathematical reduction of the world, neither, however, can it be called an exact replica. A careful examination of this work provides ample evidence for attributing to Newton the belief that he had set out the only true method of describing the system of the world. In defense of this reading of the Principia, an account of Newton's method is crucial. While any sort of in depth inquiry into his method would yield volumes of findings, we can, for the moment, be satisfied with an identification of several major characteristics of his style. He says in the Preface: I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces .... These forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of Nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer philosophy (Principia, xviii). 1 The method of "reasoning from mechanical principles" is at the very core of his entire endeavor. Introduced in only a few words here in the Preface, its meaning is revealed only through statements of his method found elsewhere. At the end of the General Scholium, New- But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. (Ibid, 547) The process of deducing propositions from phenomena and then rendering them general by induction is very important in the Principia. It elucidates the distinction Newton makes between the physical and the rational. While he clearly values both components as necessary to science, he has extremely strong views on their respective roles. Comprised of two parts, the deductive process begins with phenomena, the visible and humanly accessible world. Through analysis of the general principles one conclusions both certain and necessary are drawn 3 • This step gives the boundaries of the particular inquiry, setting the stage for the thorough mathematical investigation. The next step is inductive; through synthesis, from the specific principles uncovered and proved through the mathematics, one arrives at general principles. Newton works from the physical world, to the rational, and back to the physical; while each is necessary, the roles are quite distinct. Also present throughout his works is appreciation for geometry as a science Newton's; he clearly values the accuracy of its method. To him, it is the only logical way to attack the problem of accounting for natural phenomena. Unlike his contemporaries, Newton was quite wary of using hypotheses. He is often quoted as saying "hypotheses non fingo" - I frame no hypotheses. This statement can be quite misleading, for he did in fac use hypotheses. (The Optics, in particular, is full of them.) No science can progress, no knowledge can be gained without hypotheses. With due attention to Newton's own words, howe~er, his true meaning becomes clear. The passage in question reads: This passage does indeed seem to be disavowing all hypotheses within experimental philosophy. However, he is speaking of the causes of gravity. Since Newton can deduce nothing of the sort from phenomena, he is not free to continue along such a line of reasoning. The strength of such reasoning lies in the certainty and necessity that comes with deduction from phenomena. Replacing this step with an hypothesis could not possibly lead to any definite knowledge. In a letter to Oldenberg, Newton elaborates his manner of using hypotheses: ... For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first, to inquire diligently into the properties of things and to establish those properties by experiments, and to proceed later to hypotheses for the explanation of things themselves. For hypotheses ought to be applied only in the explanation of the properties of things, and not made use of in determining them; except in so far as they may furnish experiments (Thayer, 5) 4 • He continues, a little later, to warn of what may follow misuse of hypotheses: And if anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science; since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties. (Ibid, 5) 2 replaces Matte's inferred; from the Latin, "In hac philosophia Propositiones deducuntur ex phrenomenis, et redduntur gerenales per inductionem." 3 Sir Issac Newton, Principia, Cajori revision of the Motte trans- 1 lation, 2 vols. (Berkley, University of California Press, Ltd., 1962) this in contrast to inference, where the formal process is less clear or present. "Newton's Philosophy of Nature, Thayer, H.S., ed., (Hafner Press, New York, 1974), p.5 27 �ENERGEIA In a letter to Cotes, Newton is even more explicit about his use of the word hypothesis: And the word 'hypothesis' is ... used to signify only such a proposition as is not a phenomenon nor deduced from any phenomena, but assumed or supposed - without any experimental proof. (Ibid, 6) Newton recognizes the role hypotheses can be made to play in science and he places the proper restrictions to their use. As he says above, one should begin by · investigating the properties of objects, carefully establishing their behavior through experiment. After one has done this, hypotheses may be formed to explain these behaviors. Experimental facts must invariably take precedence over any hypotheses which happen to come into conflict with them. Those hypotheses which seem incapable of proof by experiment must be viewed as highly suspicious. The distinction between exact experimental results and mere suggestions derived from hypotheses must be foremost in one's mind at all times. When found to be in irreconcilable conflict with experimental fact, they must be scrupulously eradicated. The strict guidelines Newton sets for himself are presented frequently. In the Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy in Book Three, we discover another such statement. These four rules are not astounding, in fact one would assume that any good scientist proceeds following principles such as the ones laid out here. Rule 1 orders one to keep all explanations simple, and to avoid unnecessary complications of such explanations . Rule 2 requires that the same causes or explanations must be applied to the same phenomena. Rule 3 states that the qualities of bodies derived from experiments are to be regarded as universal. It is in the explication of the third rule that we find another passage attesting to Newton's extremely high opinion of experimentation. As he says here: For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments, and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself (Principia, 398). Having a more complete understanding of the strict use of hypotheses, the relationship between the rational and the physical, and the process of deduction from phenomena and subsequent generalization through induction, a clear idea of "reasoning from mechanical principles" is still lacking. The Preface, though merely sketching Newton's ideas and goals for the Principia, does offer a remarkable amount of insight into the role of geometry as it relates to such "reasoning from mechanical principles." Here Newton goes to great lengths to show how mechanics and geometry relate to each other. He begins by making a distinction between the aims of the ancients and those of the moderns. The ancients, he says, valued the science of mechanics more than any other in the investigation of natural phenomena, while the moderns attempted to fit the naturally occurring phenomena into the bounds of mathematics. Mechanics, as understood by the ancients, was a twofold science, comprising both practical and rational components. The rational proceeded by demonstration, the practical by construction and observation. For the ancients all manual arts fell under the heading of practical mechanics, for these arts are not perfectly accurate. Perfect accuracy became for them the property of geometry, distinguishing this science from mechanics in its accuracy only. Newton asserts that this lack of accuracy in mechanics (as opposed to geometry) is due to the artists, not the art. Were there such a thing as a perfect mechanic, he·necessarily would be perfectly accurate. He also asserts that the description of lines and angles belongs to mechanics rather than to geometry. Geometry is concerned with the properties of these objects, not the physical production of the objects themselves. He calls it the "glory of geometry" that it is able to produce so much in spite of so heavy a reliance on the production of these lines and angles by an entirely different science. Geometry, for Newton, is founded on mechanics; one must use mechanics to produce the lines and angles which are required for the study of geometry. Geometry becomes, then, a part of universal mechanics, namely that part which "accurately proposes and 28 "FOR HE UNLOCKED THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF TRUTH" demonstrates the art of measuring." Since the manual arts are concerned primarily with the moving of bodies, geometry is often used to speak of their magnitudes, and mechanics of their motion. In this way, rational mechanics then becomes the science of motions resulting from forces. However, Newton is concerned with only that part ofrational mechanics which deals with natural powers. In explaining the relationship between the two sciences, Newton clearly says that mechanics is the starting point for geometry. Now, geometry is perfect, yet mechanics is not necessarily so, being subject to all of the imperfections of the mechanic. However, a system that begins with an imperfect foundation cannot yield perfect results. In a letter to Cotes, Newton mentions first principles (and their relation to hypotheses) briefly. ... [A]s in geometry, the word 'hypothesis' is not taken in so large a sense as to include the axioms and postulates; so, in experimental philosophy, it is not to be taken in so large a sense as to include the first principles or axioms, which I call the laws of motion. These principles are deduced from phenomena and made general by induction, which is the highest evidence that a proposition can have in this philosophy (Thayer, 6). Since in the Preface Newton claims mechanics provides the foundations of geometry, the laws of motion, which he here names as first principles, must have some relation to mechanics. Because mechanics is the science of the forces which cause motion in bodies, the laws of motion must belong either to mechanics itself, or to geometry, which describes and measures their motion. But, as mentioned earlier, geometry takes its foundations from mechanics in the form of the actual production of lines and circles. The resolution of these two seemingly different concepts of the starting points of geometry (mechanics and the laws of motion) is not yet evident. One possible solution lies in an examination of another mathematician and philosopher, Pascal. In his work "On the Geometrical Mind" Pascal proposes a treatment of geometry and its first principles which offers unusual insight into Newton's own beliefs. In respect to scientific and perfect demonstra- tion of truth, Pascal says: I can give no clearer idea of the procedure we should follow to make our demonstrations convincing than by expounding the method observed in geometry (Pascal, 430). 5 He believes that the only method more rigorous and complete is one that man could never use, for "what goes beyond geometry goes beyond man" (Ibid, 430). This method would involve defining every term and proving every proposition. Simply because he is finite, man cannot participate in this ultimate method of finding truth. The first terms defined would require other terms; the first propositions would rely on prior propositions; in other words, he could never arrive at the first propositions or terms. Even though man is incapable of partaking in this perfect order or method, he should not surmise that any sense of order is outside of his capabilities. While geometry is certainly less convincing than this perfect order, Pascal claims that it is by no means less certain. By this distinction, Pascal only means to point out that geometry falls below the perfect order in failing to define or prove everything. However, this limitation does not weaken the certainty we acsribe to its findings. Geometry is certain in that it only assumes those missing proofs given perfectly clearly by natural light; nature steps in to fill the void left by discourse. Thus, it is perfectly true as well. Geometry does not attempt to define the things that are clear and understood by all men but seeks to define all of the rest. It is obvious that there exist words which cannot be defined. For example, we cannot define any term without using the words it is. Even a definition of being would utilize these two words. Since defining a term by using the term itself fails to yield a valid definition, we must conclude that there exist words which we, as men, cannot define. Nature makes up for this defect in us by providing a common concept of these words. If she had not, we would be unable to speak to each other, for we would have no basis for agreement 5 Blaise Pascal, On the Geometrical Mind, Richard Scofield, trans., In Pascal, Britannica Great Books Series, v. 33, (Chicago, Encyclopredia Britannica, Inc., 1952). 29 �ENERGEIA about the words we use. These terms given by nature are used with the same assurance as those we have had explained to us. Therefore, all of the terms used in geometry are perfectly intelligible either by the natural light or by the definitions given. This is the way in which geometry avoids falling into error in respect of either defining terms or proving propositions. Again, it defines only those terms which need to be defined, and proves only those propositions which are not evident. When in geometry man traces his steps back to the first truths that can be known, he stops there and requires that they be granted since geometry has nothing clearer to prove them with. Thus, all of the propositions in geometry are perfectly demonstrated either by the natural light or by proofs. Since nature supplies all that discourse cannot give, the order of geometry is just as perfect as anything of which man can partake. A telling example of Pascal's first principles is the (fouble infinity. For Pascal, the most important of all the properties that are common to everything is, constituted by the two infinities which are found everywhere, the infinitely great and the infinitely small (Ibid, 434). However great a space there may be, we can always conceive of one greater, and also, however small a space there may be, we can always conceive of one that is smaller. Whatever space we take, there will always be one greater and one lesser, so that everything lies between nothing and infinity, always remaining infinitely far from each extreme. This cannot be demonstrated, yet it is one of the foundations of geometry. While geometry can neither define its objects nor prove its principles, it is neither deficient in clarity nor in truth. Man has no knowledge more basic than this double infinity or any that surpasses it in clarity. Even so, since man cannot completely understand the infinite, he is often reluctant to admit its existence as well as its properties. Pascal claims that those who do not admit of the infinite divisibility of space will not be able to proceed in geometry. Those who do, however, can admire the greatness and the power of nature in that double infinity which surrounds us on every side, and learn by the consideration of such marvels to know themselves, seeing themselves placed between an infinity and a nothing of extension, between an infinity and a nothip.g of number, between an infinity and a nothing of motion, between an infinity and a nothing of time . Whereupon we can learn to assess ourselves at our just value and to make reflections worth more than all the rest of geometry itself (Ibid, 439). In this examination of geometry as a demonstration of truth, Pascal is not just defending the validity of its methods, he is saying something important about the nature of man. Man is incapable of perfect knowledge precisely because he is trapped between the two infinities. He is unable to prove first principles and know without a doubt that they can be extended to the truly infinite. This understanding of geometry's foundations produces an imperfect system, one that is based on first principles that can't be defined. Thus, as a whole, it relies on common acceptance, not on a common understanding. Pascal says that there is no geometer who does not believe that space is infinitely divisible, yet there is no geometer who understands an infinite division. This gap between acceptance and understanding is, in Pascal's mind, not a flaw in geometry itself, but in man. Pascal's treatment of the first principles is certainly an interesting one. In building any system of thought, one must start with at least one first principle. This starting point must stand on its own, or whatever came before it would be the first principle, and so on . In order to avoid this infinite regression, the starting point needs to be something common to everyone. Pascal, of course, posits that these first principles are implanted by nature in all men, so that they come from inside. The question of first principles is an important one. While Pascal's treatment of first principles certainly differs from Newton's in respect to source or origin, there are definite similarities. For Newton, geometry begins with mechanics, the actual physical production of the figures. These figures, borrowed from without, correspond to the indefinable beginnings of Pascal. To Pascal, man is imperfect, God is perfect. Geometry is imperfect, but it is the most perfect science that men have. Since geometry is imperfect, it draws 30 "FOR HE UNLOCKED THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF TRUTH" on certain indefinable terms and unproveable principles for its foundations. Now, Newton does not concern himself with the idea of first principles formally. Rather, his preoccupation with the distinction between mechanics and geometry seems to hint at questions of origin. But, in contrast with Pascal, to Newton geometry is, in fact, perfect; the beginnings are supplied by something no less perfect than the actual science. In contrasting the two views ot: geometry and the world, three distinct divisions arise. The first of these divisions is founding principles. For Pascal, these are granted by God and are therefore perfect. From this perfect foundation springs the second division, the system, or geometry. Pascal believes that since it springs from indefinable and unproveable elements (albeit perfect ones) from without, this system is necessarily imperfect. Yet it is the closest man comes to accurately describing the third division, the world. This is the actual God-given, God-granted world from which man derives his imperfect model. For Newton, these three divisions are not as distinct as they are for Pascal. Newton begins with the belief that the world was created by the perfect mechanic, of whom he speaks in the Preface, namely God. · This perfect mechanic, working with perfect accuracy, produced and set into motion the natural forces of the world. The orbits of the planets, the motions of fall ing bodies, all follow the precise mathematical laws He ordained. The first principles of this system, which Newton refers to as the laws of motion in the previously cited letter to Cotes, are directly related to mechanics. For example, the first law states: Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a right line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it (Pricipia, 13). This law may be interpreted as the production of a perfectly straight or right line. The continuation of this law further provides for the description of the parabola as well as the other conic sections as they can be seen in the planetary orbits: sion are continually drawn aside from rectilinear motions, does not cease its rotation otherwise than as it is retarded by the air. The greater bodies of the planets and comets, meeting with less resistance in freer spaces, preserve their motions both progressive and circular for a longer time (Ibid, 13). These laws serve as the rules for generation of both the actual world created by the perfect mechanic, God, and the system proposed by Newton. In contrast to Pascal's first principles, which are logical, Newton's are natural and physical. Experimental philosophy itself allows for their discovery. Confidence is engendered by experience and the accuracy of the mathematics. For example, the parabolic motion of falling bodies depends on both the inertial and accelerative components set forth in the first two laws of motion. This motion can be seen experimentally as well as demonstrated geometrically. Since God created the world, it is perfect. The first principles by which He did so must necessarily also be perfect. God used mechanics to set the world in motion. Since Newton also uses mechanics as the foundation of his system, this system too begins with perfect first principles. If the first principles are perfect, and the method used is perfect also, how can the system itself fall short of perfection? Newton is very emphatic about the perfection of the perfect mechanic; any doubts must be referred to us, not to Him. Newton does not claim that the system of the world he comes up with is perfect, rather that his method is. The system is not necessarily completely accurate, and he allows for refinements. In the Preface, speaking of the forces by which particles of bodies are impelled to and repelled from each other, he says: These forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of Nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer philosophy (Ibid, xviii). Projectiles continue in their motions, so far as they are not retarded by the resistance of the air or impelled downward by the force of gravity. A top, whose parts by their cohe- He has given an account of the general forces which dictate motion in the world. He has provided the fundamentals; all else is particular. This clarification Newton provides between the 31 �ENERGEIA system and the method elucidates the very subtle distinction between what wondrous things Newton has done and what lesser things are commonly ascribed to him. Proposition sixty-six (Ibid, 173) demonstrates our inability as men to see the whole system. We may treat mathematically all the things which we perceive, and-this itself is no small task, yet we cannot account for those things we do not perceive. Newton here gives a proof of our limits of understanding. (The very fact that he can demonstrate and prove the limits of our scope affords much credibility to his method.) All apparent uncertainties about the world are merely a result of our lack of ability to see the whole. In this way, one sees that while Newton is not merely proposing a simplified mathematical analogue of the world, neither is he putting forth a direct representation of it. He believes that the world is governed by mathematical forces which move it in a perfectly mathematical fashion, and sets forth, therefore, a compl'etely mathematical analysis of it. He is explaining the world through the only method capable of producing truth. In this respect, his system is not a simplified mathematical analogue to something more complex and not mathematical. However, it is true that we, as men, fall short of God in our abilities to perceive and understand the universe as a whole. We are able to grasp only parts at a time, and therefore, whatever system we devise to explain the whole will indubitably fall short of the truth . Nonetheless, Newton does give us truth after a fashion - his method. And this seems to be the most important distinction between the two mathematicians/philosophers: namely, the degree of perfection each of the divisions entails. Pascal, troubled by the question of the origin of first principles in a not-quite-perfect system, is led to question man's own perfection. To him, the benefits of geometry are obvious; geometry leads to truth. In agreeing with him, though, we must concede our imperfections and consign ourselves to an eternal struggle to decrease the ignorance we have of our own world. Our limited understanding of the double infinity leads us either to despair in the futility of scientific inquiry, or to pursue moderation in our attempts to explain the world. We are barred from true knowledge, and are able only to admire and delight in the workings of an incomprehensible universe. All we are left with is the task of focusing on ourselves and our surroundings, hopefully learning, as Pascal says, "to assess ourselves at our just value and to make reflections worth more than all the rest of geometry itself' (Pascal, 439). Newton, on the other hand, clearly believes that we can have true knowledge of both ourselves and the world. His veneration of geometry is evident throughout the work, and is found to be excessive nowhere. He proves to us the strengths or, as he calls it in the Preface, the glory, of geometry. We too are taught to revere this science for its accuracy as well as the enormous scope of its findings; we come to understand it as Newton does, as the science, inextricably linked to mechanics, which accurately describes the natural forces of the world. It should not be overlooked that our views of God and the world are irrevocably changed as well, for though the Principia is a geometrical treatise, it is not so narrow in scope, and is rightly entitled the "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." After a careful examination of this work we come to agree with Cotes's words from his Preface to the second edition: "FOR HE UNLOCKED THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF TRUTH" thence incited the more profoundly to reverence and adore the great Maker and Lord of all. He must be blind who from the most wise and excellent contrivances of things cannot see the infinite Wisdom and Goodness of their Almighty Creator, and he must be mad and senseless who refuses to acknowledge them (Principia, xxxii-xxxiii) We see now that Newton leads us, through a sincere and careful mathematical inquiry, to an informed participation in the glory of a most perfect universe.• Fair and equal judges will therefore give sentence in favor of this most exce-llent method of philosophy, which is founded on experiments and observations. And it can hardly be said or imagined, what light, what splendor, hath accrued to that method from this admirable work of our illustrious author, whose happy and sublime genius, resolving the most difficult problems, and reaching to discoveries of which the mind of man was thought incapable before, is deservedly admired by all those who are somewhat more than superficially versed in these matte s. The gates are now set open, and by the passage he has revealed we may freely enter into the know ledge of the hidden secrets and wonders of natural things. He has so clearly laid open and set before our eyes the most beautiful frame of the System of the World, that if King Alphonso were now alive, he would not complain for want of the graces either of simplicity or of harmony in it. Therefore we may now more nearly behold the beauties of Nature, and entertain ourselves with the delightful contemplation; and, which is the best and most valuable fruit of philosophy, be 32 33 �PHEDRE Heroism in Racine's Phedre By Peter Smith Yes, prince, I languish, I burn for Theseus: I love him, but not as hell saw him, The fickle lover of a thousand different objects, Who would dishonor the marriage bed of Death; But faithful, but bold, and even a little savage, Charming, young, drawing all hearts after him, Such as one depicts our gods, or such as I see you now. He had your bearing, your eyes, your speech; Your noble modesty reddened his face, When he crossed the waves to our Crete, Worthy subject of the vows of Minos' daughters. What were you doing then? Why, without Hippolytus, Did he assemble the elite heroes of Greece? Why, too young still, couldn't you then Board the ship which took him to our shores? You would have slain Crete's monster, Despite the windings of his enormous lair. To unfold the uncertain mystery, My sister would have armed you with the fatal thread. But no: in this scheme, I would have gone before her; Love would have inspired this thought in me first; It is me, prince, it's me, whose useful aid Taught you of the Labyrinth's twistings: With what cares I would have held dear this lovely head! A thread not enough to reassure your lover, Companion in the peril which you sought, I would have wanted to walk before you; And Phedre descended into the Labyrinth with you Would have, with you, returned or be lost. (Act II, Scene 5) eration and pious chastity are starkly contrasted with the uncontrollable lusts which plague Phaedra. He falls in love, it is true, but nicely. It makes sense, of course, that Racine should see the proud restraint which Hippolytus exhibits as the means of conquering one's passions. And just so that the analogy is made perfectly clear even to those who were not paying close attention during the first four acts, Hippolytus is made, in the finale, to battle the beast nobly in front of the wedding chapel, symbol of honorable, chaste, and divinely sanctioned love. With his heavy-handed use of metaphor Racine forces this understanding of man's battle with passion into the somewhat unwilling Labyrinth myth with which he is, after all, constrained to work. It does not always seem to fit though. What does it mean for Phaedra to lead the hero into the Labyrinth? Racine presents us with the image of a lecherous old woman enticing an innocent, luring him into the darkness of perversity. Her promise to teach him the turnings of the Labyrinth takes on a horrible and vivid significance, but it is a significance irreconcilable with the myth. There is a discrepancy on two different, but related, points. First, is the matter of the seduction: it is backwards. Theseus seduced the innocent Ariadne (and later abandoned her), and not the other way around. Secondly, it is only because of the knowledge she gives him, because of the fact that she betrays to him the secrets of her family, "du fil fatal efit arme votre main", that Theseus is able to kill the Minotaur. It is Ariadne's thread which suggests an alternate understanding of the hero, and a reexamination of the character of Theseus. That which makes it difficult for the young Hippolytus to see Theseus as hero explains the necessity of the seduction of Ariadne as preface to his battle with the Minotaur. In the eyes of his son (in the first scene) and Phaedra (in her speech), Theseus' penchant for playing the role of "volage adorateur" and his crimes against "trop credules esprits que sa flamme a tromp~s", tarnish the memory of his heroic deeds, but in the myth these seductions are closely bound to the idea of Theseus as a hero. Theseus was able to descend into the Labyrinth not because he was pure of heart, but because he was an initiate of the island's profane mysteries. He could kill the Minotaur not because of his strength and courage, but because he What is most striking about this passage is how Hippolytus usurps his father's position, not only as object of Phaedra's love, but also as hero. It is Hippolytus who should have descended into the Labyrinth. It is Hippolytus who should have killed the Minotaur and freed Athens. The fact that Phaedra ascribes to him the deeds of Theseus gives insight into Racine's reworking of the myth, and into his understanding of the hero. The image of the Labyrinth is an obvious one and central to the play. The story of its origin, of Pasiphae and the bull, of passion and bestial lust, hangs over the characters like a prophecy. It is the product of an ancient curse which dooms the descendants of the sun; the sun who looked upon, and revealed, the sins of a goddess. Their punishment , Phaedra's punishment, is unspeakable, subterranean desire. The torture is made more horrible for Phaedra because of the other half of her ancestry: she is the daughter not only of Pasiphae, but of Pasiphae and Minos. She is afflicted with remorse, the union of sin with the consciousness of guilt, of insatiable lust with divine, all-seeing, all-judging conscience. This monstrous union of man and beast is depicted for us in the image of the Minotaur, Phaedra's halfbrother. But if this is how we are to read the metaphor of monstrosity in Racine's play, how are we to understand the character of the hero, the monster-slayer? Theseus, as he appears on stage, is of little help. He is bumbling, incompetent and helpless. Until the final scene he has no idea of what is going on around him, and seems, for that little bit of the play he is actually in, more of a plot device than a character. In order to understand the nature of the hero one must tum toward the double image of Hippolytus Theseus being led into the darkness by Phaedra Ariadne. It is not difficult to see Hippolytus in this role. The imagery of the play, not only in this passage, points towards him as the monster-slayer, and in speech after speech his virtues are recounted. Racine writes Hippolytus as a bland paradigm of manly virtue, a character very different from the ambiguous and slightly repellent Amazon that appears in Euripides' play. He is proud and honorable, but in this play, only "un peu farouche". His sober mod- 35 �ENERGEIA was able entice Ariadne into revealing her secrets to him. It is also interesting to note that not only in his Cretan escapade are his heroic deeds linked_ to his conquest of women (if in the final analysis we can even make the distinction between the two). Theseus is able to save Athens from the Amazons who threatened it by coercing their queen, Antiope, the mother of Hippolytus, into committing an act of betrayal similar to that of Ariadne. Both of the threats to his kingdom come in the form of a woman (the product of Pasiphae's awesome lusts, and the proud and unbowing Amazon), and Theseus overcomes these threats not in combat, but with an act of seduction. This is the nature of Theseus' heroism. Racine ignores neither of these two heroes, but plays them off against each other, which is what makes Phaedra's speech so interesting. Even if, in the end, he seems to see Hippolytus as the hero, justifying his claim that this play, more than any other he wrote, exalts virtue, the decision is yet an ambiguous one. The fact that in loving Aricie he becomes her captive, that in finally battling the monster he becomes entangled in the twisting reins, leaves open the question as to whether the man who contemplates the storm standing safely on the quiet shore can really call himself its master. • Lyric Narration By Alexa Van Dalsem "Sing, goddess, of the destructive wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus ... " begins the Iliad, and through vivid language the reader is swept into the emotion and story of Achilles. The words provoke sympathetic sensations and pry upon the memory and imagination to relate a hero's tale. For from simple words, spoken or written, placed in careful succession upon the mind, one may experience countless lives and events and ideas. Being social, communicative animals, humans strive to communicate with others, most immediately through words and when words cannot suffice, perhaps through dance, art, theater, or music. In the studying and listening of the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No.7 the music plays into a storyline, evoking different emotions in the parade of musical measures, combining to tell a story, such as the first words of the Iliad. Like a narrator's words, music is a storyteller. The oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horns introduce the second movement as if ending a section of music, holding their notes for three measures. C makes an appearance as 3 in the oboe and bassoon, and E as 5 in the oboe and horns, outnumbering the A's in the clarinet and bassoon. The introduction has a feeling of being almost complete, not quite hitting home, leading to the entrance of the main character, who I call Kedos, represented by the lone notes of measures three and four, theme (a), a slow, precisely measured, melancholy beat (measures 3-26). The A-minor key gives the notes the familiar minor-key sadness. Measures 11-18 repeat from measure 19 on, but more quietly. Having victoriously concluded a war the stately Kedos leaves the battle land, walking in solemnity and solitude grieved of lost lives and his homeland. Coming upon a divinely lit clearing, he does not slow his steps, but approaches quietly, not wishing to be noticed by nor to disturb the figure dancing in the light. The viola and cello take up the melody, theme(~), 36 dancing behind (a) as a less solemn tune (measures 27-50). (~)moves up to the second violin, urging (a) to the first violin as the two tunes intertwine, the beat becoming momentarily less prominent (measures 5174). As(~) proceeds to the first violin, (a) is driven into the wind instruments in a crescendo of (a), made more prominent by the high pitch of the tones overriding, but not wholly hiding, the continued(~) melody in the first violin, and the contrast of the seeming lightness of the preceding section. In sympathy(~) plays along with (a) (measures 75-9.8), dropping off for a moment at 99-100 for (a). Despite his precautions, the figure turns towards Kedos, dancing around him, winding her song amidst his melancholy. Softly she sings of happiness, beguiling him to join her, to forget his pain for lightness. Tempted by her promises and the rays of joy laid against his sadness, prodded by the sharp pangs of his pain, Kedos tries to dance, to mingle with her song. But in his pain he can only erupt into the song of his sorrows, weeping and singing as she sings with him, dancing in sympathy, as he tries to purge his mind of the past. Enchanted by her continued song, Kedos ends his weeping, forgetting sorrow, and eases into her dance. After the crescendo and fall off of (a) , (~) picks up a lighter tune in a lighter key, A minor, in the clarinet and bassoon. The original rhythm of (a) continues in a variation by the bass, but pizzicato, so that the role of the pounding dominant beat is lessened (measures 101-42). Ending the tune,(~) reverts to A minor in measure 139 and begins a downward scale, to .spill into a full tumbling scale, covered by winds and strings from the flute to the bass (measures 144-48). A pair of eighth notes hang suspended at the end to be answered by two more sets of eighths (149). Having relieved Kedos 'pain, eased his piercing cries into soulful looks, she sings of her life, of the happiness he would find with her further soothing his wounds with �ENERGEIA tales of continued gaiety and merriment. She ends her song with arms outstretched towards him, asking if he will join her in the lightness, suspended as she wonders if she has convinced his pain to escape into her dance. He cannot but assent, wrapped in her enchanted song. (p) returns in measure 150, still accompanied by the pizzicato bass beat. Measures 176-77 hold a short set of saddened tones that give way again to a soothing tune, leading into the fugue. The fugue subject as appears in measures 183-86 is another variation of (a), using the same rhythm in a smoother sequence of notes. The fugue having begun with two string instruments widens to all four string instruments, comes to include the wind instruments, and builds to another crescendo of music for a return of the solemn pounding (a) theme (measures 214-23), repeating a part of what the flutes so plaintively declared in measures 7598 . Falling into the lightness, Kedos and she dance, signing her notes of glorious, lulling melody. Under her enchantment his pain finds rest, resurfacing in fleeting instances to be blanketed by her swift hands. She wove his pain into light, relieving his soul with masks made of his sadness. As he dances his light ascends, as she sings he flies, floating only among her notes to be gripped by his unyielding pain. Falling to ground, he cries in familiar anguish as memory triumphs over her presence, seized with realization of his dances 'futility, of the enchanted mask resting upon his face. As (a) repeats in measures 214-23, so does the melodic variation of (p) of measures 101-42 return, again to A major, futilely trying to dispel the reinstated sadness (measures 224-51). The sad (a) struggles over (p), returning softly in measures 243-45 to A minor and the original beat, and is more strongly reinstated in the following measures, becoming climactically loud (by all instruments except strings) as (a) returns, softly (only by the strings), loudly, softly, as if to reveal two contrary views of a situation (measures 24753). The succeeding beat series of quarter note, two eighths, and two quarter notes is played by pairs of the wind instruments in succession (flute and oboe, oboe and clarinet, etc.), to be supported and answered by all four strings in pizzicato, and then repeated (measures 255-70). Finally, the winds consent (measure 271) and the strings, returning to area, speed off to the end. Trying once again to dispel Ke dos' pain, an- swering to his repeated cry, she sings her song' of gaiety and merriment, enclosing his soul in her leaves of easement. But his melancholy winds shu.ffie her leaves to the ground, and as if to convince himself he exclaims, "I have t'o go," a yearning to stay lingering in his eyes, but convinced by his own words. Calmed by his conviction, he found his pain echoed in her slowing song, in her consent. Little to reply, he disappeared beyond the boundary of her faded light. Perhaps not coincidentally, this story resembles that of Odysseus and Calypso. As Homer's epic poetics composed the tale of Odysseus, so does music hold the ability to compose a tale. Listening to music, I often put phrases of words with the music, naturally matching the tones with words. Songs intentionally combine music that expresses emotions to simiiar emotions expressed by the words (or vice versa). Palestrina used voices formed around words to produce a musical composition, expressing sentiments through words and music. An in the Kyrie of the Missa Papae Marcelli, the singing of the "Kyrie" is shortened compared to the elongated "eleison," as if calling attention to the Lord and then singing in supplication for mercy, lengthening the word so that it reaches the Lord and giving "eleison" importance as if the Lord's attention can be easily gotten, but his mercy requires more effort. Together and separately music and words express a story or emotion or can portray a scene. According to Aristotle, " ... that which has a beginning and a middle and an end is a whole." (Pqetics VII.27) Musical compositions and written stories, being complete and whole like tragedy, should have a beginning, middle, and end in which to contain a story, and methods of revealing the building, climax, and resolution within those boundaries-words through suspenseful and climactic literal illustrations and music through the soundings of instruments. In the second movement Beethoven denotes when instruments should become loud or soft, when to crescendo and other such dynamics to set a scene or mood. Music from the beginning (a) overlaps the end of the fugue in stretto, building to a powerful reinstatement of (a), to give a booming and dynamic entry to a familiar tune. While (a) rested beneath(~) and hid within its variations, it could never disappear. Its reentry sneaks up on the listener and hits the ear with grand resolution at its return. (a) and(~) of the second movement 38 LYRIC NARRATION differ through dynamics as well-( a) being more of a march, stately and solemn, using the same rhythm every two measures, with each note pronounced. Whereas(~) flows into a dance rhythm, creating a song theme through varied notes, many tied together to soften the evident beat of (a). Dynamics of music describe a scene and actions as words and phrases describe a scene in a story. As words invoke images of characters which are carried in the mind throughout a story, the use in music of different instruments or tunes defines characters. The musical characters interact as the instruments and tunes interact, playing separately or together, one perhaps louder or higher in pitch that the other, to reveal different qualities and positions of the characters. Beethoven's use of two tunes (the beginning stately (a) and the added flowing(~) which play together, and sound separately, and build over one another, sets apart two characters acting together as the music acts together. Shiitz's St. Matthew Passion similarly distinguishes the characters, having the Evangelist and Jesus as single singers with music and words presented more as speaking than song, sung by musically different voices. The High Priests and Learned Ones as well as Jesus' Disciples sing with multiple voices to represent a group of people, differentiating the Evangelist, Jesus, and the followers. In music, characters are described through musical qualities, which act as words ion character descriptions by playing on the emotions conjured up by the musical qualities. Both words and music evoke one's emotions, letting the mind hold the story within itself, to experience vicariously sadness and joy, trouble and resoluti on, being the· foundation for humans to participate in stories. Different keys easily set the tone, as the beginning key of A minor of the second movement gives the music sadness and the intermittent A-major sections give the music a lighter, less solemn air. The regular beat of (a) reminds the listener of marching, giving the tune solemnity and stateliness. The melodic (~) , on the other hand, with notes tied together, trickling up and down scales in notes of smaller time increments, sounds like a dance, resulting in a tune with a tendency towards happiness. Without these memories or sympathies, one can only see words or music, without truly reading or listening, failing to fly above the tones. Like written compositions, music combines musical elements as a form of expression, resulting not only in a musical composition but an expression of emotion, resembling a story. • 39 �Non-Profit Or~ U.S. Postage PAID St. John's College Permit No. 6t Lutherville, Mc Annapolis, Maryland 21404 ___J � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. ii, 39 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anderson, Christopher (senior editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Spring 1996 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1996 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Spring 1996. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 1996 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/735a3e690bc5af6c2e155eb46ef128eb.pdf d15a9862f616edbedbffd595d2cccbd3 PDF Text Text SPRING 1995 �ENERGEIA: The activity in whicp anything is fully itself. Tl ... vou EVEp)'Eta ~ro11 ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) Staff Carla Echevarria Veronica Gventsadze Rebecca Michael Sean Stickle Junior Editor Christopher Anderson Senior Editor Amy Thurston Faculty Advisor Abe Schoener Special Thanks To the St. John's College Print Shop: Marcia Baldwin Chris Colby Vernon Magee Don Smith To the St. John's Computer Lab: Matthew Braithwaite Chad Cranfill Sean Stickle Eva Brann Leigh Fitzpatrick Adrienne Rogers Jennifer Swaim Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published once a year and distributed among the students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis. The Energeia staff welcomes submissions from all members of the community - essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. �D Table of Contents Cary Stickney On Beginning Hegel's Phenomenology.... .. .............. ........... ..... ................ ............. I Cindy Lutz Dawn Shuman Dissection of Morning Glory Seed Pods ............................................................... 8 Devin Rushing-Schurr Definition of Faith in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments .......................... IO Edward Freeman The Manipulation of the Field .. .. ......................................................................... 27 David Jennings A Possibility of Beauty........................................................................................ 30 Eva Brann The Tin Star at High Noon ................. ........................................... ...... ....... ......... 32 Carrie Lynn Sager Separation and Combination: The Unity of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise .............................................................................. 36 Mary Dietch The Offence of Socrates: A Look at the Philosopher in Athens ........................ 44 Dawn Shuman The Infinite Straight Line in Book I of Euclid's Elements .................................. 48 Emily Katherine Brock Character, Reader, Author, God: What It Means to Read Ulysses ..................... 50 Gregory Alan Brandt An Attempt at Unlocking "Benito Cereno" ......................................................... 62 Cover Art Cindy Lutz, to accompany Dissection of Morning Glory Seed Pods, page 8. �On Beginning Hegel's Phenomenology D Cary Stickney Let me begin with a confession. Some of you may remember that in the second act of the Tempest the drunken butler Stefano appears with a bottle which he has somehow made of tree bark and filled from a cask of sherry which he rode ashore. He presses this liquor on Calib,an with the phrase, "Kiss the book." My confession is that the first book I ever kissed, twenty years ago this December (1994), was Hegel's Phenomenology. I was home on Christmas vacation and I had persuaded Robert Bart, my Senior Seminar leader and Essay advisor, that I could write my Senior Essay on Hegel. Of the Phenomenology I had read only the two most famous parts: the lengthy Preface and the short, mystifying, unforgettable section entitled "Lordship and Bondage." A few days into the vacation I sat down to read the Introduction and the first chapter. It was on finishing the first chapter that I kissed the book. It seems now a very strange thing to have done and it seemed a little strange even at the time, I remember, but it was the only expression I could find adequate to my gratitude and happiness at that moment. I suppose I had better add, in the interest of completeness, that I never kissed the book again , and that in fact, though I have studied it a fair amount since, and even went to live in Germany for several years largely in order to study Hegel, I cannot say that I have ever read the whole book through. I hope you will not think me fickle on this account, or conclude that I am not after all enough of an expert to be of any use to you. One of the main things I want to say is that the Phenomenology, like other books on the Program, is too great to be left to the experts. So why, exactly, did I kiss the book? Perhaps, like Stefano, I had the soul of a lackey and I was intoxicated with what did not even belong to me? Maybe I had no one else to kiss? Of course I must have been kissing myself in part, congratulating myself that I could make any sense at all on my own of this famously obscure philosopher. But I think I was primarily responding to a liberator. I felt that I had been set free; or restored to myself. To what had I been enslaved? I think I had been afraid of, if not exactly in bondage to, a deep suspicion that thought didn ' t ultimately make any difference; things are as they are in the world, you can think about them or imagine you understand them as much or as little as you like-nothing is thereby changed about the way things really are. I might take that suspicion another step and suspect that I myself am like everything else in the world: My being, too, will then be indifferent to any thoughts about me, even my own thoughts. I will do whatever I do and feel whatever I feel quite apart from what I or anyone else may surmise to be the reasons. If this is so, then any seeming confirmation of my understanding becomes somewhat empty. I may successfully predict an event or exert control over a force either human or natural, but I am always coming from somewhere outside. I could as well have predicted or controlled from several very different beginning points and still succeeded, so my success is not any ultimate criterion of a true understanding. Maybe it is all the criterion there is, though. This, or something like it, was my suspicion, from which I was so grateful to be set free. I suppose I could very roughly abbreviate it with the name "Kant," though other names suggest themselves-"Descartes," or even "Modem Science," at least as that science tends to appear on television and in high schools, and hence as it appears in its claims to be a worked-out version of good solid common sense. Hegel sets about to demolish this view at the beginning of his book and in my opinion succeeds brilliantly. It is the first task of the Introduction to step behind Kant, to tum his skeptical mistrust of the powers of human knowing back upon itself. Kant had asked, "What are the conditions of the possibility of human knowing?"; that is, "What must be the case if there is to be such a thing as knowing?" . That real knowing did exist he took to be given by the existence of geometry and by the dazzling successes of Newtonian celestial mechanics. His answer was couched in terms inherited from Aristotle: form and material. Let knowledge consist of necessary conclusions about objects of possible experience and its form will be the element of necessity, while the material · will be the objects of experience. Kant reasoned that necessity could not be the contribution of experience, since, as Hume and many other Skeptic philosophers had long since pointed out, the mere fact of something happening to exist or to behave in a given way says nothing at all about any necessity for things to be thus. So if there is. truly necessity in things it is a form we humans have placed on experience, and it must in tum be neces �sary and inescapable that we do so, otherwise there would be no real necessity and no real knowledge after all. But this all feels rather cumbersome; it is a little like the children's game in which you must jump back and forth over a rope which is raised and lowered. First the experiences of mathematics and celestial mechanics are invoked as containing necessity, then empirical one-at-atime experiences are recalled as mere happenstance, void of all necessity, then again even they tum out to necessarily belong under the rubric of possible experience which must after all be governed by various necessary categories of understanding, imposed indeed by us, but necessarily, ineluctably imposed by every human qua human, such that there is really no access to any experience in which this imposed necessity is not already an inextricable element. I hope I am not doing too much injustice to what I continue to find a beautiful argument and a worthy enterprise for the Junior Seminar. It has been some years since I have heard any protest in Faculty Meetings about devoting as many Seminars as we do to Kant. This year it is ten, and I take it as a sign of the depth of intellect of my colleagues that they recognize what a giant Kant is. Let me stay with him a little longer, since, as Mr. Venable has remarked, Hegel is to Kant somewhat as the New Testament is to the Old. At least, it is nearly always illuminating to ask, when one has to begin with some idea of what Hegel is talking about, "What would Kant have said about this?". Sometimes every argument Hegel makes can sound like an argument against Kant. One result of Kant's own argument is that a world of so-called "things-in-themselves" turns out to exist, about which we can know nothing. These things-in-themselves are at least required by the terms of the argument: While the imposition of necessity and various other kinds of order upon experience is our constant spontaneous act of forming, we must still be given material to form. But since time and space themselves are products of our formative activity, then the sources of the material to be formed must lie outside time and space and indeed outside all the categories of c~r understanding. It becomes again a problem how we can be sure these sources do exist. Kant addresses this problem in the section of the first Critique entitled "Refutation ofidealism" but I think we will hasten past to what Hegel replies to all of this. Hegel asks how we can be satisfied with a knowledge which begins by proclaiming its separation from things as they are in themselves. What then lli it a knowledge of, if not of the way things really are? Why call it know ledge at all? He questions one of Kant's deepest assumptions: that the world is over there being and that we are over here thinking. If that is our immovable beginning then we will never solve .the problem of how to own the truth. With truth on one side and thought on the other we will need a middle term, a bridge where they can meet, a tool to pull the truth over or a telescope to observe it close up from afar. But all of these things only involve us again in Kant's difficulty: What we wanted was the truth itself and what we got was how it appears in a telescope or how much of it fits onto a certain kind of bridge or how it looks after being hooked and dragged out of its home. The problem, as Hegel puts it, is about mediation. Words like "absolute" or "in itself' suggest a truth having nothing to do with the knower. But if this is so then all knowing, all attempts to mediate the truth to the knower will be some kind of falsification. It is not a new problem. The following exchange takes place in Plato's dialogue the Sophist. Theaetetus the mathematics student is replying on behalf of the "friends of the forms," that is, the believers in the n811, to the Stranger from Elea, a one-time disciple of Parmenides. (248d) Str.: ... Do they acknowledge that the soul knows and real being is known? The.: Certainly they agree to that. Str.: Well, do you agree that knowing and beingknown is an action, or is it experiencing an effect, or both? Or is one of them experiencing an effect, the other an action? Or does neither of them come under either of these heads at all? The.: Evidently neither, otherwise our friends would be contradicting what they said earlier. Str.: I see what you mean. They would have to say this. If knowing is to be acting on something it follows that what is known must be acted upon by it, and so, on this showing, reality when it is being known by the act of knowledge must, in so far as it is known, be changed by being so acted upon, and that, we say, cannot happen to the changeless. The.: Exactly. Str.: But tell me, in the name of Zeus, are we really to be so easily convinced that change, and life, and soul, and understanding have no place in that which is perfectly real-that it has neither life nor thought, but stands immutable, holy, and exalted, devoid of intelligence? The.: We would indeed be yielding to a fearsome doctrine, stranger. 2 Hegel's answer is that change and life and soul and understanding are inextricably entwined in the truth; in other words, that mediation is not something that must be brought to bear on a reality over there. Being is mediation. It mediates itself to itself. As the Eleatic Stranger's teacher, Parmenides, had written: Thinking and being are the same. So I have arrived, as I had to, at one of those grandiose claims that always seem to infuriate a certain proportion of Hegel's readers. Parmenides doesn't provoke anything like that response; I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he wasn't a German Professor? So Kant, that other German Professor, was not after all so very far wrong in Hegel's view. The world is, indeed, just as Kant claimed, thoroughly permeated with thought. The categories of the understanding are indeed structures of the world itself; only not of a merely phenomenal world behind which would exist some unreachable realm of things-in-themselves, forever denied us, holy, exhausted and mindless. No, the very articulation of Being into Kant's phenomenal and noumenal realms is in its entirety part of the self-mediation of Being. That is, the "things-in-themselves" belong together with thought just as much as the categorically determined objects of possible experience do. Far from being unknowable, they are known to us preci. ely as the other s half of Kant's argument: We know them to be the noumenal source of the phenomenal world, we know them to be outside time and space, to be beyond the dominion of the understanding, to be the unreachably high standard of truth without which the humanly attainable truth would have no meaning. That is a great deal to know about something Kant himself sometimes modestly proposes to denote with no more than an "X." It is that last thing we know that has the most importance for the program Hegel lays out in the Introduction. We know enough about these things in themselves to say that our humanly attainable truth is not the whole truth. Thus, apparently, we can conceive of knowing the whole truth, if it is meaningful to us to speak of not doing so, and thus there must be more knowing left for us to do. After learning about the limits ofreason, we must ask, "In the light of what kind of a Beyond have we recognized these limits a:s limits?" Limits cannot reveal themselves as limits unless there is some sense of what lies on their other side. But as soon as there is any sense of that at all then they are no longer absolute limits, for we are already, at least in thought, beyond them. As Socrates put it, the terrible thing is not to be ignorant, but to be unaware that you are; and on the other hand, to know of one's ignorance is already to have some hope of relief from it. We can begin to have a conversation about what our experience of knowing might be, about what kind of beings we might ourselves be in order to know how to critique our knowledge, or hope to improve it. This conversation goes by the name Dialectic, both for Hegel and for Socrates, and for both of them it seeks to go beyond all ordinary human limits to the unifying source of all that is. For Hegel the full self-mediation of Being is found in the Being that knows itself to be all that is, one and many, same and other, Being and Becoming. This he calls Geist or Spirit. The title of his book means: The Ordered Account of the Appearing of Spirit to Itself. For we humans are Spirit, and so is everything we think about. Let me dwell a little longer on what it means to say that Being is mediation. It means that nothing is simply and immediately itself alone. Everything is involved in a great whole and nothing could"be" by itself. So the conventional understanding of matter cannot be correct. By that account matter simply exists as a kind of inert opposite of thought. It needs nothing else to exist and on some level it is impervious to thought. Thought always connects and relates things to one another; it mediates by gathering and separating. But if matter as such is immediate then thought will never grasp why matter is or what it is, because there will be nothing in terms of which an explanation could be formulated. Matter would be a given, a brute fact. That givenness, conceived apart from any actual giver, that impenetrability to thought, constitutes for most people a very large part of the realness of what is real. Such a view makes the intellect into a stranger in the world. Moreover it gives no account of any motion. If matter is only as it is, inert, then why is it always moving and changing? I think Hegel would tell us that we are not minds surrounded by matter, in the sense of two opposed and equally fundamental principals; but that we are Mind in the presence of Mind, or if you prefer, Spirit in the presence of Spirit. It is very exciting to see the details of this extremely bold thought worked out. Maybe it would be helpful for me to read a few passages aloud and approach them with these thoughts in mind. In Paragraph 91 of the Introduction Hegel is beginning to speak of the testing of knowledge that he will conduct, and of its difficulties. A test seems to require a criterion, but how can a criterion justify itself in advance? We would seem to need already to know the truth in order to begin sorting out the true in our knowledge. This is very like Meno's paradox that we cannot learn what 3 �we don't know because we will not know it when we see it; and Hegel has a not dissimilar answer to the one Socrates gives. Let us, he says call to mind the abstract determinations of truth and knowledge as they occur in consciousness. Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. Shall we dwell on this sentence a moment? It is, as he says, abstract, by which he nearly always means "rather schematic and relatively lifeless." If Hegel had a pair of columns, as the Pythagoreans are said to have had, with the good in one and the bad in the other, he would certainly have "concrete" in the good column and "abstract" in the bad. "Concrete" comes from a word meaning "to grow together" and so for one who believes that the truth is the whole, the higher the degree of concreteness a thing has, the more it is grown together with other things, the more adequate it is as an expression of the truth. Still, abstract though it be, the sentence does show how we tend to think about knowing. It is an analysis of what we mean by saying "I am conscious of something"; this may mean "I see something" or "I imagine something" or "remember something" or "I am explicitly aware of something". "Conscious" translates Hegel's German word "bewusst" which might be overly-literally rendered "beknown." "Conscious" and "bewusst" both take a genitive object: One is conscious of or has a share in this or that. The earliest attested usage of "conscious" given in t~e Oxford English Dictionary is 1601, when it appears in its Latin-derived meaning of "sharing knowledge with" or "privy to, sharing in, or witness of human actions or secrets" and is applied in a line of Ben Jonson's to Time. It comes to be applied to the knowledge one shares with oneself, so that to be conscious means to be a fellow-knower with oneself of something. Something like this is what we mean by our conscious: Not only do /know I have done something wrong, some other judging part of me is a fellow-knower of my trespass. A division in ourselves and even in the knowing part of ourselves is necessary to be able to speak this way. It is suggestive that this usage comes into English during the century of those tireless dividers Hobbes and Bacon, Descartes and Pascal, but the Latin usages of conscious are many centuries older and perfectly paral- lel: One may very well be conscious to or with oneself of something else already in, say, the time of Ovid. "Bewusst" seems to have more the sense of being known to oneself as knower of this or that. But this too is a dividing up of myself into two knowers, one who knows something, the other who knows that the one knows something. "Ich bin mir <lessen bewusst" is a common expression for "I am aware of it" which literally translates as "I am beknown to myself of it". One sometimes hears that there is no word for consciousness in Hegel's sense to be found in Ancient Greek. I think this is true if it means the same as saying that no one before Hegel endowed consciousness with such a panoply of forms and powers. On the other hand there is the verb O"UVotba which is often used with a reflexive pronoun, as when Socrates says in the Apology, "crnvmoa Eµmrt(J)t ou8 0110uv <JO<pO<J (J)V ." "I am well aware that I am not clever at anything" or literally "I know with myself, not being clever at anything." There are also the nouns <JUVE<m; and <JUV£l0£01~ which mean "conscience," as well as "awareness" or consciousness." Certainly the words one is accustomed to see in Plato and Aristotle for "intellect," such as "vou~," "C>tavota," "<j>pOYT101~,'' do not translate "consciousness" and that fact cannot be without significance. Still, a knowing that is doubled and thereby fully explicit, the being well aware that comes from one part of me knowing something and another part knowing that I know; doesn't that kind of knowing imply that another kind would exist? If the first kind is called conscious knowing, the other kind would be unconscious knowing: One part of me will know something without this being known to all of me, without my being well aware or my knowing fully explicit. And isn't this very much what we find in some of the Platonic Dialogues? The story told about Recollection in the Meno is intended to explain the possibility of learning by proposing that the soul knows all things in an unconscious way, which can be compared to the way one knows something one has temporarily forgotten. In the Theaetetus Socrates is constantly bringing the conversation to a halt by the peculiar consequence that we would have to know something and at the same time not know it, or not know that we know it. This does appear absurd and unacceptable to the young mathematician, but Socrates surely knows that if something of the sort is not possible, then neither is dialectic at all. I conclude that many of the thoughts which Hegel associates with the word "consciousness" are indeed present in the thought of Plato and that perhaps Whitehead is right when he says that all Western 4 Philosophy is footnotes to Plato. But this etymological digression is in some danger of sounding like a footnote itself. The second part of Hegel's sentence was" ... the detrminate aspect of this relating or of the being of something for a consciousness is knowing." Notice that knowing is a rather loose term: Anything determinate in the aspect of a thing presents to us is something we "know" about it. What comes next is very important. ti on, one step closer to the Whole. Thus we change along with our'knowledge of the thing and this, says Hegel, is what is meant by Experience. The ordinary view according to which I learn some error of my ways when I happen to have some new experience, is only another limitation of the learning consciousness. Hegel, who is by hypothesis already at the end of the path, will show how the only way I was ready to have that new experience make sense to me was by having reached a kind of end of my previous pattern of consciousness, and by having sensed what lay beyond that end. These movements indeed were actually what constituted that which seemed to present itself as a spontaneously occurring new experience. Of course hardly anyone can experience life as a relentless march toward final wisdom, and when Hegel speaks of a necessary sequence of patterns of consciousness, he doesn't mean that it is necessary that any one consciousness go through all of the forms he lays out in the ordered sequence of his book. On the contrary, his claim is that everyone before him has without exception gotten stuck somewhere along the way, and that he is the first to see the completed whole of the self-unfolding Spirit. Still, if there is to be a whole, then there must be an order to its parts, and if it is a whole over time, that order must be also a temporal order. Hence there must be a necessary sequence of patterns of consciousness, ending as Hegel says, as a point where consciousness But we distinguish this being-for-another from being-in-itself, whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth. Just what might really be involved in these determinations is of no further concern to us here. Since our object is phenomenal knowledge, its determination too will be taken directly as they present themselves, and they do present themselves very much as we have here apprehended them. I think the reservation Hegel is voicing has to do with his understanding that there cannot ultimately be a being-in-itself outside any relation to consciousness. Why then is this impossibility so much a part of what we first mean by truth? I think Hegel's answer is that we are somehow gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with inexplicitly aware, within the division of ourselves that something alien, with what is only 'for it' and is called consciousness, of an overarching oneness or some sort of'other,' at a point where appearance wholeness of ourselves, or of ourselves with everything, becomes identical with essence, so that its expowhich we nevertheless do not see directly, as we do the sition will coincide at just this point with the auvarying particular contents of our consciousness. thentic Science of Spirit. And finally, when conThis unity cannot be reached until the end of the "necsciousness itself grasps this its own essence, it essary sequence of patterns of consciousness" has been will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itfound. It is the only real "thing-in-itself," because it is self. the whole, and thus needs no other to complete its being These are the last words of the Introduction. But or its intelligibility. It is our implicit connection to that whole which makes us discontented with every limited you were promised a talk on sense-certainty and percepand partial knowledge or pattern of consciousness we tion. Maybe we could look at the transition from senseencounter, or rather become. Our discontent always takes certainty to perception and try to see in what sense it the form of noticing that what we have understood is not · might be called a part of a necessary sequence. So sense-certainty has proposed itself as true knowlthe thing itself, but only how it appears to us. That is, we notice that there is more that the thing can be than we are edge, invoking its purity and immediacy as character yet seeing, because we who do the seeing know that we witnesses. But its truth has turned out to be not the imare limited in this or that particular respect. But as I said mediate particularity it intends by saying "This" and earlier, we only perceive those limits in the light of what pointing, but rather the most abstract generality, a unilies beyond them, and so we can go beyond them and versal "This" made of a universal "Here" and "Now." revise our view of the thing by means of our new posi- Only by being indifferent to any particular content can 5 �the terms stay open to all possible examples of their mean- can't hope to get anywhere with steps D and E. I have ing, and only so can they be applied to any one thing sometimes been asked by worried Seniors if it wouldn't meaningfully. In Hegel 's words, "An actual sense-cer- be better for them to reread an earlier Hegel reading sevtainty is not merely thi s pure immediacy, but an instance eral more times before going on to the upcoming assignof it." That is, it is one among many others of the same ment, since they felt they have so much left to underkind. If I could manage to be and remain fully absorbed stand already back there. I try to remind them of Aristotle, in my immediate sense-certainty of the one and only be- another system-builder, whose system is nevertheless ing in existence, I would have no need to say "this" or to more like a circle whose identical curvature reveals itpoint at all. Of course I would have to keep myself un- self everywhere, than like a brick wall, the location of aware that there were after all already two things and not whose particular bricks would have to be gauged by keepjust one, namely this solitary thing I am sensing with ing a careful count of how many units up and over from certainty, and myself. But once I recognize multiplicity the cornerstone one had traveled. Not only may one fail then my knowing will have to take it into account. To to understand many previous sections and suddenly be know one thing will then involve knowing how it is not illuminated by a later chapter; even within a page or parasome other, but also how it could be. That is, I will at graph one may go from the darkest kind of puzzlement least need a way to recognize that insofar as they all have about one sentence to piercing insight in another. Such being, all beings are the same and insofar as each is not at least has been my experience. A stubborn and atten-. the others they are all different. Universal words like tive gnawing and worrying at an obscure passage is prob"this," "here," and "now" do precisely that: They single ably never simply a wasted effort, but don ' t imagine you out a particular by saying that it is not any other and at must solve each sentence before you are allowed to read the same time they say nothing about it that could not be the next. Hegel often seeks to say the same thing in other said of any other, for every particular is a "this," every words, or to say briefly what he has just said at length, location is a "here," every time a "now," and each of or, most often, as Mr. Venable's note pointed out, to dethem is not any other. We use them sometimes when we scribe in one way for us his readers what he describes in want to let a thing speak for itself, because we suppose if another way as the experience of the consciousness that we say the very minimum the richness of the thing 's own is his protagonist. A glimmer of understanding found in particularity will have the most room to come across . any of these can sometimes be used to unlock some of But if we are replying to the question "Wherein lies the the surrounding mysteries. And sometimes not. I will (briefly) return to perception. Sense-certainty certainty of your knowledge of the thing?" with the words, "I am certain of it because it is this unique one, had ended with the coming-to-be of the universal as a here and now immediately present before me," then we unity of one and many: The Here is "in its own self a say the opposite of what we intend, for all of those words simple Together of many Heres." (Even so the "I'' is refer us to the very broadest categories of things, and now know as this I only be not being any other I, each of hence to mediation and relation, and not at all to a kind which is, insofar as it too is just an I, not nameably difof self-contained pot of truth, sitting on its own off to ferent.) Consciousness continues to seek the truth outside one side, whether that be the side of this "I" or of this thing. The true is the universal, and insofar as we al- itself, as it imagines namely in the object. But the obj ect ready see that the word "I" is just as universal and non- means something different now. Hegel says, unique as the "this," we are a step closer to seeing that Since the principle of the object, the universal, is our being is not ultimately other than that of the things in its simplicity a mediated universal,the object of the world, and that to understand the one will be to must express this its nature in its own self. This understand the other. it does by showing itself as the thing with many Now, how does the truth of sense-certainty become properties. the new truth of perception? Before addressing that let me dissent a little from a view of how to read Hegel that may seem to be implied One of the things these sentences are saying is that the by the selection of Senior Seminar readings. That view, very simplicity of the universal implies some unfinished if I were to exaggerate it a little bit, might claim that business, a thought that has not been thought through yet. Hegel's thought is not only systematical, but mathemati- In order to be simple the way it is, the universal must be cal, so that if you haven't understood steps B and C you mediated. But that means it must be negatively related 6 to many others. Mediation always involves negation. Hegel somewhere reckons it to his credit that he has gone beyond Spinoza' s insight that every determination is a negation to the realization of the converse: Every negation is a determination. Spinoza had meant that we define a thing by marking it off from what it is not; that everything we say about something is really a form of saying how it differs from some other thing and is thus a negation. Hegel 's advice is to say, as he does in the introduction, that to discover a thing is not what we thought it was is never a dead end, but is always a gain. If we have negated then we have further determined. He speaks of negation that s not empty but is precisely the determinate negation of some specific previous understanding. In fact he is speaking of it in Paragraph 113, right after the passage I just read. He says: The This is therefore established as not This, or as something superseded; and hence not as Nothing, but as a determinate Nothing the Nothing of content, namely of the This. Consequently, the sense-element is still present but not in the way it was imagined to be in the case of immediate certainty ; not as the singular item that is "meant," but as a universal or as that which will be defined as a property . Supression (''.Putting Up") exhibits its true twofold meaning which we have seen in the negative: It is at once a negating and a preserving. Our Nothing as the Nothing of the This, preserves its immediacy and is itself sensuous, but it is a universal immediacy. Being, however, is a universal in virtue of having mediation or the negative within it; when it expresses thin in its immediacy, it is a differentiated determinate property. As a result, many such properties are established simultaneously, one being the negative of the other. 7 �Dissection of Morning Glory Vine Seed Pods D Dawn Shuman Cindy Lutz We dissected a morning -glory vine from Mr. Schoener's garden. 1 The plant was intact, including the roots. The vine was past flowering and was producing seed pods, which became our focus. The earliest growth of the pods was somewhat unclear at first. In fact, we originally suspected that they might be flower buds . However, there were several dead flowers, still attached to what are called the "leaves" in the following notes, and when we detached the petals we found a very small, pod-shaped bud at the base of the flower. When we broke this mini-pod off of the stem and examined it under the microscope, the beginnings of the six sections in the mature seed pod were clearly visible. Therefore, we conclude that the plant flowers, then produces mini-pods after the flower dies, and that these pods then mature to produce viable seeds. The function of these pods for the vine as a whole is obviously that of reproduction. The resemblance of the seed contents to miniature leaves is remarkable. If time were no object, it would be fascinating to germinate the seeds and observe them closely at each stage of growth. However, for now we are content with the information gathered from the pods and seeds themselves. There were three basic levels of maturity of pods on the vine: -Green (young) pods -Green/brown (slightly dried out) pods -Brown (completely dried out) pods At this point, the pod is green with healthy leaves. At the spot where the three sections of the pod come together, there is a small stem-like object. When broken off, "milk" leaks out from inside the pod. GREEN/BROWN PODS The external appearance of the more mature green/ brown pod is very much like that of the green pod except for a slight difference in color and the fact that the leaves and casing of the pod are slightly dried out. BROWN PODS The external appearance of the dried pod is much like that of the green and green/brown pods in shape, et cetera. However, while they felt solid to the touch, the dry pod feels hollow. Its outer membrane is hard and splitting apart at the three seams. When shaken, the dry pod sounds like a rattle. The three sections of the pod fall away easily to reveal six seeds, two in each compartment, separated by a stiff, Y-shaped membrane. While almost all of the seed pods have six sections which form six seeds, we found a few with only five seeds. GREEN PODS The sections have pulled away from each other slightly as well as away from the wall of the pod. The exterior of each section has turned off-white and the green that was casing each section has turned to brown. l---:;:::::::.::::::::::----~ ~1'eM The seed can be removed at this point. 1 This was first submitted to Mr. Schoener's Freshman Laboratory Tutorial. 8 9 �Definition of Faith in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments sessment of Climacus's account of faith. once. For the dialectical part of the problem, there are the strict and categorical philosophical discussions (Chapters I and III, and the Interlude). And for the pathetic, there are the poetical chapters (II, IV, and V), which try to convey the passion that is bound up in the prospect of true eternal happiness. Of course, these are only broad divisions. Within each section, there is much blending of the poetic and the philosophic, if only because "the difficulty of the problem consists precisely in its being thus composite." (PS 345) In a more particular way, the philosophic and poetic tracks of the book can be seen as addressing two specific audiences, each of which is at a disadvantage with respect to one side of the pathetic-dialectic problem. One audience consists of the mid-nineteenth century Hegelians who dominate the philosophical circles at the time of Climacus' writing. Climacus feels that these Hegelians have gone astray in their attempt to apply speculative philosophy to revealed religion. He thinks that they need a lesson in dialectic. It is primarily for the sake of the Hegelians that the book adopts its philosophic tone. Climacus wishes to address them directly, and thus he speaks their language. This extends even to the point of adopting a completely new terminology. The word "Christianity" does not tum up in Philosophical Fragments until the very last page of the final chapter. Throughout the book, Climacus brings up traditional points of Christian doctrine, but all of the talk is thinly veiled in a quirky, Hegelian-sounding terminology: the god, the occasion, the difference, the fellness of time, et cetera. The other audience of the book is composed of the apathetic, "matter of course" Christians. The typical member of this group is born into Christendom, baptized two weeks later, given a Bible at the appointed age, and taught over time to mouth the tenets of Christianity by rote. This person does not reflect on what it means to be a Christian. Christianity is a matter of custom, the mark of a respectable citizen, but it is not a subjective and eternal relationship with Christ. This group takes Christianity for granted, a fact that incenses Climacus: Devin Rushing-Schurr Part I (Prenuptial Agreements) For Jennifer Aileen Michael Schurr, whom I will happily marry on February 28, 1993. Introduction (The Proposal) For Pascal, it happened at 10:30 p.m. on Monday, November 23, 1654. For Augustine, it happened in the summer of the year 386, when a child sang, "Take it and read, take it and read," and Augustine obeyed. It is the experience of total Christian conversion-the decisive, wondrous, all-consuming event in the life of a believer. Kierkegaard refers to it as "the moment." In the moment, the god gives me faith, by means of which I abandon my human understanding and embrace eternal happiness. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard tries to get inside the moment. The entire book is his attempt to give an account of the acquisition of Christian faith. This is not to say that Kierkegaard is using Philosophical Fragments to proselytize. The book is an exercise in definition, nothing more. Kierkegaard wants to state clearly and precisely what faith is, but he does not seek to pass judgment: Only let me again repeat: I do not attempt to decide whether Christianity is right or wrong. I have already said in [Philosophical Fragments] . .. that my bit of merit, if any,consists solely in presenting the problem. (PS 330) 1 To this end, Kierkegaard writes in the voice of Johannes Climacus, and interested and inquisitive nonbeliever. Kierkegaard does not present us with a definition of faith as a point of doctrine. Instead, Climacus begins with a question about Socratic recollection and proceeds from there to develop the definition of faith ex hypothesi within an independent thought experiment. Climacus's objectivity, his integrity, and his passion PF-Kierkegaard. Philosophical Fragments . Trans. H. and E. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. PS-Kierkegaard. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. Trans. D. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. References to the Bible and Shakespeare are in standard form. 1 for clarity and definition are admirable. Regardless of whether he personally will attain faith, he seeks to know what it is and what it is not. The spirit in which he conducts his experiment is summed up in his motto, "Better well hanged than ill wed," which serves as the epigraph of Philosophical Fragments. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Ph ilosophical Fragments , Climacus sheds some light on the sentiment of this epigraph: My idea is that if Christianity is the highest good, it is better for me to know definitely that I do not possess it, so that I may put forth every effort to acquire it; rather than that I should imagine that I have it, deluding myself, so that it does not even occur to me to seek it. (PS 340) How are we to approach a book such as this, undertaken by an author whose attitude is, "All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears."? (PF 8) How can we respond to a man who casts his whole life in the stark alternatives of "Better well hanged than ill wed?" There really is only one thing for us to do: we owe it to him to determine whether, in fact, he was hanged well. Since defining faith is the prevailing task of Philosophical Fragments, the only question we should ask when trying to appraise the book is whether the definition is a good one. Has Climacus succeeded in giving us insight into what faith is and what it means to acquire it? In attempting to answer this question, we will proceed in five steps. In Part I, we will briefly look at the structure of Philosophical Fragments, and we will cover some preliminaries for our reading of Climacus's definition of faith. In Part II, we will tum to the definition itself. This will necessitate further consideration of how the definition is developed in the book. In Part III, therefore, we will look at Climacus's presentation of the ab solute paradox, a key stage in the development of the definition. This will make it necessary to think about the intended audience of the book. In Part IV, then, we will focus on Climacus's refutation of the Hegelians. Finally, in Part V, we will conclude with an overall as- 10 Climacus divides Philosophical Fragments into six major sections (five numbered chapters with an interlude between Chapters IV and V). As the headings and subheadings of these sections show, the sequence of the book is, speaking broadly, an alteration between philosophic and poetic modes: Philosophy Chapter I. Thought-Project Chapter III. The Absolute Paradox: A Metaphysical Caprice (with Appendix) Interlude. Is the Past More Necessary than the Future? Or Has the Possible, by Having Become Actual, Become More Necessary Than It Was? (with Appendix) Poetry Chapter II. The God as Teacher and Savior: A Poetical Venture Chapter IV. The Situation of the Contemporary Follower Chapter V. The Follower at Second Hand This constant switching back and forth between poetry and philosophy reflects the peculiar nature of the problem of faith, which Climacus characterizes as "patheticdialectic." (PS 345) The object of faith is the paradox that eternal happiness rests in a relationship to something historical: The eternal is rooted in the temporal. Grappling with this paradox is a pathetic problem, "for human passion culminates in a pathetic relationship to an eternal happiness." (PS 345) And it is a dialectical problem insofar as one must recognize that the paradox is indeed a paradox. Faith is possible only through the combination of these pathetic and dialectic qualities: Although I am only an outsider, I have at least understood so much, that the only unpardonable offense against the majesty of Christianity is for the individual to take his relationship to it for granted, treating it as a matter of course. (PS 19) The problem here presented demands an existential inwardness adequate to an apprehension of its pathos, passion of thought sufficient to grasp the dialectical difficulty, and concentrated passion, because the task is to exist in it. (PS 345) Primarily for these apathetic Christians has Climacus prepared the poetic side of the book. He seeks to rouse Thus we have a book that proceeds along two tracks at 11 �their passions, to spur them to become personally engaged in the issue of eternal happiness, and to put an end to their unreflective ways. To this end, the odd terminology serves a second function. By avoiding customary words that the apathetic Christians would instantly recognize, Climacus is able to present the ideas of Christianity in a fresh and unfamiliar way. He catches the apathetic Christians off guard, and for once they actually hear what they themselves have been reciting since youth. This leads to an interesting result in the book. Caught in the cross fire between Climacus and the Hegelians, the apathetic Christians sit in their pews and watch as barrages of strange terms fly over head. Every now and then, one of these Christians will lay hold of an idea that seems familiar and, recognizing it as Christian, will bolt up to exclaim righteously, "What you are composing is the shabbiest plagiarism ever to appear," (PF 35) or "you talk like a book, and, what is unfortunate for you, like a very specific book," (PF 68) or something similar. This happens with amazing regularity. Each chapter ends with the sudden insertion of a snippet of dialogue between Climacus and one of these Christians. The Christian criticizes Climacus for his manner of speaking, and Climacus responds by suggesting that, instead of being angry, the person should perhaps try to pay attention to the ideas that are being put forth. To get a general sense of the content of each of the two major tracks of the book, we should look briefly at Chapters I and II, in which the philosophic and the poetic are introduced. Chapter I, "Thought-Project," establishes the philosophical exercise that will occupy the book. It begins with reflections on Socrates. Climacus observes that all philosophy involves some form of the Socratic theory of recollection insofar as philosophy presupposes every human's innate relationship with the truth. For this reason, says Climacus, philosophers who claim to have gone beyond Socrates have not really done so. Climacus then mediated on what "beyond Socrates" would mean. This leads to the assignment uf the thought-project: to go truly beyond Socrates by constructing a system that departs radically from the theory of recollection. Viewed Socratically, the moment in time in which the learner passes form ignorance to knowledge is merely accidental, for the learner has been in possession of the truth all along. By contrast, Climacus 's project starts from the hypothesis that "the moment in time must have such decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it. .. " (PF 13) All of Philosophical Fragments is framed by the thought-project, which is another way of saying that the whole book is an exploration of the moment. Chapter II, "The God as Teacher and Savior: A Poetical Venture," begins the poetic track of the book. In the famous parable of the king and the maiden, Climacus tells the story of a loving god who seeks to be understood by the lowliest human. But true understanding requires equality, and the inequality of the god and the human seems insurmountable. Thus, Climacus commissions a poet (himself) to construct a story that enables the unequal to be made equal, so that the god and the human can embrace one another happily. These two opening chapters prepare us for how the rest of the book unfolds. Throughout Philosophical Fragments there is an interweaving of the poetical venture and the philosophical project. These two strands are sometimes difficult to distinguish. In trying to keep them apart, one can easily get tangled up within them. With this as our introduction to the book, let us now tum to the presentation of faith. Part II (Writing the Vows) In one sense, it is not at all difficult to discover what Climacus thinks about faith. All we need to do is open up Philosophical Fragments to the seventh paragraph of Chapter IV and, behold, there sits a formal definition of the term. This is true. Climacus's definition is a beautiful, powerful, concise representation of Christian belief. But to read the definition requires a bit more preparation. Climacus's definition of faith happens to be the point of convergence of three distinct lines of thought, one from each of the first three chapters of the book. Thus, before we look at the definition itself, we should briefly point to these th ee lines. In Chapter I, Climacus begins to work out some of the implications of his hypothesis that the moment must have decisive significance. If the moment is to be truly deci sive, it must effect a complete transformation of the learner, comparable in importance to the transition from "not to be" to "to be." It must be the transition from untruth to truth. For this to occur, the learner prior to the moment must be untruth-must be completely oblivious to the existence of truth. Moreover, the learner must not even be in a condition to understand the truth. If the learner is already in a condition to understand the truth, then the learner can begin to inquire after it. In such a case, the learner's discovery of the truth would tum out 12 to be self-motivated and self-accomplished, and hence merely Socratic. Thus, if the moment is to be of decisive significance it must contain not only the gift of truth, but also the very condition for understanding the truth . The condition is just as much a gift as is the truth itself, and both are given within the moment. This condition, as it turns out, is faith. Chapter II, as we have said, is the beginning of the poetical venture. Given a god who loves the human but nevertheless cannot be understood by the human, the poet has the formidable task of finding a meeting ground for human and god, "a point of unity where there is in truth love's understanding." (PF 28) This point ofunity also turns out to be faith. In Chapter III, Climacus reflects on the nature of the understanding. He observes that the understanding has the potential to collide with what is, for it, a mortal threat. He gives this threat the name "absolute paradox." The absolute paradox is, quite simply, "something that thought itself cannot think." (PF 37) When the understanding collides with the paradox, there are two possible outcomes. The understanding can assert itself by denying the paradox-this is called "offense at the paradox"-or the understanding can give way to the paradox . The latter opinion, this giving way, becomes the act of faith. These are our three lines. Let us see how they come together. After the metaphysical caprice of Chapter III, Chapter IV returns abruptly to the poetic mode and tells a story of the god coming down and taking the form of a man. The god-man is careful not to reveal himself directly as the god, but nevertheless the manner in which he goes about teaching in the streets raises quite a stir. People take interest in the god-man in different ways, and some speculate as to who he might be. We pick up the story with the following lengthy passage, which culminates in Climacus' s definition of faith (the ellipses represent the omission of roughly two hundred words): vide the condition to understand this, how will it ever occur to the learner? But that the god provides this condition has already been explicated as the consequence of the moment, and we have shown that the moment is the paradox and without this we come no further but go back to Socrates ... How, then, does the learner come to an understanding with this paradox, for we do not say that he is supposed to understand the paradox, but is only to understand that this is the paradox. We have already shown how this occurs. It occurs when the understanding and the paradox happily encounter each other in the moment, when the understanding steps aside and the paradox gives itself, and the third something, the something in which this occurs (for it does not occur through the understanding, which is discharged, or through the paradox, which gives itself-consequently in something), is that happy passion to which we shall now give a name, although for us it is not a matter of the name. We shall call it faith. This passion, then, must be that above mentioned condition that the paradox provides. (PF 58-59) Thus we have Climacus's definition of faith. Faith is the condition-provided by the moment-which enables me to let go of my understanding in order to make way for a paradox, the paradox that states that my eternal consciousness begins with an historical event. This definition is an achievement in brevity. If we unpack what has been said earlier in the book regarding the philosophical content of the moment; if we bring forward what we have been shown poetically about the loving, suffering god; and if, further, we translate all of this out of its strange terminology and put it back into Christian dress-if we do all of this, then, without adding anything essential to Climacus's words, we see the expression of Christian faith to be something like the following: The appearance of the god is now the news of the day ... the occasion for much loose and empty talk. .. But for the learner the news of the day is not an occasion for something else, ... it is the eternal, the beginning of eternity. The news of the day is the beginning of eternity! If the god had let himself be born in an inn, wrapped in rags, laid in a manger-the swaddling clothes of the eternal, is indeed its actual form, just as in this assumed case, so that the moment is actually the decision of eternity! If the god does not pro- God, out of love for me, you became human and suffered-the all-powerful God suffered! You did this for me because it was the only way I could be made to see that I have sinned and that, despite my sin, you still love me. Right now, in this glorious moment, I have for the first time seen that I truly have sinned and that through my sin I had distanced myself from you and from 13 �eternity. But in this very same moment you have given me the boldness to accept your love. That in one moment I could come to face with eternal happiness, that by entering once into human history as you reached across time to embrace all who will accept you-these things are beyond my comprehension, they are repellent to my understanding. But in this moment you have given me faith to believe what I cannot understand, and in this moment I do believe it. All of this is contained in the short statement that faith arrives in the moment and enables the understanding to submit to the paradox. But Climacus does not choose to define faith in the way that he does merely for the sake of shorthand. Simply to translate his experiment back into the standard Christian wording is to do a disservice to Climacus and betray a misunderstanding of his whole enterprise. He intentionally expresses the familiar concept of faith in the awkward terminology of moment, condition, and absolute paradox. The terminology reflects his attempt throughout the book to present the essence of Christianity in a new light in order to command the attention of the philosopher as well as the lazy Christian. In the guise of a philosophical explication of an alternative to Socratic recollection, Philosophical Fragments is Climacus's attempt to bring out the pathos of faith, the passion that must attend a decision on which eternal life depends. Before we assess the definition of faith on the basis of how accurately it expresses the traditional notion of Christian faith, we should explore some of the nontraditional aspects of Climacus' s account. Thus, we will proceed to a more careful study of the third chapter of the book, "The Absolute Paradox: A Metaphysical Caprice." Does Climacus succeed in giving us insight into what faith is and what it means to acquire it? We cannot answer the question until we look more closely at how the definition is developed within the book. Has Climacus been hanged well? So far, we have not s~en any hangings. Again we come back to that epigraph, "Better well hanged than ill wed." Those words-they are borrowed from a clown in a Shakespearean comedy, yet they loom heavily over our discussion, giving it an air not of comedy but of tragedy. If this is indeed a tragedy, if Climacus really is to be hanged, then he must somewhere make a tragic mistake. We state this as a simple literary fact. Instead of stopping now to dwell on the matter, let us continue with our analysis. Part III (The Last-Minute Crisis) At the beginning of Chapter III, we leave the thought project and the po.e tical venture behind. We put on hold our investigation of the moment, and we temporarily suspend our story of the god who seeks to reach an understanding with the human. We do this in order to embark on what Climacus calls a "metaphysical caprice." The metaphysical caprice is a logically self-contained discussion of thought and paradox. Just as the book as a whole proceeds from the premise of the moment, so too does Chapter III begin with a premise of its own, namely, that thought is passionate. From this premise alone Climacus derives almost everything that he says within Chapter III. Much of what is said in this chapter is carried forward into the remainder of the book. The metaphysical caprice turns out to be an important step for the. thought-project. But the presentation of Chapter III is such that the metaphysical caprice could, if necessary, stand entirely on its own. In this way, we can view Chapter III as a discourse within a discourse. The premise with which Chapter III begins-that thought is passionate-is not entirely new. That thought is in some way erotic has been proposed by many ("The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher."). And that there is something appetitive about our continual acquisition of knowledge has also been noted before ("All people by nature desire to know."). But to this premise Climacus joins the observation that all passions are selfdestructive. This leads to a remarkable conclusion that is, to my knowledge, original: Thought ultimately seeks its own annihilation. Let us begin our discussion of Chapter III with Climacus's observation that all passions tend toward their own destruction. This is certainly true of the appetites. When I an hungry, the hunger causes me to eat, and eating destroys my hunger. Thus, the hunger brings about its own destruction. By analogy, this is sometimes said of the higher passions, too: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die ... (Twelfth Night or What You Will I. i. 1) But for Climacus, the way in which the understanding seeks its own destruction is more complicated. It is more in line with certain description of the self-destructiveness of erotic love. The best analogy is the familiar poetical treatment of the moth and the candle-flame. 14 Here, the moth is the lover, the flame is the beloved, and cisely because it has content, precisely because it can be erotic love is that which seeks the union of the two . called a " paradox of eternity and temporality, it is not the Driven by erotic love, the moth passes closer and closer formally absolute paradox of "that which cannot be to the flame. This, in tum, drives erotic love higher and thought." higher. When Eros is at its highest, the moth seeks to After stating that thought seeks to collide with "somebecome one with the flame . But what would happen if thing that thought itself cannot think," Chapter III proerotic love achieved what it wants, of the moth actually ceeds with a restatement of the paradox. First, the paraflew into the flame and burned? The love would die. dox becomes the unknown. This is a proper designation. The love would die because the moth would die. Erotic Insofar as the paradox is that which cannot be thought, it love lies precisely in the duality, in the opposition. When is in principle and by definition both unknown and unthe lover loves the beloved so strongly that it actually knowable. Because it cannot be thought, it is the absodies for the sake of the beloved, the lover is gone, the lutely unknown. duality is gone, the opposition is gone. There is no longer Next, apparently for the sake of shorthand, Climacus any place for erotic love. Erotic love, if it achieves the seeks to give the unknown a name. Again, this is legitiunion it seeks, must itself die in the process. In this way, mate. If the name does not imply anything about the say the poets, erotic love is self-destructive. unknown, and if the familiarity of a name does not fool So too is thought, according to Climacus. We see us into thinking that we therefore know something about that thought constantly pushes outward toward its own the unknown (which, by definition, we cannot), then what boundaries. It seeks out that which it does not know, harm can there be in giving the unknown a name? and it wrestles with the unknown until it comprehends Climacus chooses to call the unknown "the god": it. Most have interpreted this as a positive desire to grow and to gain knowledge, but Climacus interprets this conBut what is this unknown against which the untinual seeking to go beyond as an indication of self-dederstanding in its paradoxical passion collides structive passion. This is most clearly see, he says, in and which even disturbs man and his self-knowlour love affair with the paradoxical. We cannot disenedge? It is the unknown. But it is not a human gage ourselves easily from a paradox. Though paradox being, insofar as he knows a man, or anything defies our understanding, for this reason alone we grapple else that he knows. Therefore let us call the unwith it more fiercely than with any other object of thought. known the god. It is only a name we give to it. (PF 39) Thought is most passionate when it confronts what it cannot immediately understand. Climacus says that this is an indication of its ultimate potentiation. In continuFrom here, Climacus takes us through a long diverally seeking to know, thought is really only failing in its sion in order to tell us something that we already know, attempt to find that which it cannot know. What the namely, that we cannot prove the existence of the god. understanding ultimately seeks is the absolute paradox; We cannot use works, wisdom in nature, or goodness in "something that thought itself cannot think." governance to say anything about the god, for in prin"That which cannot be thought"-this formal, verbal ciple we can say nothing about the god except that the statement is the pa adox. It is not a description of some god is that which cannot be thought. Nevertheless, thought will not rest until it can say other paradox . The very words "that which cannot be thought" are the rocks on which thought wrecks itself. something concrete about the god. This is why the absoLater in the book, however, Climacus gives · the name lute paradox is paradoxical, and it is why the absolute "absolute paradox" to another, more substantial paradox. paradox becomes impassioned. It seeks to do the only He takes the paradox that stands at the heart of Chris- things it knows how to do: to think and to understand. tianity-namely, that eternal consciousness depends on a · But the more it engages with the god, the unknown, the relationship to historical knowledge-and he gives this paradox, the more it becomes frustrated by the fact that the name "absolute paradox." By looking closely at the it cannot think it or understand it. presentation in Chapter III, I hope to show that this later Everywhere it turns, thought collides with the unappellation presents difficulties. While the paradoxical known. Thought cannot simply give up and be content notion that eternity meets time at one specific point in to allow that there is something that it cannot know. Such history may be the essential paradox for Christianity, it apathy is not in thought's nature: should not be called an absolute logical paradox. Pre- 15 �To declare that it is the unknown because we cannot know it, and that even of we could know it we could not express it, does not satisfy the passion, although it has correctly perceived the unknown as frontier. But a frontier is expressly the passion's torment, even though it is also its incentive. (PF 44) The unknown is a frontier at which thought continually arrives, which is another way of saying that the unknown is beyond, or is the absolutely different. "But it is the absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark." (PF 44-45) We cannot say that it is different from this or different from that or different in some specific way. It is the absolutely different, and as such even its differentness defies description. Thought cannot think the absolutely different as such. So what does it do? It begins to conjure up many, varied, and fantastic things, attempting to lay hold of the god by trying to generate what is different from anything that it knows. This, of course, cannot work. No matter what novel or strange conception thought comes up with , the conception is still a product of thought, and as such it is known. To arrive at the absolutely different, thought would have to transcend itself completely. But any myth that it generated is created from within itself. Thus, deep down, thought realizes that it has not arrived at the god, but at its own fabrications. The unknown is not just something different, it is the difference. It is so different that there is no point of reference or distinguishing mark by which thought can gauge the difference. This leads to an interesting result. Because thought can in no way distinguish itself from the different, it begins to confuse itself with the different: If the difference cannot be grasped securely because there is no distinguishing mark, then, as with all such dialectical opposites, so it is with the difference and the likeness- they a.re identical. Adhering to the understanding, the difference has so confused the understanding that it does not know itself and quite consistently confuses itself with the difference. (PF 45) have a mortal contest. We have two warriors. Formally, we can already state that there are two possible decisive outcomes. But before w~ proceed, let us pause to see where we have come in the argument and how we have gotten here. We started with the premise that thought is passionate. From this , and from the self-destructiveness of passions in general, we said that thought must in some way will its own downfall. Reflecting on how thought works , we recognized that thought loves to embroil itself in paradox. This as a clue led us to "that which cannot be thought," which we have variously called "the absolute paradox," "the unknown ," "the god," and "the difference." We suspected that thought could neither free itself from the paradox nor conquer it. Ultimately, lacking any distinguishing mark between itself and the paradox, thought began to confuse itself with the paradox. All of this we derived from the opening premise of Chapter III simply by reflecting on the nature of thought, of passion, and of paradox. We have not had to invoke the moment, nor the theory of recollection per se. That is, we still stand in isolation from the first two chapters of Philosophical Fragments. Ultimately, of course, Climacus wants the absolute paradox to be a Christian paradox. The highly abstract paradox of "something that thought itself cannot think" is objectified into the Christian paradox of temporality and eternality. The god that was simply defined as "the unknown" becomes the god about whom we indeed know much-a loving god, a god who suffers for our sake, a god who gives us the paradox in order to make us aware of our sins. Because he is ultimately concerned with Christianity and Christian faith, Climacus begins at this point in the argument to edge his way back toward Christian conceptions. Why are we different from the god? Climacus harkens back to Chapter I: .. .if a human being is to come truly to know something about the unknown (god), he must first come to know that it is different from him, absolutely different from him .. .But if the god is to be absolutely different from a human being, this can have its basis not in that which man owes to the god, (for to that extent they are akin) but in that which he owes himself or in that which he himself has committed. What, then, is the difference? Indeed, what else but sin, since the difference, the absolute difference, must have been caused by the individual himself. (PF 46-47) Thus we see what strangeness results in this war between thought and the almighty absolute paradox . How will the matter end? Will though find a way to preserve itself, or, following its true passion, will it allow itself to collapse beneath the force of the absolute paradox? We 16 In just these few remarks, the god that at one time was simply synonymous with the unknown has become quite recognizable. That we "owe" something to the god makes the god our creator. That the difference is somebody's fault-it is my own fault-gives us the fall and the concept of sin. Once this not-so-sly transition takes place, in which the absolutely unknown god of Chapter III is replaced by the Christian god of Chapter I, we have completely abandoned the abstract, purely logical argument of the absolute paradox. This, of course, is as it should be. Climacus never meant for the metaphysical caprice to go uncorrupted. Philosophical Fragments is not a treatise on formal logic. It is a half-poetic, largely comical book about Christian faith. This conspicuous, shameless betrayal of the formal argument is perfectly in keeping with Climacus's ironic style. Nevertheless, this deviation from the formal argument leaves us with a question: If he never intended to see the formal argument through to the end, why did he embark on it in the first place? What does the abstract, theoretical treatment of thought and paradox add to the book? We ask the question now, but let us hold off on the answer. Let us first look at the rest of the argument as given, rife though it be with intrusions from Chapters I and II. The god is now the god of Chapter I who seeks to make us aware of the difference (sin). And at the same time the god is the god of Chapter II who seeks to annihilate all difference so that god and human can become equal: Thus the paradox becomes even more terrible, or the same paradox has the duplexity by which it manifests itself as the absolute- negatively, by bringing into prominence the absolute difference of sin and, positively, by wanting to annul his absolute diffe ence in the absolute equali ty. (PF 47) The absolute paradox, then, is not simply the god (as it was before when the god was simply the unknown), but it turns out also to be a gift of the god. In this way, it can be said that the god gives itself for the sake of the human. Now, as we had already predicted, there are two decisive ways that the collision of thought with the paradox can tum out. Before returning to our question about the formal beginnings of the metaphysical caprice, let us look at these two options and consider how they help us to understand Christian faith. We shall not be in a hurry, and even though some rriay think that we are wasting time instead of arriving at a decision, our consolation is that it still does not therefore follow that our efforts are wasted . (PF 25) The first possible outcome of the collision is taken up in the appendix to Chapter III, "Offense at the Paradox: An Acoustical Illusion." Although technically a different section from Chapter III, the appendix continues in the same abstract and philosophical mode. Offense occurs when thought completely rejects the paradox in order to preserve itself. Seeing the paradoxthe gift of the god-as a mortal threat, thought summons the strength to thrust the paradox away once and for all. Thought does this precisely because of the paradoxicalness of the paradox. All that thought knows is that it can think, and it is too prideful ~o entertain the possibility that there is anything which it cannot think. It is easy to see how the notion of offense applies to Christianity. When the understanding encounters the unlikely story of Christianity, offense may very well be the result. Someone tells us that the eternal god made an appearance in history as a particular human being. The person says that the god did this only once, about nineteen centuries ago in the Near East. "Sure," I say, "and I have some land in Florida ... but tell me, why would god do what you describe?" "To suffer and die in order to save you from sin." "To save me from sin? How do you know this? How do you know that what you are saying is not just a clever myth? Maybe it was a good story, and it caught on, and now millions of people believe it. But how do I know that those millions of people are not wrong, that they are not deluding themselves, that they are not throwing away their entire lives because of some concoction of the imagination? What can you do to persuade me?" "I cannot persuade you. There is no way for me to prove to you that it is anything but a story. But I believe that it is not just a story. Even though it lies outside my understanding, I believe it to be real. And now I will tell you something else: Your own eternal happiness depends on whether you believe it. I know this challenge of mine offends you, but I offer it anyway. Do not expect to make sense out of what I have told you. The whole point of it is that it cannot be understood. It must be believed." By nature, we seek to know and to understand. The understanding is our most loyal ally. In some ways, our understanding is all that we have. Christianity challenges the understanding and defies it, for all of Christianity is 17 �built upon paradox. The understanding chokes on paradox. The notion that in order to Ii ve eternally one has to throw away one's understanding is perhaps the most abhorrent notion ever presented to a human being. Thus, thought may take offense at the paradox. Climacus says that when this occurs it is thought misunderstanding its own passion. Thought seeks clarity. But the hypothesis of the metaphysical caprice is that what thought really wants is to pass away. Here, in the collision with the paradox, thought finally has a chance to realize its own ultimate goal. But offense occurs when thought mistakenly thinks that the more superficial drive, the urge to know and to understand, is its true tendency. This is one of the great advances of the book. Why would eternal happiness require from us something as unnatural as the complete forfeiture of our understanding? Climacus's metaphysical caprice gives us reason to think that, ultimately, such forfeiture may not be altogether unnatural. We see that though is continually on the move, that it acts all the time. It does not seem to be erotic in this way. Perhaps, then, it really does seek a kind of passing away. Perhaps thought continues to move only because it is seeking a point of rest. Perhaps thought really does wish to stop thinking. This would not go any further toward making the paradoxes of Christianity reasonable (if they became reasonable they c:ould not be thought's resting point), nor would it make faith any easier (just because it may be in thought's nature to give way to the paradox does not mean that thought can know its own nature). But it does suggest that the phenomenon of faith might make a certain amount of sense. Often, faith is looked upon as a kind of feebleness of mind, an easy way out for those who lack intellectual vigor and integrity. Climacus's metaphysical caprice gives us another way to look at the issue. This brings us to the other possible outcome of the collision, the so-called happier collision which takes place in faith. The discussion of this second option does not occur in the appendix. ·After the offense, Climacus suddenly departs from the philosophic mode of .presentation and moves on to Chapter IV, "The Situation of the Contemporary Follower." The chapter begins with the words, "So, then (to continue with our poem) ... " (PF 55), putting us securely back into the poetic mode of the book . We have already discussed what happens in Chapter IV. The story is told in which the god comes down and takes a human form. As his presence and his teachings are reported, some fortunate souls realize that "the news of the day is the beginning of eternity." This notion, that one can find eternity within a historical moment, is a paradox. In Chapter IV, it becomes not just a paradox, but the absolute paradox. The person who embraces the beginning of eternity does so at the expense of the understanding. In one sense, this is the logical end of the argument begun in Chapter III. The metaphysical caprice begins with passionate thought, predicts a collision between thought and the absolute paradox, and then states that there are two possible results. One possible result, offense, is taken up in the appendix. The other result, the happy collision in faith, is dealt with here in Chapter IV. In another sense, however, we have distanced ourselves as far as possible from the original project of Chapter III. Chapter III began as an abstract and isolated discussion of thought and the absolute paradox. After a while, though, the formal argument was compromised. Now, not only have we gone back to poetry, but the ab.., solute paradox has become something completely other than it was. "That which cannot be thought" has turned into "My eternal happiness depends on my relationship to an historical event." We shall consider the issue of formality in just a moment. First, though, let us try to see how it is possible that this latter paradox comes to be called the "absolute paradox." I am a thinking being, but I am also an existing human being. As a human being, I have a great interest in my existence and its continuation. How much more interest must I therefore take in my own eternality ! What prospect could engender in me more pathos than the prospect of eternal happiness? And if it should so happen that the possibility of eternal consciousness lies in a single decision, would that not have to be the most important decision in my life? It would be an absolute decision. But my life-it takes place in time. Therefore, any decision I make in this life must be a decision made in time. Is is not paradoxical that my own eternality is something that is decided in time? Of course it is a paradox, but it is not the absolute paradox of thought. Of thought? Perhaps not. From the standpoint of logic, "that which cannot be thought" is the absolute paradox of thought. But here we are not talking about thought; we are talking about existence. Viewed existentially, the paradox that decides the eternality of my being must surely be called an "absolute paradox ." Here lies one of the most important messages of Philosophical Fragments. The paradox of Christianity is absolute in a way that differs from logical absoluteness. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus refers to Christianity as an "existential com- 18 munication" as opposed to a philosophical doctrine or logical structure. (PS 339) Christianity is not philosophy, and we should not treat it as if it were. If Christianity claims that its basis is a paradox, then attacking the paradox on a purely theoretical level does not ultimately do much good. Some thinkers do this, but in so doing they often fail to attach themselves personally to the pathos of the paradox. In most cases, a paradox is interesting only insofar as it is a logical riddle. The terms of the paradox, taken individually, do not need to be intrinsically interesting. But this Christian paradox is a paradox of eternal life, a term which should command some attention even from the coldest of logicians. This gives us some insight into the rhetorical value of the transition made during the metaphysical caprice. By starting on a lofty and abstruse theoretical plane, then shamelessly violating the logic of the argument, then descending without apology to the realm of pure poetry, Climacus tries to show how foolish it is to try to treat Christianity as if it were a philosophical position or a logical problem. In a sense, this answers our question of why Chapter III begins as a formal argument only to be abandoned later. But it is only a partial answer. While, for ourselves as readers, we may get much out of Climacus's satirical treatment of the purely philos?phical approach to Christian doctrine, we must consider that Climacus wrote at a particular time to a particular philosophical audience. To fully appreciate the richness of his attack on philosophical treatments of Christian faith, we must consider how Climacus's metaphysical caprice stands in relation to Hegelianism, the prevailing philosophical trend in Climacus's day. cal Fragments should itself be thought of as a play. It would, o'f course, be a play in five acts, since there are five chapters. This fact, together with the epigraph, suggests Shakespeare. But which play? The epigraph is from Twelfth Night or What You Will, but Climacus refers to Shakespeare throughout the book: As You Like It, King Lear, All's Well that Ends Well. Which play? One of these, a combination, a different play entirely? In Shakespeare, the turning point of a play often occurs in the third act. The third act of Philosophical Fragments is, of course, "The Absolute Paradox: A Metaphysical Caprice." Let us return there and look for further clues. There is only one direct reference to Shakespeare in all of Chapter III. It does not occur in the body of the chapter but stands slightly apart from the book. It is tucked away insignificantly in the middle of a footnote : A fly, when it is, has just as much being as the god; with regard to factual being, the stupid comment I write here has just asmuch being as Spinoza's profundity, for the Hamlet dialectic, to be or not to be, applies to factual being. (PF 41) The Hamlet dialectic, the soliloquy of "To be or not to be," does in fact occur in Act III of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. It need hardly be said that "To be or not to be" is central to the meaning of Philosophical Fragments. The subject of the book is the acquisition of faith, which brings about a total transformation in the learner. Climacus calls this change one of rebirth. He says in several places that it is "the transition from not to be to to be." Also, "To be or not to be" is the great dialectic of the understanding, which in the moment must Part IV (The Rival Suitors) decide between its outward tendency toward self-preservation and its inward desire to pass out of existence. But "To be or not to be" is perhaps the single most The interlude between Chapters IV and V begins as overworked soliloquy in all of literature. It is hard to follows: conceive of any discussion of existence that could not in some way be linked to this famous speech. Thus, we My dear reader! We assume, then, that this should not make too much of the connection. In a more teacher has appeared, that he is dead and buried, significant way, though, Act III of Hamlet is a good model and that an interval of time has elapsed between for Chapter III of Philosophical Fragments. A key event Chapters IV and V. Also in a comedy there may in Act III of Hamlet is the presentation of the Mousebe an interval of several years between two acts. trap, which is a play within a play just as Chapter III is a To suggest this passage of time, the orchestra sometimes plays a symphony or something simidiscourse within a discourse. The Mouse-trap is performed for the audience of lar in order to shorten the time by filling it up. (PF 72) Claudius, King of Denmark. Hamlet's purpose in showing the play is to represent to Claudius that his reign is The clear implication of this passage is that Philosophi- illegitimate and his marriage ill-gotten. Likewise, the 19 �metaphysical caprice is performed for the Hegelians (Hans Lassen Martensent, et al.) who hold dominion over the philosophical circles in the Denmark of Climacus's time. Climacus uses the metaphysical caprice to demonstrate that the Hegelians's appropriation of revealed religion is illegitimate, and that despite their nominal Christianity, they are not truly wed to Christ. Climacus objects to what the Hegelians have done on their way toward an overarching conception of Spirit. As Climacus says in the preface to the Concluding Un scientific Postscript, "better well hung than by an unfortunate marriage to be brought into systematic relationship with all the world." (PS 3) In many ways, The Mouse-trap can be seen as representative of the whole of Hamlet .. To appreciate this, of course, we must see how Hamlet and Claudius interact with one another throughout all five acts of the play. Likewise, if we are going to see how the metaphysical caprice addresses the Hegelian lords, we should first point out what the book as a whole has to say to them. "We shall take our time-after all, there is no need to hurry." (PF 16) Climacus's assessment of the Hegelians seems to be as follows. For the Hegelians, all contradictories are merely relative. Because all contradictories are merely relative, they are all subject to mediation. The Hegelian's whole enterprise is based on this presupposition. Mediation occurs within System (speculative philosophy) . In System, the opposing terms of a paradox or contradiction are set over against one another, and the dialectical distinctions between them are drawn. Upon inspection, it becomes clear that the opposing terms, properly viewed, are actually identical. This being so, the barrier between them dissolves, the opposition ceases, and the terms are synthesized into a higher unity. This is mediation . Through mediation, System attends to the unfolding of the Idea. The Idea, of course, is immanently knowable by Mind. Philosophical Fragments as a whole is a vehicle for Climacus to state two main objections to the Hegelians, one regarding their axiom that all oppositions can be mediated. Climacus thinks that the Hegelians have entirely misunderstood what dialectic is. As he says, "Basically, an unshakable insistence upon the absolute and absolute distinctions is precisely what makes a good dialectician." (PF 108) Socrates understood this. Socrates was always pursuing precision in definition; he was always trying to cordon off one idea from another in hope of seeing correctly how the various ideas relate to and inter- penetrate (but not become) one another. Hegelians make distinctions, too, but even before doing so they have resigned themselves to the supposition that no distinctions can hold. They draw lines of division, but only in order to erase them. They are so caught up in the motion of System, they are so eager to, mediate in order to get on to the next paradox, that they fail to experience the forcefulness of the paradox that is right in front of them. This, in part, is why we see constant reference to Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. Climacus is trying to shame the Hegelians into recognizing that their dialectic is weak and sloppy. By continually eulogizing Socrates as the greatest of all dialecticians, Climacus hopes to show the Hegelians that in going "beyond" Socrates they have actually failed to get even as far as he. Climacus attributes the feebleness of the Hegelians' dialectic to lack of passion: ... dialectics .has lost its passion; just as it has become so easy and light-hearted a thing to think contradictions-for it is passion that gives tension to the contradiction, and when passion is taken away the contradiction becomes a mere pleasantry, a hon mot. .. (PS 345) The Hegelians are too much at ease with contradiction. They have grown so accustomed to the inevitable resolution of paradoxes that they no longer can feel the tension that makes a paradox unsettling. This gives us yet another way to view the two modes of presentation in Philosophical Fragments. Climacus 's endless switching between poetry and philosophy is not just a depiction of the pathetic-dialectic problem of faith, but it is also a constant, inescapable reminder that thought cannot be separated from life, that intellect cannot be separated from passion. As Climacus says at the beginning of Chapter III, "the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow." (PF 37) So it is that the entirety of Philosophical Fragments is an attack on the dialectical methods of the Hegelians. Ultimately, though, Climacus is less concerned with the Hegelians ' faulty methods than with where those faulty methods lead. Hamlet ... you shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife. (Hamlet III. ii. 270) 20 For the Hegelians, all paradoxes are relative, even those of Christianity. In their quest to mediate all oppositions, the Hegelians have sought to bring Christianity under the domain of speculative philosophy. By explaining the articles of Christian belief, they claim to have removed the need for Christian faith. Faith is crude and primitive. It lacks rationality. It yearns to be elevated to a higher form of knowing. But through System, all in principle is ultimately knowable. According to the Hegelians, Christianity can be understood. This being so, the Hegelians say that they no longer have a need for faith. But despite their lack of faith, the Hegelians still consider themselves to be Christians. Climacus cannot abide the Hegelians' attempt to replace faith with reason. Faith is the very core of Christianity. If ever faith were made unnecessary, Christianity would no longer have a place in the world. tianity is altogether different from philosophical doctrines. 'Because of its emphasis on the absurd, it is opposed to philosophy in general. Because of this, true Christianity lies beyond the reach of speculative philosophy, as Climacus says in the following rather lengthy passage from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Is not mediation a speculative category? When the opposites are mediated they (Christianity and Speculation) are not equal before the arbiter. .. When two opposites are mediated, and reconciled in a higher unity, they may perhaps be equal before the mediating process, because neither of the entities is an opposite of speculative thought itself. But when one of the opposites is speculative thought, and the other is an opposite to speculative thought, and a mediation is proposed, and mediation happens to be a speculative category, it is illusory to speak of an opposite to speculative thought at all, since the reconciling factor itself is speculative thought or the mediationfunction which is its category. (PS 335-336) Player Queen But here and hence pursue me lasting strife If once a widow, ever I be a wife! (Hamlet III. ii. 228) To render faith reasonable kills it. The Hegelians cannot kill faith and still hope to wed themselves to Christ. It simply will not happen. This brings us to the second and more important of Climacus's objections to the Hegelians. He rejects their axiom that all oppositions are merely relative. The Hegelians seek to mediate Christianity and to explain its central paradoxes. But Climacus maintains that the paradox at the heart of Christianity cannot be resolved, and that Christianity itself cannot be brought into conformity with philosophy. If Christianity were just another doctrine or theory, it could be translated successfully into speculative terms, and then it would indeed be subject to mediation. But Christianity does not present a theory; it indicated a mode of being. Christianity is an existential communication. It is not a philosophical doctrine to be contemplated; it is an absurdity to be believed and lived. The absolute paradox of Christianity is not a merely logical paradox that can be treated by speculation. It is an existential paradox that engages more than the mind. The paradox states that a life entirely outside of time is nonetheless causally dependent on a personal decision made within time. This paradox challenges one's whole being, not just one's intellect, for eternal happiness is, subjectively speaking, the highest goal that an individual could ever have. In its form of presentation, in its subject matter, and in its relationship to the individual, Chris- 21 For philosophy, reason is the sole criterion, but Christianity calls for the abandonment of reason. Philosophy addresses itself to the mind alone, but Christianity is addressed to the entire self. Before speculative philosophy can mediate an opposition, the terms of the opposition must first agree to be placed within a speculative framework. Without this initial agreement, any attempts to mediate are illegitimate. But Christianity cannot be expressed in speculative terms, for speculative philosophy ("The truth can be known through reason alone.") is itself the opposite of Christianity ("The truth cannot be known through reason alone. "). According to Climacus, the Hegelians hasten past this all-important initial agreement in order to get on with mediation . Because the Hegelians fail to hammer out the initial agreement, not only is their mediation invalid, but-because they themselves claim to be Christians-it is an act of high treason: It is indeed permissible within speculative thought to assign to everything which claims the status of speculation its relative position, and thus to mediate all those opposites which have the common character of being essays in speculation ... But it is very different when the opposite in question is an opposite to speculative philosophy in general. If there is to be any mediation in this case ... it will mean that speculative thought �judges between itself and its own opposite, and therefore plays the double role of litigant and judge. Or it means that speculative thought assumes that there can be no opposite to speculative philosophy, and that all opposition is merely relative, as being an opposition within speculative thought. But it was just this question which should have been dealt with in the preliminary agreement. Perhaps this is the reason why speculative philosophy ... is in such a hurry to apply mediation and to recommend mediation: Because it fears the worst would happen if it became quite clear what Christianity is. The behavior of speculative thought in mediating Christianity is not unlike the behavior of a rebellious ministry which has seized the reins of power, and now governs in the king's name while keeping the king himself at a distance. (PS 336) The Hegelians try to overthrow faith and supplant it with reason. At the same time, they seek to wed themselves to Christianity on their own terms. Such a mad marriage never was before. (What a superb theme for revenge tragedy!) Climacus uses the whole of Philosophical Fragments to rail against the Hegelian appropriation of Christianity. The Hegelians have attempted to rationalize Christianity from top to bottom, to explain away every article of Christian belief, and to resolve the paradoxes that are at the heart of Christianity. With regard to the Hegelians, Philosophical Fragments is Climacus's way of saying, as a spokesperson for Christianity: Hamlet Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! you would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass-and there is much music, excellent voice,. in this littleorgan, yet you cannot make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (III.ii.372-381) The whole of Philosophical Fragments is presented as a thought-project that seeks truly to go beyond Socrates. But Socrates represents all of philosophy, or at least all ofldealism. And the result of the thought-project is Chris- tianity. In this way, the entire book can be viewed as a statement to the Hegelians that there is something, namely Christianity, that in principle lies wholly outside of speculative philosophy. The thought-project frames the book, and the absolute paradox is its center. Both attempt to demonstrate that Christianity lies forever beyond the reach of speculation. This, at last, brings us back to the metaphysical caprice, Climacus's version of The Mouse-trap. "Now we shall begin." (PF 100) When Philosophical Fragments is viewed as a refutation of the Hegelians, Chapter III becomes a logically independent representation of the entire book- a self-contained whole within the whole. It accomplishes this in a synecdochical way. The book as a whole shows that speculative philosophy, which seeks to mediate all things, cannot mediate Christianity, which stands opposed to speculative philosophy. The metaphysical caprice attempts to show that the primary organ of speculative philosophy, the understanding (which seeks to understand all things), cannot understand the object of Christian faith, the absolute paradox (which stands in opposition to the understanding). The proportion, then, is: speculation : Christianity :: the understanding : the absolute paradox What I hope to show is that, as is often the case with synecdoche, the metaphysical caprice works beautifully and gracefully as a metaphor, but it must not be take too literally. In order for speculative philosophy to mediate an opposition, both terms of the opposition must be placed fully within a speculative framework. In the case of speculation versus Christianity, this cannot work. One of the terms of the opposition is speculation, and thus it does not fall within speculation. The other term lies entirely outside speculation in principle and therefore does not fall within speculation. Neither term will fit wholly inside speculation, and thus no mediation can take place. In order for the understanding to resolve a paradox, both terms of the paradox must be placed securely within the understanding. (To begin to come to grips with "This statement is false," one must first understand why the statement has to be false and why the statement cannot be false.) In the case of the understanding versus "that which cannot be understood," this cannot work. One term of the paradox is the understanding and therefore does not fall within the understanding. The other term by definition lies entirely outside the understanding and 22 therefore does not fall within the understanding. Neither term will fit wholly inside the understanding, and thus no resolution can take place. As poetry, this analogy is delightful. But if we try to take it literally, we quickly run into a problem. It is the same problem we encountered before: "That which cannot be understood" is not the essential paradox of Christianity. As we have seen, the absolute paradox of Christianity is not an abstract paradox of formal logic, but a specific existential paradox regarding time and etemality (eternal consciousness is rooted in an historical moment). Chapter III begins as if it were a discourse all its own . Until the very end of the chapter, the presentation is highly abstract. "That which cannot be understood" is the absolute paradox of Chapter III. It is a verbal paradox, and its absoluteness lies precisely in its formality. Any significant deviation from the words "that which cannot be understood," and attempt to imbue the paradox with content, and the absolute paradox ceases to be the absolute logical paradox. It may very well become the absolute existential paradox of Christianity, but in so doing it gives up the title of being the paradox that, by definition, defeats the understanding. It is clear that we cannot have both kinds of absoluteness at once, for we see what the two paradoxes are, and we see that they are different. Nonetheless, I think that, on some level, Climacus does want both kinds of absoluteness at once. I say this simply because he himself does not explicitly point out the two senses of "absolute" that we have been discussing. He obtains "that which cannot be understood." He gives this the name "absolute paradox" because it is a paradox that absolutely defies understanding. He then goes on to find another paradox, the essential temporaletemal paradox of Christianity, and he proceeds to call this the "absolute paradox" as well. I think that in giving the latter the name "absolute paradox," Climacus hopes to bring forward the sense of logical forcefulness that accompanies the paradox of "that which cannot be understood." That is, I think that he wants the essential paradox of Christianity also to be the paradox that absolutely defies the understanding. Why he might wish to do this is clear. It would fit · nicely as a third step in his refutation of speculative philosophy, and thus it would serve to further secure Christianity from speculation. First, he has brought the dialectical fastness of the Hegelians' methods into serious question. Second, he has shown that in principle the very attempt to mediate Christianity is illegitimate. I think that Climacus wants to go the third step of beating 23 Hegelians at their own game. Suppose for a moment that we 'overlooked the impossibility of accurately representing Christianity within a speculative framework and allowed the Hegelians to attempt to mediate Christianity. Suppose further that we granted them the right to employ all of their questionable dialectical methods in trying to achieve the mediation. Would it not, after all this, be nice to be able to show very simply, in a way that even they might acknowledge, that the essence of Christianity resides in an absolute paradox that is by definition impossible to resolve? I cannot say with certainty that Climacus wishes for the double usage of the term "absolute paradox" to have this effect. The matter becomes highly difficult to judge when we consider the profusion of paradoxes, discontinuities, and qualitative leaps that occur over the course of Philosophical Fragments. How does one get from a demonstration to the thing demonstrated? How can I know that something has come into existence, for when I experience it, it simply is, and afterward ·I am separated from it by time? Is coming to be an existential change only, or is it an essential change as well? -These are just a few of the thorny problems that come up in the book. Even the essential Christian paradox has its rivals (the suffering god, the human god). Amidst all of these difficulties, it is hard to tell exactly how to take the nominal link between the two "absolute paradoxes." Even so, I think that in some way the double usage of the name indicates an overeagerness on the part of Climacus to refute the Hegelians on as many fronts as possible. So, then, we come to the end of our analysis of the absolute paradox. In an earlier section, we said that in order to be hanged Climacus would have to commit a tragic mistake. Has our analysis uncovered anything that qualifies as a tragic mistake? I do not think so. At worst, we have discovered a little bit of logical sleight of hand, but we cannot even prove intent in the matter. And besides, even if Climacus were guilty of misusing the name "absolute paradox," would such a minor crime be a hanging offense? No, it would not. I am not what they call a "hanging judge." I would much prefer to see our play tum out a comedy instead of a tragedy. So rather than hang the poor man, let us try to marry him off. Let us proceed to our final act, where we will try to find a proper spouse for Climacus. It is only fitting that a comedy should end with a wedding. Part V (The Big Day) �We began with the question of whether Climacus was well hanged. What we meant in asking the question was: Has Climacus given an accurate and insightful account of what Christian faith is and what it means to acquire it? At the time, we did not know that we were going to opt for a wedding instead of a hanging. Nevertheless, the question still stands, and we can ask it in another way: Does Climacus really know who it is that he is getting ready to marry? There are wonderful insights to be found in Philosophical Fragments. For one, Climacus makes it clear that faith requires both thoughtfulness and passion. It does not require thoughtfulness in the sense of erudition or intellectual acuteness. If that were the case, then faith would be differently accessible to different people, depending on how clever they were. No, faith requires only so much thoughtfulness as is necessary to recognize the fact that much of what Christians believe does not make sense. There are genuine contradictions in Christianity, literally embodied in Christ himself, who is believed to be not only the one, eternal, all-powerful God, but also a particular man, fully human, who lived, suffered, and died within human history. To be a Christian is to believe in these paradoxes. But to embrace a g~nuine paradox, one must defy one's own understanding. This requires tremendous passion. To believe in something even when one's own understanding says that the thing cannot be, one must love the thing greatly. It is not easy to say, "As far as I know, you are an absurdity, but I love you so much that your absurdity is not an obstacle to my believing you." Of course, it would be easy to say if one were, in general, not bothered by the prospect of believing in the absurd. This is where passion comes back, and this is where Climacus makes one of hi greatest contributions: Thought itself is passionate. If one's thought lacks passion, then one does not bother to get worked up about contradictions and paradoxes. It takes passion in order to say firmly, "this is so," or "this is not so." Philosophical Fragments makes a valuable statement in saying that thought and passion are intimately connected and that, in particular, clear and forceful thinking requires its own kind of passion. In this regard, Climacus seems to know his future spouse quite well. Faith requires clear thinking in order to discern that the object of faith is an absurdity. From here, it requires passion to believe the absurdity. But one cannot then allow one's thinking to get slack. One must have the passion of thought that is required for holding on to the recognition that the absurdity is still an absurdity even when one believes it. But in some ways, I wonder whether Climacus really knows what he is getting himself into. He is so concerned with staving off potentially bad marriages that to a degree he has lost t_ouch with his own notion of what a good marriage would be. That is, Philosophical Fragments is so caught up in the philosophical project of refuting Hegelianism that this impinges on the theological project of explicating the content of Christian faith. Because he is addressing himself to the Hegelians, he has gone to great lengths to adopt their way of speaking and to present Christianity in an abstract and categorical way. Thus, in Philosophical Fragments , everything is bound up in the moment. the moment of decisive significance is indeed an ingenious device for simply but totally distinguishing between philosophy and Christianity. In terms of what philosophy is inclined to consider important, the Christian idea of a single point in which time · meets eternity is a unique and fascinating proposition. But Climacus sees it as more than just a handy way to set off Christianity from philosophy. He also tries to make it the entire essence of Christianity: That an eternal happiness is decided in time through the relationship to something historical was the content of my experiment, and what I now call Christianity ... To avoid distraction again, I do not wish to bring forward any other Christian principles; they are all contained in this one, and may be consistently derived from it, just as this determination also offers the sharpest contrast with paganism. (PS 330) I do not think that this quite works. I do not think that all of Christianity can be deduced from the moment. The moment is brilliant as a way of demonstrating the need for the subjective appropriation of Christianity. Regardless of the time in which one lives, regardless of how many or how few Christians are around, the problem of faith is equally problematic for every individual. When one truly recognizes what Christianity is, when one sees that faith entails a complete turning away from the understanding, then personal belief in Christ becomes a difficult and terrifying proposition. But Climacus's nearly total focus on the subjectivity of the moment leads, I think, to a neglect of the objective elements from which the moment draws its power. The all-important paradox of the moment is that eternal happiness rests on historical knowledge. Should we not, therefore, show some concern for the content of that historical knowledge? For the intellect, the idea that the eternal God erupted into time is a great perplexity. But theological writings fail to treat the personal offensivefor the heart, is it not more essential that the eruption ness of Christianity. Climacus places it in the center of was an act of pure love, and that by coming down as a his book. human the omnipotent God had to experience human Nonetheless, I think there are limitations to suffering? The abstractness of the moment does not, I Climacus' s treatment of the offense. Here again, we come think, capture the full pathos of the great Christian event. back to the neglect of the message. Climacus speaks of the importance of God's appearance as a teacher. What then, of the teaching? Is it not imporThen came his disciples, and said unto him, tant that Christ came down in order to bring us the Word? Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, Is it not important that the historical event left the world after they heard this saying? (Matthew 15: 12) with two great commandments? The moment places too much emphasis on the simple recognition that God ap- Why are we offended by the person of Christ? In a large · peared in time. Climacus does not show, in this book, part, we are offended because the very notion of Christ that he fully appreciates why God appeared in time. By is defiant to reason as such. But in another significant not talking more than he does about the objective mean- way, we are offended by the way in which Christ's teaching of the appearance, Climacus makes it seem as though ing challenges our understanding of the world in which it were merely a photo-opportunity. Climacus makes it we live: sound as if God came down solely in order to give us the opportunity to believe that God came down. Though the Ye have heard that it hath been said to you, An simple fact of God's appearance in time is an amazeeye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: But I say ment all by itself, and though it alone tells us much about unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever God's nature and God's love, it does not provide us with shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the entirely of Christianity. When he made his appearthe other also. And if any man wi11 sue the at ance, Christ could have told us anything. I do not think law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy that we can deduce the particularity of Christ's message cloak also. And whoever shall compel thee to merely from the fact that he brought us .one. go a mile, go with him twain . Give to him that But it would be wrong to criticize Philosophical asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of Fragments too strongly on the basis of what Climacus thee tum not thou away. Ye have heard that it did not say. Philosophical Fragments is a short work. hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and In the space of little over a hundred pages, Climacus not hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your only goes a long way toward summing up the true esenemies, bless them that curse you, do good to sence of Christianity, but in so doing he also offers a them that hate you, and pray for them which derefutation of Hegelianism in general and of the systemspitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew atic appropriation of revealed religion in particular. Given 5:38-44) all that it sets out to do and how successfully it accomplishes it, Philosophical Fragments is to be praised Or again: highly. Another of the riches in Philosophical Fragments is If any man come to me, and hate not his father, Climacus's treatment of the offense. He displays a proand mother and wife, and children, and bretheren, found awareness of how the paradoxes of Christianity and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot are not only absurd, but also abhorrent. When the mind be my disciple. (Luke 14:26) reflects on such attributes of God as omnipresence and omnipotence, its first impulse is to reject on aesthetic · Or again: grounds the notion that such attributes are commensurate with that skinny kid from Nazareth. The understandTherefore I say unto you, Take no thought for ing takes pride in its categories. We stake much of our your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; personal worth on our ability to think. When Christiannor yet for your body, what ye shall put on ... ity comes along, shatters the categorical framework of (Matthew 6:25) our understanding, and shuts down our thinking, we are threatened with ridiculousness and impotence. Many These statements are not statements that defy our facul- 24 25 �ties of thinking qua faculties. They defy our notions of justice and morality and causality. They contradict what our own experience tells us about how the world works. Climacus succeeds brilliantly in showing us how offensive Christ is to our process of thinking and, to the extent that we identify ourselves with our thinking, how offensive Christ is to our person. But I do not see much in Philosophical Fragments that treats the offensiveness of Christ's worldly message. Does Climacus know his future spouse? He knows much. His insights into what it means to acquire faith are profound and, in some ways, original. Though in focusing on subjective appropriation he may de-emphasize the objective and worldly implications of Christianity, he nevertheless makes and invaluable contribution to Christian theology. They say that you never really know the other person until you are married. If this is true, then we should not expect Philosophical Fragment to nail down every important detail of Christian teaching-especially since abstraction and philosophical generality are partly the goal of the book. Rather, we should thank Climacus for what he has told us about his future spouse. His poem is a gift for which we should be grateful. As we take our leave of Climacus, we should say to him with all sincerity: The Manipulation of the Field D Edward Freeman We are dissatisfied with the explanation founded on the hypothesis of attractive and repellent forces directed towards the magnetic poles, even though we may have satisfied ourselves that the phenomenon is in strict accordance with that hypothesis, and we cannot help thinking that in every place where we find these lines of force, some physical state or action must exist in sufficient energy to produce the actual phenomena. Thus Maxwell states, in the beginning of "On Physical Lines of Force," the nagging question left unanswered by the theory of action at a distance. 1 Action at a distance theories do not address what phenomena could cause "sufficient energy" to enable the "actual phenomena." How does one account for the mysterious power of the magnet? In what does the energy reside? The magnet and similar phenomena exert a physical force upon objects in their vicinity. There exists, according to empirical observation, an area around such electromagnetic sources that registers a buildup of something that causes physical responses to certain things brought into proximity with them, but what is this something? The most basic field hypothesis presented by Maxwell was that account given in "On Faraday's Lines of Force." There we found a mathematical construct designed to exhibit the lines of force found in the vicinity of a magnet, static charge, or live wire. Maxwell imagines mathematical fluid tubes carrying an unnatural, yet ingenious, incompressible fluid incapable of momentum, created to demonstrate that the direction of the natural forces displayed around an electromagnetic source could be accounted for by some type of system of real forces in the area around the source. Infinitesimal tubes which resist the passage of a massless fluid pervade the area around a source. This account certainly gave us a map of these phenomena but fell short of presenting an actual account of the physical forces involved in any electromagnetic circumstance. We could account for the diminishing strength of the field as it moved from the source Name the day of marriage, and God give thee joy. (Much Ado About Nothing II. i. 295) This paper was written for Mrs. Marilyn Higuera's 1993 Preceptorial on Maxwe11. The text used was The Dialec1 Let us next consider the mechanical effect of a state of stress symmetrical about an axis. We may resolve it, in all cases, into a simple hydrostatic pressure, combined with a simple pressure or tension along the axis. When the axis is that of greatest pressure, the force along the axis will be a pressure. When the axis is that of least pres- · sure, the force along the axis will be a tension. The axes spoken of in the passage were formerly known to us as the fluid tubes in the first analogy. The new mechanical concept described above is the vortex. This tic of the Field: Three Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, edited by Thomas K. Simpson of St. John 's College. His commentary was invaluable to our study. 26 by the resistance of the medium (fluid tubes) . But this only demonstrated one of the many facets of electromagnetic forces. The Jack of an account for induced currents and other phenomena forces one to conclude that this conception of Maxwell's falls short of a true expression of the field. Maxwell knows this and pinpoints the difficulty, attributing it to the lack of momentum in this mathematical analogy. Even though this analogy fails to explain electromagnetic phenomena fully, Maxwell is advancing our thought, leading us to shift our perception of these phenomena. When one considers the meticulous care Maxwell exercised to prevent the infusion of false impressions through inappropriate analogies into the study in which he was employed, it seems that we can see exactly where the problem lies. There is no substance to the fluid. There is no more physical force to this conception than in that of "action at a di stance." But, even with this difficulty, I find that I am no longer questioning whether the choice is between action at a distance or the field . It is now merely a question of what is truly the nature of a field which exhibits electromagnetic properties. It now seems to be possible to find forces originating in a field. Maxwell has oriented our thought towards pressures through a medium pervading the area around electromagnetic phenomena. The proposal for an electromagnetic medium that most intrigues me is given in "On Physical Lines of Force." We still need to follow the pattern of forces indicated by the fluid tubes of the last paper, but we also need to utilize forces that are more conventionally physical. Maxwell gives the fundamental concept of this paper in the following paragraph: 27 �vortex answers the problem of having a non-physical Now we are in a quandary. Maxwell's solution to entity create a physical force. It is the answer to the prob- the field in physical terms cannot be felt although it should lem created by the strictly mathematical conception found be present everywhere. The degree of the force of its in "Faraday 's Lines." By whirling the fluid around and particles is nonexistent when set beside the effects attribgranting it momentum we initiate centrifugal pressures uted to it. Degrees of magnetic force are granted though that, when coupled with an additional hydrostatic pres- differing densities of this ether, but no differential in sure, give us conditions that will coincide with those found weight can be distinguished. In typical fashion, Maxaround a magnet. To incorporate induced current and to well is prepared for such difficulties. Speaking of the keep the vortices from rubbing together and creating fric- vortical hypothesis, he says: tion Maxwell imposes an insulating layer of "particles" between the vortices. By imposing elasticity upon the I do not bring it forward as a mode of connexion shape of the vortices we incorporate the electrotonic state existing in nature, or even as that which I would into our model. We now have a complete conception of willingly assent to as an electrical hypothesis. It the situation in the vicinity of the magnet, live wire, and is, however, a mode of connexion which is meelectrostatic field: Three-dimensional whirling and glidchanically conceivable, and easily investigated ing forces silently buzzing away in impossible intricacy, and it serves to bring out the actual mechanichal all of which could, mathematically speaking, be caused connexions between the known electromagnetic phenomena; so that I venture to say that any one by the momentous vortical fluid. But this aura of force only occurs in the vicinity of who understands the provisional and temporary character of this hypothesis, will find himself electromagnetic items. Does this vortical fluid, with its intervening layer of particles, reside only near electrorather helped than hindered by it in his search magnetic entities? This is rather absurd, if almost everyafter the true interpretation of the phenomena. thing is receptive in some manner to the effects of electromagnetism. Maxwell postulates this conceptual vor- Here of course is Maxwell at his best. What does it mattical fluid to be an ether, residing everywhere, actualized ter if the vortices are not actually there? They could be. in the presence of an electromagnetic source. How does At least this hypothesis demonstrates that physical forces this fluid appear in its neutral state? How can the par- can be responsible for the equations given by the "action ticles remain in position to prevent friction in the vorti- at a distance" theorists. He now has us thinking of the ces in the event of actualization? Although the vortical field and believing that it is possible to understand these motion of an ether when it is actualized seems sufficient phenomena as more than mysterious forces acting upon to account for the forces in a field, it is very difficult to each other from afar without physical connection. conceive of ether in its unactualized state. Now that we are thinking in terms of the possibility There is, of course, another difficulty presented by of this electromagnetic ether, Maxwell asks us to step this ether. It must necessarily be physical and have mo- away from any definite conception of the manner of its mentum if it is to effect the forces attributed to it. It must existence. It is sufficient to say that it is possible that this also be able to infuse any medium with which it is pre- ether could exist and could mechanically cause the phesented. To answer these needs, the particles of the field nomena we experience. In "A Dynamical Theory" we are made infinitesimally small. Maxwell grants them mo- are asked to take a step away from the vortical concepmentum but not gross mass. Having no mass, this is a tion and return to something very like the mathematical very odd momentum which which he has postulated for conception in "Faraday 's Lines." He speaks of the field us. Can we find the results of action with momentum but in terms of energy and abstracts his theory from the physino mass? Maxwell designed an experiment to examine cal hypothesis. We now look at the dynamics of a posthis question. It was entitled "The Inertia of a Current sible field and leave the difficulties associated with its Experiment" and is found in the Treatise Volume II, Ar- physical ordering behind us . The frailties of physical ticle 217. This experiment was designed to discover if a conception are no longer a factor. The field is postulated current carried momentums of the same magnitude as and its dynamical effects examined. those found in fields near electromagnetic sources. MaxIn the Treatise Maxwell invokes the image of bell well could find no momentum. Modem scientists have ringers pulling at ropes to fulfill their charge. Hidden to found momentums, but they are very small compared to them behind an opaque ceiling is the machinery which it the effects found in the field. is their duty to sound. Therefore, their vision of the ac- 28 tual sounding bodies is blocked. The "action at a distance" formulas give a like understanding of electromagnetic phenomena. The effects given by the exercise of certain actions are known, but the mechanism remains dark. The culmination of Maxwell's work is ultimately to arrive at the action at a distance formulas through the examination of the field itself, not the electromagnetic sources. Thus the mechanism itself is examined, not merely the ropes. 29 �A Possibility of Beauty D David Jennings Is the Special Theory of Relativity beautiful? The answer is no. A theory, insofar as it is an abstract construct (as differentiated from its presentation), cannot be beautiful. The abstract can never be beautiful. Carravagio's "Conversion of St. Paul," for instance, is stunningly beautiful. The concept of the painting-its essence or meaning or whatever-is on the other hand a flimsy, insipid thing by definition (if definition is to be had). What we mean by the "Theory of Relativity" is not the progression of the argument on the page or the blackboard or the tabula rasa of our minds. If it were then we would not have a single theory but a multiplicity of theories, one for each page, blackboard, and tabula rasa that falls under Einstein's sway. We speak, however, of a theory that may be thought of as the permanent form of each of its representations. And if we have learned anything, we have learned that form is just as flimsy and insipid (and boring) as matter. We can ask, though, whether Einstein's presentation (his "text") is beautiful. It is often said that mathematics is beautiful, the subtler the better. This means that the dizzying concatenation of logic and proof that constitutes the working out of propositions is thought of as sublime. Again, this cannot mean that mathematics itself (whatever that entity may be) is beautiful. Instead, the descriptive term beautiful is attached to what may be vaguely termed the experience of mathematics. Proof and procedure seem unsullied, clean, pure (c.f. pure reason). Perhaps because of evolutionary reasons, or perhaps because of the presence of our divine selves within our bodily selves, the (somewhat) neutral attribution of cleanliness is associated with the decidedly valuational attribution of beauty. So, we ask, is Einstein's theory clean? The last question is very difficult to ~pproach and more difficult to answer. Mathematics does not imply criteria of cleanliness. Perhaps one could claim that Einstein's work, insofar as it is mathematical, is beautiful when compared to dirty old physics. However tenuous, indeed ridiculous, 1 this claim is, it is at least a little 1 I hasten to point out that for my part, I am not quick to disparage the ridiculous in a case like this. It may indeed happen that beauty resides in what is childish, silly, and (yes) unsubtle. As Heraclitus supposedly says, "Enter, for there are gods here too." more tenable than saying, for example, that Einstein is more beautiful than Lobachevski. A part of the beauty of mathematics is that it, like a goddess, is indifferent to itself. Without some sort of recourse to something outside of mathematics only this indifference will pertain. All mathematics is aesthetically equivalent (equally "clean") when viewed upon purely mathematical grounds. But we want to know something specific about Einstein's text. It is uninformative to say that it is beautiful insofar as it is mathematical. We only gain some sort of new glimpse upon the text when we make an aesthetic judgment concerning the text itself.2 Our recourse is a common one; we reread. Math~ ematics, abstract or not, is not our interest. Here the reader faces a text, and just for a moment, as if in a dream, he disregards the appellation "mathematics" altogether. Under the thick veil of notational argot, and through it and in it, the reader finds a perspectival gigantomachia. The earth giants, the brutal and stone-like creatures of primitive gravity and rest, pile on mountains of calculation to comprehend the airy, motive Olympians. The Olympians on their part hurl lightening (velocity=c) upon the heads of the giants. The former are called collectively "small k" and the latter "large K." Or perhaps there is no war at all, but rather a never-ending tension of isolated looking. The two parties, mr. k and Mrs. K, share one thing in common, one event, but the entirety of the rest of their lives (in time) are out of synch. And then there is above all (giants, gods, lonely couples, et cetera) the transcendent (unreal) hope of ultimate redemption: synchronicity. We once had it in an innoTo take an example: "The works of Cummings are beautiful because they are poetry." This statement, if "poetry'' is thought of as analogous to "mathematics," is senseless. Now it may be argued that what the speaker means is that there is some body of real poetry, all of which is beautiful as compared to fake poetry. In fact, we often use the term "poetry" in this sense. However, such a use implies that task of distinguishing the real from the false. In making such a distinction, we are going through a process of judgment no different from that implied in this simple valuation: "The poetry of Cummings is beautiful." "Is beautiful" is here no more and no less informative than "is poetry" in the above context. cent (Newtonian) age, where with Leibnitz (Einstein's favorite tragi-comedic hero) we thought that Chinese was the answer to the curse of Babel. But Einstein's work is a tragedy. We never get where we want; we live isolated in time; the greater our velocity the more we risk obliteration by candle light. 3 So is this beautiful? I would say yes, but it is beautiful only in its completeness. The gigantomachia is an ancient tale, and the story of mr. k and Mrs. K is even older. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing we can learn here from the "content." There is something remarkable, however, in the straightforwardness of Einstein's text. Seamlessly and effortlessly, Einstein winds his way (our way) through simple functions, transformations, synchronizations, electromagnetic formulae, and mathematical approximations to tell his tale. There is a great deal of finality implicit in the work; note for instance the devastation in Einstein 's description of the Doppler Effect. Yet the presentation is direct, concise, and somewhat cool. Einstein, who lived to see the bomb and the Copenhagen interpretation, paints his picture like a Carravagio. There is seriousness and doom, darkness and luminescence, but there is also a coolness and distance that allows the reader/observer to encounter the text/paining as a work of sheer, simple and devastating harmony. 2 3 Fanciful? Yes, naturally. But what tells us that Einstein's presentation is not a text in the sense that for example, the Bible is? Where are the criteria that g~ide our "textual" reading? They must be outside of the text in a context of social exigencies, instinctual exigencies, habit, etc. (And this may-just may- be precisely how any text is informative in an interesting way.) And this is the point. I use this gruesome and tactless figure of the gigantomachia to get my point across in the first brutal moment. 30 31 �The Tin Star at High Noon D Eva T. H. Brann disillusioned mentor, in the movie. Gary Cooper was fifty in 1952, when the movie was filmed, and no effort was made to make him look youthful, but he is not old, or impaired, or disillusioned, though some of the story's sad feel carries over. "Will" suits him well enough, for he is indomitable, and "Kane" fits perfectly with the new element in the screen story, because he is an outcast in his battle with the outlaws. He bears a kind of reverse mark of Cain, a mark of courage among the craven. The story itself is slight, but it evidently made a good starting point for transformation. For another example, in "The Tin Star" Will is a sor-: rowing widower, while in the movie Will is newly married. The movie opens with the ominous rendezvous of Frank Miller's three accomplices on a hill. From it they are converging on the town to meet their vengeful leader, who has just been pardoned from his conviction of murder and released from the pen. There is a second beginning, Will's brief civil marriage ceremony to Amy, his young Quaker bride. He is wearing his marshal's star, and we see that he is acutely aware of his office: As marshal he is bashful about kissing her in public, though once he takes the star off and pins it to his gun belt, he is a playful enough lover. He has promised to leave town with her and tum storekeeper. He says he will try his best, but it is evidently something of a sacrifice for him to settle into a star-less life. The point is made that the star is not just a piece of cheap beaten tin to him, and that he is marshal before husband. And now arrives a telegram telling that Frank Miller, the badman he had sent up to the pen, is returning II. Now this magazine story actually bears scarcely any on the twelve o'clock from St. Louis. And the clock starts relation to High Noon. Its reluctant hero's name is Sher- ticking. Three devices mark this movie. The first might be iff Will Doane,which was changed to Marshal Will Kane called "the sound of time passing" : the horses' clipbecause, I have read, the script writers were afraid that it would come out "Well Done" on the sound track. The clopping, the rails ' clicking, the clocks' ticking and the shift from sheriff to marshal shows the care of the script pendulum's swing. The action begins at about 10:40 AM , writers: sheriff is a county office, but a marshal works comes to its culmination as the sun does, at high noon, for a city; Marshal Kane' s relation is to his town, intensely when Miller gets in, and ends with a brief shoot-out. This so. In the story Will is old and arthritic and speaks all the is a real-time film. The movie takes-though I haven ' t bitter words attributed to the old marshal, Will Kane' s clocked it-about the same time as the action, an hour and a half. If anything, near the climax its clocks move somewhat slower than real time. It obeys. only far more strin1 I want to thank Mr. Adam Schulman for giving this gently, one of the requirements of dramatic unity of anessay a critical reading which saved it from some errors cient tragedy. that the action should take place within a and enriched it with new insights. High Noon is, to my mind, a movie of near-perfect artistry. 1 It gets to me more and in more different ways each time I see it, and I've seen it more often than I've read the Iliad. One of my younger fellow-tutors confided to me that often as he had seen it, it never made him weep until he became a married man. I have watched it dry-eyed and wet-eyed, but always with that sense of being all there-all coolly attentive to its artful devices, all warmly receptive to its gathering pathos . That dual consciousness, in which the powers of noticing and of empathizing are activated together, seems to me to be the trustworthy signal of being in the presence of a work of art. The following collection of observations and interpretations are only partly my own. The Chicago Alumni invited me to a seminar on the film in the summer of 1994, and in November the Student Committee on Instruction chose it for the All-College Seminar. I have double cause for thanks to these two groups, first for indulging my enthusiasm, and then for the discoveries I made while listening, talking, and thinking along. High Noon came to be from a series of happy circumstances . The first of these was the fact that John Wayne turned down the lead. I am no Wayne-basher, but Gary Cooper, as I will try to show, was just right for the story as adapted in the script, and he gives the performance of his life. The script itself is felicitous in its deviation from the story which the credits cite, "The Tin Star" by John M. Cunningham, published in Colliers December 6, 1947, two years after the end of World War plain-spoken . Cooper's facial acting is altogether miniThere are, incidentally, four more allusions to antiq- mal, a Clroop of the mouth, a switch of the cheek, a glint uity. Judge Mettrick-excellently named, for he is a cyni- in the eye. His body language is similarly restrained; he cal, if not bad, judge who takes the measure of his town's is all held-in grace, intensely controlled length, or better, unreliability-cites Herodotus on the corruption of ancient height. Will, as played by Cooper, is even in happy times Athens in allowing the return of the Pisistratid tyranny as a quiet, modest man, and under the pressure of time he an excuse for his own flight. And Will, to make his es- becomes more and more laconic. As he tells Amy, he has cape from the fiery stables in which the outlaws have no time to explain. He has pinned his star and buckled trapped him, clings to the side of this mount as the herd · his gun back on, and she has given up pleading her Quaker rushes out, just as Odysseus once escaped from the Cy- faith and is waiting to leave him and the town on the train clops' cave by grasping the wool on the underside of a on which Miller is returning. The ballad sings to us what big ram. The beautiful woman who has known the men he can't say to her; it pleads where he is dumb; it is the on both sides is called "Helen," as in Helen of Troy. And feeling descant to his brusque words. It shows that his finally "High Noon" itself is an antique moment, as I will decision to stay and fight is not heroics but heroism, because it is made in the face of a great loss . show in a minute. Some of us who watched the movie in the Francis To return to the unity of the film: It wonderfully concentrates the mind and allows us, the viewers, to close Scott Key Auditorium asked ourselves why there was this the distance between a fiction and an event. As we hear misplaced laughter at crucial moments. I think I have an its time passing, we are living indistinguishably in the idea what induces it, aside from the fact that in a student audience not everyone will have developed the self-posfilm's time frame and in our own. The second device of the movie is what might be session necessary to assimilate quietly the representation called "the critical moment." High noon, when the sun of strongly charged moments. Students feel that they owe culminates, is in ancient myth the time of the god Pan, something to sophistication. This film is not morally sothe panic time, the moment of revelatory terror. It is the phisticated but simple-though not simplistic. That is to time when the shadows are the shortest and blackest, when say, it presents a situation which is humanly wrenching the sun beats straight down, hot and brilliant, and there is but not morally ambiguous. The laughter, though we no place to hide. It might even be midsummer day. In could have done without it, is a tribute to a moral world this sunlit scene with its black edges, Will walks up and in which gravity reigns rather than confusion, and where down the deserted streets of Hadleyville. Since it is, more- complexity does not entail ambiguity-at least not for over, Sunday, the Lord 's Day, that part of the population the hero. That brings me to the figures who are-for the present which is not in the saloon is in church. Will, with inclusive trust, seeks help in both places, and finds more purpose very rightly-called the "characters" of the movie. straight talk among the drinking rabble than among the First, Will's bride of ten minutes, Amy: She is, as was mentioned, a Quaker (which is the reason they are not hymn-singing burghers. The camera work is of the essence to this quintes- married in church), but what kind? Clearly an adventisential black-and-white film. The clean, stark rectangu- tious Quaker, converted more by circumstance than by larity of the deserted town under the midday sun and principle. For she has seen both her fathe a d he b othe Cooper's elongated striding figure work together to tell shot and killed, and so she disavows all shooting and killthe moral tale. Here colorization, which works fine for, ing. Yet she ends up killing, and very mercilessly too. say, one of those delightful Danny Kaye musicals, is sim- She shoots the second to last gunman in the back as he is reloading. ply an aesthetic crime against the camera. When, already settled in the train, she hears the first The third device is the ballad written for the movie by Tiomkin and sung by Tex Ritter. It has a clip-clopping shot from town, she jumps out, clearly expecting to find under-theme, a lyrical melody which culminates in a her husband dead. She recognizes the body as that of heart-rending modulation, and words that might be maud- one of the outlaws, and she walks by his gun without lin in ordinary speech but are archetypal in a ballad: "Do picking it up. Once in the refuge of the sheriff's office, not forsake me, oh my darling ." The ballad makes we see her head next to the gun belt that Harvey, Will's Cooper's interpretation of Will possible by complement- childish and resentful deputy, has hung up. It is this gun ing it. Will is shy, sad, and inarticulate, except in the she uses to kill the third outlaw, and so she becomes Will's ordinary business of life, when he is simple, candid, and surrogate deputy. In concert they dispose of Miller himday. 33 �self. Has she given up her principles? Well, they weren't principles to begin with, but rather a strong revulsion to all the senseless killing. And that revulsion she does not disavow in her action. She is not engaging in an honest shoot-out involving manly principles of honor. She is rather saving her man in the most effective way possible. She is doing efficiently what her Quaker principles forbid but her heart requires-her heart shaken both by the reprieve from Will's death and by a new influence. It is the influence of Helen Ramirez, "the Mexican woman." The wise madam, the south-of-the-border oddwoman-out, is a stock character of westerns. The character of Mrs. Ramirez is an upgraded version. She owns the saloon, not the house, and her business partners have genuine respect for her, though the ladies shun her. She has been intimate in turn with Frank, Will and with Harvey, the broad-shouldered boy-man against whose low, rationalizing vacillation Will's resolution stands out. She loves Will with resignation. She is, in fact, his fit complement. She will not, as he cannot, explain her moral judgment. She is as socially solitary as he is morally alone. She has dignity as he has stature. They share a high pathos, but qualified by the sex and status of each. It is Mrs. Ramirez who intimates to Amy, first scornfully and then kindly, what's what. She would not forsake her man. Why is it nonetheless this girlish blonde (Grace Kelly was twenty-two to Cooper's fifty) who wins Will's heart and not the darkly beautiful woman? The reason is not only the stock social prejudice. The choice also makes sense, for if the Mexican is Will's complement, the Quaker is his counterpart. Will is like Amy in a certain innocence, and Amy is in tum his equal in strength of will. Mrs. Ramirez, the "nomad," is alien to them in her illusionless realism. She bends where they risk breaking. This is a marriage of like to like. Will and Amy learn more about each other in the first hour and a half of their marriage than they seem to have discovered during their courtship. She learns of his history with Miller and with Mrs. Ramirez; he learns that just as he puts the star before his love, so she too puts her conviction before her marriage. But he is also to find out that in the end she will stand by him and that she will answer the ballad's plea. We may imagine that they will not be mere storekeepers to the town in which they settle, but that they will be among its first citizens. In Louis L' Amour's well-researched westerns, such men as Will eventually find their voice and go to the Senate. What, above all and finally, of Will's own character? In American golden oldies the typical moral setting is a supine crowd finally carried along by a lone hero, often through the speech of his life. Think of situations as diverse as Jimmy Stewait's in the good-natured Christmas favorite It's a Wonderful Life and Marlon Brando's in the brutal world of On the Waterfront. For Gary Cooper the case is altered: He makes no speech, and the town doesn't come through. He is morally alone for two cooperating reasons. One is his mild, brief and candid mode of speech. He is the very type of the unrhetorical man, the strong silent man, only in a finely honed version. We get the impression that the complex elements of the moral situations are all present to him, that he understands how his high practicality might look like outdated quixotism to this tame frontier town. But he is not good at articulating his thoughts and uttering his feelings. In this movie the antiheroes make the prevailing. speeches. He knows that he cannot, being the man he is, run away, because he has tried. The buggy is already running in the prairie, and he sitting silent and disturbed beside his bride, when we see it coming to a halt and turning back. Later on, in what he calls a moment of tiredness, he goes for his horse to ride off without Amy, but it takes no more than Harvey's attempt to force him on his way to bring back his resolution. He also knows that running away is not only morally impossible, it is also realistically impracticable because the outlaws will eventually find him and his wife. He gauges his outlaw adversaries more accurately than do the the ostrich-like townsfolk who want to avoid provocation by having him leave, on the chance that the pen might have reformed Miller. He has a respectful sense of Miller's unregenerable wildness. Will's judgment that the town will revert to the time when no respectable woman was safe on the street in broad daytime is amply borne out by the youngest of the Miller men, Frank's brother. When they stalk through the town four abreast, he breaks away to make a commencement of crime by smashing a store window-incidentally at once warning Will of their whereabouts and giving him cause for arrest-to steal a ladies' bonnet, which he then ties to his belt as a sort of forcible favor, a sign of rape to come. But above all, Will knows that he cannot on any pretext doff the responsibilities of a sheriff by unpinning the star. He is marshal through and through. He thinks of his charges even in the most distracting circumstances, warning Mrs. Ramirez at the risk of being misunderstood by Amy, releasing the drunk from his cell before the fight starts, and untethering the horses when the stables are on fire. 34 Will is right and he is responsible, but he has no moral suasion, not merely because he is laconic but principally because he has no time. Will's life has readied him for a moral crisis, though even he needs a few miles' run into the prairie to find his will, but the townspeople, decent enough, are c~ught in moral unreadiness on this Sunday. The preacher is courteous but indecisive, the first men of the town hide, vacillate, misjudge. The mayor makes a spe.ech, the i~nobly sensible turning point for the congregat10n, wammg of the consequences a shoot-out will have for the town's commercial prospects; Will listens in drained silence. The women have a better sense of danger and of decency, but will-lessness prevails-not the d~ep lack of caring that the crippled marshal imputes to his .fellow-citizens out of his own impotence, but a lack of timely resoluteness. · . Three times in the movie we are briefly shown the town's name, Hadleyville. It is an allusion to Mark Twain's story "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg," a tale of the effects of evil on a small town of weak charac~er.. The name betokens that what is lacking in Hadleyville is mdeed moral readiness. As the old marshal says: People need time to work themselves up to law and order, that is, into moral decision. That is why the inexorable clock ~ominates the movie as a sound and a sight. The endmg reverts to t_ e tin star theme though it h isn't in "The Tin Star" story. (There is, inci,dentally, a pretty good movie of this title with Henry Fonda, which has a quite similar plot but with the tragic edge taken off._) Will and his wife-no longer a bride-have together delivered the town from evil. The townspeople crawl out of the woodwork (the shot is from above) and come running. The best man in Hadleyville, a boy who runs messages for Will, has brought up the packed buggy for a second departure. Before mounting, Will again takes off the star. It is the movie's most subtly expressive moment. Cooper does not fling it away into the street he drops it. It lands near the pointed toe of his boot which we see slowly turning, not to grind the tin star into the dust, but away from it. It is a consummate gesture of speechless contempt-not for the star but for this town. It must be that somewhere, sometime, on the frontier wn there was some such to_ and some such marshal. To be sure, the town would not have been so starkly clean-lined, the townsfolk so craven, the outlaw so fear-inspiring or the marshal so alone. No matter-the movie has concentrated the event and raised it to a mythic dimension, to a monumental and artful American frontier myth. Recall, ho~ever, ~hat the movie was made just seven years after a warm which a whole nation submitted to villainy 35 ~rom ~ack of civic courage and had to be delivered from its evil.largely by American arms. It does the director ~red Zinnemann, honor that he managed to incorporat~ m an archetypal American setting lessons recently learned abroad. �~ Separation and Combin~tion: The Unity of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treqtise Car rie Lynn Sager Everyone has been strangely hasty in affirming that the prophets know everything within the scope of human intellect, and, although certain passages of Scripture plainly affirm that the prophets were in certain respects ignorant, such persons would rather say that they do not understand the passages than admit that there was anything which the prophets did not know; or else they try to wrest the Scriptural words away from their evident meaning. (33) The dismemberment of orthodox religion is so severe at the beginning of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise that it is difficult not to condemn Spinoza of blasphemy. In his attack on Scripture Spinoza shows little reverence for the sacredness of Scripture. Rather, he ferociously preys upon Scripture, continually discarding crucial doctrines which had been cherished for hundreds-if not thousands-of years. His examination is exhaustive; it seems that no chapter or verse escapes his scrutiny. After his rigorous purging is complete, it seems that almost nothing in Scripture remains sacred to Spinoza. Yet, as shocking as this may seem, at the very height of his attack on the tenets of religion , Spinoza claims to have discovered the true core of religious belief-a universal faith-that he firmly establishes at the center of his political thought in the remaining chapters of the treatise. In order to better appreciate this restoration, a close examination of the extent and severity of Spinoza' s attack is necessary. Spinoza wasted little time in contesting the "tissue of ridiculous mysteries" that men had made out of religion. In going straight to the source of religion- Scripture-he declared that he This is Spinoza's testimony of man 's predisposition .to superstition. According to Spinoza, nowhere does Scripture indicate that the prophets were endowed with perfect minds. Men, therefore , should not make that assumption but rather accept what Scripture does indicate: namely that the prophets had "unusually vivid imaginations." (27) From this premise Spinoza proceeds as follows: Since the imagination is not grounded in the sure fabric of objective reality, its products-words and figures which may be either real or imaginary-lack the certainty of truth. Therefore, as Spinoza concludes, "prophetic knowledge is inferior to natural knowledge, which needs no sign, and in itself implies certitude." (28) Prophecy, as a product of the imagination, needs an exdetermined to examine the Bible afresh in a careternal reason to make it real and to give it certitude. For ful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no the prophets this external certainty came from morality. assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it (29) Hence, the only certainty that men should look for no doctrines, which . .. are not clearly therein set in the prophets' writings is moral certitude. In short, down. (8) 1 "knowledge of natural and spiritual phenomena" cannot be found in the prophetic books . (27) This, however, is In other words, Spinoza's new method of interpreting Scripture is to let Scripture explain itself. If men try to only Spinoza's first salvo. Miracles are the next part of the religious world to do otherwise, they will continue to bury Scripture, and bear the brunt of Spinoza's "method." For while men religion along with it, with misconceptions .that will lead may have traditionally looked upon miracles as the ultithem only deeper into superstition. Rather than cloud mate expressions of God's power and have thusly stood Scripture with mystery and unnecessary meaning, men in awe of them, Spinoza shares no such sentiment. Acshould endeavor to explain Scripture with Scripture only. cording to Spinoza, "the masses think that the power and This is Spinoza's "method," his only means to his puriprovidence of God are most clearly displayed by events fication of Scripture. that are extraordinary and contrary to the conception they The first territory to which Spinoza lays waste is the have formed of nature . . ." (81) By styling miracles prophecy sung by the Hebrew prophets. He states: after this fashion, men are only furthering their misconception of God. As Spinoza points out, what men fail to 1 All citations refer to A Theologico-Political Treatise, recognize is that the power of God and the power of Dover edition , 1951, tr. R.H. M . Elwes. 36 Nature are co-extensive, and moreover, the power of God is equal to His will. Therefore, anything which contradicts Nature necessarily contradicts God's will. (83) For Spinoza it is the mark of sheer absurdity that men claim that miracles are the most awesome demonstrations of God's power, for as men view them, miracles are a direct contradiction to his power. Therefore, Spinoza declares: e~ations, each of which surpasses human comprehens10n- they are altogether beyond reason. (100) And as ~eason cannot explain nor reason from what is beyond its grasp, man cannot call upon reason to help deduce the m~aning of Scripture. On the contrary, the meaning of Scnpture can only be deduced from Scripture alone. Spinoza's conclusion has an important consequence, namely, "We are at work not on the truth of the passages, but solely on their meaning." (101) Furthermore, "We ... it comes to this, that a miracle, whether it has must take especial care, when we are in search of the natural causes or not, is a result which cannot be meaning of a text, not to be lead away by our reason in explained by its cause, that is a phenomenon so far as it is founded on principles of natural knowlwhich surpasses human understanding; but from edge ... " (101) To put it another way, men should not such a phenomenon, and certainly from a result look ~or truth in Scripture, but only meaning. According surpassing our understanding, we can gain no to Spmoza, when men try to search for truth in Scripknowledge ... (85) ture, they are only succeeding in turning philosophy into superstition. As they vainly try to use their reason in a In short, miracles defy human understanding and stand territory not fit for reason, all men's philosophical specuoutside of the deductive order of the universe so that they lations cannot help but become mere superstitions. This can teach man nothing about God. For, as miracles can- wrongful application of philosophy results in both the not be grasped by the understanding-not "clearly and contortion of philosophy into superstition and, more imdistinctly understood"-they cannot be the basis for fur- portantly, the usurpation of religion by this superstition. ther deductive reasonings. (85) Therefore, men shouldn' t While Spinoza's claims about prophecy and miracJes make miracles out to be more than what they are. Spinoza could be accepted by some without too much grief, his views miracles simply as powerful tools used in the nar- treatment of Scripture is undoubtedly offensive to anyratives of Scripture that appeal to men's imaginations. one who has been reared by orthodoxy and holds the Bible . (91) In this view, miracles arouse men in such a way as as The Book. For example, Spinoza is nothing short of to promote both admiration for, and devotion to, God. insulting when he makes his claim that the Bible is a Since miracles do not afford men sure knowledge of collection of histories written by authorities but compiled God, they do not constitute a dogma of religion. There- promiscuously by historians. (135) Rather than accept fore, under no circumstance should men solidify their that there are some inconsistencies in the Bible which faith in God solely on account of the doctrine of miracles. like the causes of miracles, are beyond human under~ As Spinoza points out, Scripture does not teach the doc- standing, Spinoza is quick to conclude that the Bible is a trine of miracles "as a truth necessary to salvation ... there- corrupted text. fore everyone is free to think on the subject as he On this point Spinoza surrenders to no one, not even likes ... " (97) Thus, Spinoza has pruned another branch the illustrious Jewish commentator Maimonides. To from the tree of orthodox religion by debunking the be- Spinoza no biblical scholar has presented a satisfactory lief that miracles can bestow on man a knowledge of God. method of interpreting Scripture which can do away with While his onslaught against prophecy and miracles all the inconsistencies contained therein . In fact, Spinoza is quite clear, Spinoza's aggression towards orthodox claims that Maimonides' method of Scriptural interprereligion is best elucidated with an examination of his re- tation is not only unsatisfactory but may be dismissed as view of the canon of Hebrew and Christian Scripture. "harmful, useless and absurd." (118) At the heart of Spinoza's analysis is the following Again, he begins his report by criticizing previous bibli- · cal interpretation. He states that "scriptural interpreta- c1aim: The Pentateuch was not written by Moses- which tion proceeds by the examination of Scripture, and infer- had been the traditional Jewish claim-but rather it was ring the intention of its authors as a legitimate concJu- compiled from many sources by the prophet Ezra. ( 130) sion from its fundamental principles." (99) In other For anyone, Jewish or Christian, the enormity of this words, although they have tried, men cannot possibly c1aim is positively shocking. God's authorship of His strive to deduce Scripture from reason. For Scripture is books of revelation is precariously challenged. Could filled with both narratives containing miracles and rev- any other claim be more damaging? 37 �Hence, Spinoza completes what he promised in his preface, namely "to point out the misconceptions which, like scars of our former bondage, still disfigure our notion of religion," (6) by exposing Scripture for what it really is, rather than the collection of philosophic speculations and theological prejudices that men have mistakenly introduced into it. Hence, he has returned religion to its proper domain by making light of how under the rule of philosophy, Scripture was corrupted by superstition. Yet, it is here , when Spinoza's interpretative "method" is at its most incisive, that a remarkable change of face occurs. Amidst the carnage, Spinoza claims that true religious faith is not only unscathed, but finally free of its "trappings of superstition" so that its proper splendor can shine forth brilliantly. In fact, the faith that arises from religion, now emancipated from superstition, possesses-in Spinoza's eyes-a stature that allows it to become the centerpiece of his political theory. Spinoza signals this rebirth at the outset of the fourteenth chapter of his treatise: "Let us recapitulate the chief aim and object of Scripture; this will indicate a standard by which we may define faith." (183) That standard, the solid and true foundation upon which to rebuild faith, is stated earlier by Spinoza as: "For from the Bible itself we learn, without the smallest difficultly or ambiguity, that its cardinal precept is : To love God above all things, and one's neighbour as one's self." (1 72) With this as its main precept, Spinoza declares that the aim and object of Scripture is thus to teach men obedience. (183) For Spinoza, obedience to God is the cornerstone of religion. (172) In fact, to him it is the only sure ground that religion has to stand on, and without which it would crumble completely and be buried again under " the trammels of superstition." The structure of the treatise is now set into relief: Spinoza's purpose in the first thirteen chapters is to rid religion of all dogmas which men have mistakenly deduced from their reason-rather than from Scripture alone-which do not support the Bible's main precept. With this work complete, Spinoza, in the fourteenth chapter, builds his argument for a new foundation of religion based upon the aforementioned precept. His construction of this religion based on deductive reasonings that begin with Scripture alone, and not superstition, is so thorough that not only is he able to generate new dogmas from it, but this religion in turn becomes the heart of his defense for political liberty and the freedom of thought. Faith, according to Spinoza, "consists in a knowl- edge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Hirn implies." (184) As this definition follows his earlier claim that the fundamental precept of both Hebrew and Christian scripture is love of one's neighbour, and that the Bible' s purpose is to teach men to obey the will of God, it follows-for Spinoza-that obedience to God is the same as loving one's neighbour. (183) In addition to considering this precept as the proper foundation for religion, Spinoza also con siders it as the standard by which faith is defined. Hence, as obedience is the standard for the definition of faith, obedience precedes faith . To put it another way, Spinoza claims that to obey God is to know him. Since without knowledge of something it is impossible to obey it, as Spinoza points out, men could not even begin to obey something they did not know. This is, in fact, one of the subtlest points in Spinoza's treatise. To grasp it fully keep in mind that for Spinoza, knowledge is not of who or what God is, but rather an understanding of the meaning of God inasmuch as is necessary for obedience. (176) And since man can only know God by obeying Him, obedience both implies and is the origin of knowledge of God, which is faith . Following this declaration of the true definition of faith, Spinoza reveals several consequences which arise from this definition . The first is that "faith is not salutary in itself, but only in respect to the obedience it implies." (184) Next, he states that any man who is obedient is necessarily faithful. (184) Or, in other words, if a man is faithful , he must needs be obedient, while at the same time a man is not faithful if he is not obedient. His obedience, moreover, is only demonstrated through his deeds, namely loving his neighbour through acts of justice and charity to him. Hence, Spinoza concludes that, as quoted in Scri pture, "Faith without works is dead," and that a man is only judged "faithful or unfaithful by his works." (18 5) This accords precisely with Spinoza's words in the preface: "If deeds could only be made the grounds of criminal charges , and words were always allowed to pass free . .. " (6) Soon, when we examine Spinoza's account of the beginning of the state, the importance of this conclusion will bear even greater relevance. For now, however, consider again the design of the treatise. Spinoza has spent the first thirteen chapters eroding the foundation of religion until he found the one, true foundation upon which he could construct a new religion. The Archimedean point for his ecumenical labors is the precept to love one's neighbour. And as the love 38 of. one's neighb.our is. to obey God, so obedience implies just and mercifu!, ~he Exemplar of the true life, faith. Yet obedience 1s only displayed through works so 1 th~t· w?osoever is ignorant of or disbelieves in a man can only be judged faithful or unfaithful by his Hts existence cannot obey Him or know Him as works , and faith becomes a measure of one's deeds r a Judge. (186-187) s.hort, faith leaves men free to say or think what ~he~ hke, as long as their deeds conform to obediance of God. Remember that Spinoza does not believe his dogmas to So after b~ginning with a universal precept, Spinoza reveal the truth. of God's nature·, the1'r onl y purpose is to . now has a umversal rule: Faith is a measure of deeds . mculcate obedience. and men are judged ·only according to this rule. As this Of faith then Spinoza believes he has shown that it ru1~ foll~ws clearly from what has already been proved, Spmoz~ 1s able to deduce dogmas for his newly articu?o.es not so much require truth as piety, and that la~ed fa1t?. Yet before listing them, Spinoza states someit ts only quickening and pious through obedithm? wh1~h sheds a bright light on the nature and scope e~ce, consequently no one is faithful save by obeof his project: dience alone. The best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who displays the best reasons Lastly it follows that faith does not demand that but by him who displays the best fruits of justic~ dogmas sh.ould be true as that they should be piand ~ha~ity. How salutary and necessary this ous-that ~s •. such as will stir up the heart to obey doctrme is for a state, in order that men may dwell ... Thus it is not true doctrines which are extogether in peace and concord. . . 0 8 8 ) pressly required by the Bible, so much as doctrines necessary for obedience. . . ( 185) A~ we will see momentarily Spinoza is prepared to weave this strand of "universal religion" into the fab . f l' · . nc o po This conclusion has significant implications First ~heal hfe. Yet before he proceeds he undertakes one ac.cording to Spinoza, men need only obey God ~o hav~ fihnal task: to separate once and for all faith and philosofaith, .or ~ather to know God. This claim is the key to p y. esta~hshmg an equality among all men. Regardless of Ac.tually this divorce has already been accomplished. the time, age, situation, language, or any other condition Fo: ~pmoza makes it quite clear that when the orthodox tha~ ma~ separate them, all men are equally able to love rehg1?us .autho:ities began looking for truth rather than their neighbour, thereby obeying God and thus coming meanmg m ~cnpture they confused the aims of philosoto know God. Men don't need to be specially chosen as ph~ and ~a1th . . The end of philosophy, according to ?od'~ people, nor do they have need of a supernatural Spm~za, ts truth, whereas the end of faith is obedience i~telh~ence to have a knowledge of God. Despite the ~tspanty among all the people who read the Bible, Chris- and p~~ty .. Hence, as their ends "are as wide apart as the poles, fatt~ and p~ilosophy ought never to be conjoined. tians, Jews, Turks, etc., can all alike obey God. Spinoza (189~ Agam we fmd another explanation of Spinoza's has fo~n.d one aspect that is universal to all men, of evmerciless attack on orthodox relig1'on·. The erosion o f · ~ry rehg10n: obedience to God through justice and charth~ foundation of religion and the separation of faith from ity. N~ one, a~c ~rding to his universal rule, can deny a ph1lo~ophy a~e, in fact, one and the same. In other words, man fat~h who IS_J~st and charitable. In short, Spinoza's as S~moza discarded all the old prejudices and misconr~storat10n of rehg10n and faith has resulted in the estabcept10ns, that is, the philosophic speculations which men lishment of a " universal religion," one that is based on had wr?ngly layered on top of Scripture, he was in fact deeds alone. separatm~ religion from philosophy. He dismembered From the "universal religion" stems a universal faith ~11 the. a~1en branches of philosophy that were disfigura~d th~s Spinoza deduces the dogmas that accompan; · mg rehg10n. Fo.r Spinoza, religion and philosophy stand this faith, na~ely only those that are absolutely necescomple.tely dtf~erent foundations. Thus, only by clearsar~ for o~ed1ence and without which obedience would mg a.11 .ph1losoph1cal speculations from the foundation be 1mpos~1ble. .(186) The first of these dogmas is the of :ehg1on could Spinoza permanently separate faith from one doctrme which lays the foundation for those that folph~losophy. As religion was shown to be separate from low: ph1loso~hy, so too is faith in that it stems solely from the foundat1?n of religion-whatever pertains to religion, That God or a Supreme Being exists, sovereignly necessarily pertains to faith also. Furthermore, this sepa- ?n 39 �ration was essential in order for Spinoza to salvage the one, true faith that had been lost-religion and faith could only be restored to their proper foundation by casting off all the vain adornments and embellishments of philosophy. Only by returning them, moreover, to their proper form could Spinoza establish his "universal religion," one that is based on deeds alone. If only this had been the extent of Spinoza's restoration of faith, then his tum from a destroyer of faith to its savior would have been remarkable enough. Yet this is only the beginning. For now that Spinoza has rescued faith from what he considers to be crippling superstition, he intends to include this strand of theology into the workings of political life. In order to better appreciate Spinoza's final elevation of faith, that is, its incorporation into the state, we must take one last step backwards for just a moment. Having seen the theological part of the treatise, we must consider the political side of Spinoza's treatise before the two can be united as one. For Spinoza, government is fundamental for the betterment of mankind. He states: to do so, for I believe it to be of all forms of government the most natural, and the most consonant with. individual liberty. In it no one transfers his natural rights so absolutely that he has no further voice in affairs, he only hands it over to the majority of a society, whereof he is a unit. Thus all men remain, as they were in the state of nature, equals. (207) For Spinoza, democracy is the best form of government because it is most suited for granting the greatest amount of freedom in a state. While these comments are altogether too brief in sketching the complexity and subtlety of Spinoza's political thought, they should suffice in showing where Spinoza's political allegiances lie. Having established a democracy, a state in which liberty can be granted unfettered, Spinoza wants to extend that freedom as far as possible within the state: namely, all the way to the inclusion of freedom of thought and speech. In fact, freedom of thought and speech is not only a "virtue in itself' for Spinoza, but it is instrumental for the well-being and preservation of the state. For, in his preface to the treatise, Spinoza stated: ... the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain , by fear, but contrariwise to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. (258-259) That is, government is necessary for all men because it makes men free. Or, as Spinoza points out, "the true aim of government is liberty." (259) Liberty is of utmost importance for Spinoza. For when men are held in check by fear, they cannot live properly as rational beings; it is only when they are freed from fear, that they can "develop their minds and bodies" and progress in the noble pursuits of science and the liberal arts . (261) For Spinoza it seems that without liberty and the security of public peace, men might as well be beasts rather than rational beings. Or to put it another way, the liberty afforded by government allows men to enjoy God's greatest gift to them-their reason . (59) Democracy is for Spinoza the ideal (or as close to ideal as possible) political association. In fact, the one political issue that Spinoza seems least afraid to declare is his love for democracy: I think I have now shown sufficiently clearly the basis of a democracy: I have especially desired I have believed that I should be undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task, in demonstrating that not only can such freedom be granted without prejudice to the public peace, but also that without such freedom, piety cannot flourish nor the public peace be secure. (6) No one can stifle men's thoughts, not even the sovereign has enough power to lay down and uphold laws designed to make men think in a certain way. If, however, they attempt to charge men for "crimes of opinions," they will only succeed in "surrounding victims with an appearance of martyrdom, and raise feelings of pity and revenge rather than of terror." (265) While such law s are calculated solely to bridle the thoughts and speech of men, they in fact serve no other purpose but to inspire men to seditions and crime, both of which lead only to the sinking of the ship of state. Therefore, since men cannot be prevented from making their own judgments, the only remedy for the situation is to grant men this freedom. While it does have some disadvantages, the advantages are far greater-in Spinoza's eyes-and more instrumental in the securing of the public peace. The only way, however, for Spinoza to grant men the freedom of thought and speech within the state is to bind men by their actions alone, while leaving their rea- son and judgment "free and unshackled." For example he says that ' the safest way for a state is to lay down the rule that religion is comprised solely in the exercise of c?arity and justice, and that the rights of rulers m sacred, no less than in secular matters should merely have to do with actions, but tha~ every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks. (265) ~eeping in mind Spinoza's declaration that the ultimate aim of government is liberty, and democracy is the form of government b~st suited to this end, we can begin to underst~nd the umty of Spinoza's treatise. It is now clear why .spmoza considers this a theological and a political treatise. H~r~, fi,~ally, is where the aforementioned "universal r~hg10n of deeds. takes on its greatest importance and is elevated by Spmoza to its acme. For Spinoza's only m~ans for gra~ting men freedom of thought and speech IS to make piety and religion-in addition to all ob~ervances of the. sovereign law-consist entirely in action, there~y leavmg men's judgment and their reason free. Accordmg to Spinoza, therefore: If we hold to the p~inciple that a man, s loyalty to the state should be Judged, like his loyalty to God from his actions only-namely from his charit; towards his neighbours, we cannot doubt that the best ~ovemment will allow freedom of philoso~h1cal speculation no less than of religious behef. (261) Thu.s faith sets the standard for the state-only by followmg the standard that Spinoza had set for his " . 1 f · h" umver sa a1t can i:nen be granted freedom of thought and sp~ech: That is, through faith men are judged by the umversal rule-a man is judged solely on account of his deeds. Hence, faith is the only means by which the freedom necessary for the security of the public peace can be gr~nt~d. Or, for Spinoza, to extend the limit of freedom m his democracy to include the freedom of thought ~nd . speech, h~ ~an only do so by the integration of his umve~sal rehg10n" that is, a religion based on deeds alone, mto the political life of the state. ~pino~a does not seem to give a full explanation of the mcept1on of his "universal religion" into the fab . of _the .state .. Despite this minor gap, one aspect of umon IS elucidated clearly by Spinoza: The sovereign is t~~~ 41 40 c.rucial to th~ seamless combination of theology and politics. F~r Spmo~a, the sovereign is the entity that wields power whether It be the body politic as a wh 1 t · b d f o e, a ceram : o yo. men, or one man. Upon entering the compact m formmg the state, all men agree to hand over their power-and. therefore their natural right-to th e sover· eign. ~y virtue ?f this right to rule over all men, the sover~1gn po~er is thus the origin of justice in the state. To .spmoza, m fact, justice exists only through the sov~re1gn . .(246-24 7) T?erefore, if the "universal religion" IS to be mc.orporated ~nto the state, it must be codified by the s?ver~1gn. As Spmoza succinctly declares: "religion acqmr~s It~ force as law solely from the decrees of the s~vere1gn'. (245) That is, without the force of law relig10n remams only a "universal precept of reason',' and has no s~ch p~wer as to compel men any differently than does theu desue or passion. In f~~t, as Spinoza points out, men only obey when they are und~r the fear of a greater evil, or the hope of a greater go?d, (203) that is, when they are bound by the law established by the sovereign power. He nee, re l' . . . 1g10n can~ot be p.ut mto practice or "received as the law of a particular km~dom" until it is codified." (248) Rememb~r that for Spm?za religion consists exclusively in obedience to God ~n t?e form of loving one's neighbour through .act~ of !usttce and charity. However, the existence of Justice IS wholly dependent upon the sovereign power. There~ore, by necessity, it follows for Spinoza t?at the sovereign's rule is crucial to effect the codification of religion into the legal order of the state. One final ~titch must be made in order for Spinoza to com~l~te his seemingly seamless union of theology ~nd politics: the deliverance of all religious authority mto the hands of t~e sovereign. Spinoza is quite insist~nt that the ~overe1gn must be given both civil and relig10us authonty; as the codification of religion is depende~t upon the decrees of the sovereign, it follows for Spm~z~ that the sovereigns are the "proper interpreters of rehg10n and piety." (249) For: ... it is c~rtain that duties towards one's country are the highest that man can fulfill; for, if government be taken away, no good thing can last all falls into dispute, anger and anarchy reign un~ checked amid universal fear. Consequently there can be no duty towards our neighbour which ~ould not become an offence if it involved injury to the whole state, nor can there be any offence _against our duty towards our neighbour, or anythmg but loyalty in what we do for the sake �of preserving the state. (249) Hence, if men are to obey God while simultaneously conducting themselves in a way that is most conducive to the preservation of the state (i.e. securing the public peace) , the only solution-for Spinoza-is that "the outward observances of religion, and all the external practices of piety should be brought into accordance with the public peace and well-being if. .. men would obey God rightly." (249) Said another way, Divine law must be made to conform to sovereign law. Spinoza seems to believe that the only way to accomplish this successfully is to give the sovereign authority over both civil and religious matters. All tension between church and state is resolved as they are united once and for all by having the sovereign of the state absorb the authority of the church. While this solution may appear altogether one-sided in favor of the state, in the remaining chapters of the treatise Spinoza argues vehemently that this union does not injure the church but is actually in the best interests of both the state and the church. On the side of religion, the result is the final establishment of God's kingdom on earth. For, as Spinoza points out, inasmuch as the kingdom of God consists entirely in rights applied to justice and charity or to true religion, it follows that (as we asserted) the kingdom of God can only exist among men through the means of the sovereign. (247) That is, God 's kingdom can only exist on earth through the sovereign. Without the sovereign there is no justice, and justice is the sole foundation of God's kingdom as Spinoza declared earlier. Without the codification of religion, therefore, the whole idea of God's kingdom and religion is nothing more than a "universal precept of reason" that cannot compel men to obedience more than can any other desire or passion. Meanwhile, on the side of the state, Spinoza has finally found a way to secure public peace. By eroding religion and then resurrecting it on its proper foundation-obedience to God-Spinoza gave birth to his "universal faith" on the basis of a universal rule: A man should be judged only according to his deeds . Then, as he wove this standard into his political fabric he was finally able to grant men freedom of thought and speech. In sum, the structure of the Theologico -Political Treatise is best captured by two words: separation and combination. Spinoza set for himself the task of demonstrat- ing that not only can the freedom of thought and speech be granted without jeopardizing the public peace, but moreover, such freedom is necessary in order for piety to flourish and the public peace be secured. (6) As the title of the treatise betrays, Spinoza believes he accomplished this by combining theology and politics. Yet before this combination could be wrought, he had to first make a separation, namely the separation of faith and philosophy. Only by clearing the philosophical speculations and false notions that disfigured religion, could Spinoza find the one, true cornerstone of religion-obedience to God through love to one's neighbour. Upon this "universal" foundation, Spinoza then resurrected faith, one altogether free of "credulity and prejudices" and entirely separate from philosophy. Once Spinoza had thus cleansed faith , then, and only then, could he implement it as the single thread for the weaving together of theology and politics seamlessly into the fabric of the state. Hence, the separation is the means to combination, the end of which is the securing of public peace th.rough allowing the freedom of thought and speech to men. Spinoza's enterprise, however, is ingeniously twotiered. Not only is his separation of faith and philosophy the means to his end, but it is, astonishingly enough, an end in and of itself. Although freeing faith from the hindrances of philosophy is Spinoza's expressed end, it seems, more impo rtantly, that philosophy is finally left to its own devices . For, once Spinoza had separated faith and philosophy, he declared : seemingly .e~er-presen.t, .floating on the periphery, never wholly qmttmg the v1s10n of either the author or the reade~. In fa~t, in his preface Spinoza overtly declared that his treatise was meant for "philosophical readers" o~ly, and no one else, especially not the multitude whose mmds ~~e-and perhaps forever will be-bent towards s~perst~tlon. Furthermore, philosophy appears at the crucial pomt of the treatise: As mentioned above at th ~oment when Spinoza has finished with his ex,amina~ hon of theol?gy an? is about to embark upon his political undertakmg, philosophy is given due recognition It s.eems that ~h~losophy stands between theology and p~li­ ~1~s, and th.is is further supported by the realization that It is the philosopher who grasped the delicate workings o~ theology a~d politics. Could it be, then, that what is viewed as Spmoza's end is really his means? While the free.dam of thought and speech is the means to the protect10n of the public peace, perhaps this preservation is not the end, but is itself the means to the truly desired end-the freedom to philosophize. Faith, therefore, allow s the greatest latitude in philosophic speculation, allowing us without blame to think what we like about anything, and only condemning as heretics and schismatics, those who teach opinions which tend to produce obstinacy, hatred, strife and anger. . . (189) In short, the freedom of thought and speech-now seen as the freedom to philosophize-is both the means to the securing of the public peace while at the same time a noble end in itself. How is one to grasp this multi-layered undertaking? Both the multitude and philosophers benefit from the implementation of Spinoza's enterprise. From his presentation, on the one hand, it seems that Spinoza has tailored his treatise to serve the best interests of the multitude by affording them the preservation of the public peace. Yet, while the freeing of philosophy is not the central point nor the expressed end of the treatise, it is 42 43 �The Offense of Socrates: A Look at the Philosopher in Athens D Mary Dietsch committed no crime and that his behavior in no way harms I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subj~c~s about which you hear me talking and exammmg b?th myself and others is really the very best. thmg that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living ..." Apology 38 1 Athens. Socrates then deviates from the critics' charges to explain the origin of his unpopularity. ':ith them. ~e explains that his behavior reflects a spmtual. revelat10~ to him at Delphi declaring that no one was wiser than him. So, compelled by a spiritual duty, Socrates de~eloped th.e habit of questioning individuals thought wise by their fellow Athenians to discover if the oracle spoke.the truth. The approach taken by Socrates in Plato's ~~ology Proceeding from one interview to another, he.discov~red to defend himself against the accusations of cnttcs and no one to be wiser than him. Having explamed this to the comrades of Meletus emerges as an exhib~tion of the the court, Socrates then seeks to broaden his defens~. He true "crime" for which the court condemns him. He at- decides to explore in court the breadth of a p~1t1cul_ar tempts to expose the true purpose of the cou~t's proceed- man's knowledge. However, in searching for this, h~ irings and seeks to inform the jury of the precise nature of ritates a sore at the heart of the public's grudge aga~n~t that truth. In the first two paragraphs of the Apology, the him, for it was the result of previous encounters that mi"truth" appears four times, culminating in Socrates' tially gained Socrates their disdain. . word h" declaration: "From me you shall hear the who1 trut . e Thus, by revealing his search to discover .the nature ( 17 c) He reveals the truth to the jurors th~oug? the way of human wisdom, it appears that Socrates aims to ag· hich he conducts his defense. So begms his address gravate the jurors . He systematica~ly ~~poses to them mw . .. bf as he faces the accusations of his pubhc cnttcs e ore the types of ignorance displayed by mdividuals who beconfronting the specific indictment brought by Meletus, lieve they know more than they actually .do. H~ att~cks all of the prominent members of Atheman society . the Anytus, and Lycon. . Pronouncing the most dangerous in~uence i~ the politicians who know absolutely nothing; the poe~s who court to be the public's inaccurate perceptt?n of _his ac- by their instincts appear to know something, but m fact tivities, he considers the charges levied agamst him .. He do not; and the artisans who possess the knowledge of a suggests that the affidavit might read "criminal med~lmg, particular skill, but also presume to possess know_l~dge in that he inquires into things below the earth and m the of other things. In one fell swoop, Socrates humiha~es sk and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, the Athenians by clustering them into various categones an~ teaches others to follow his example." (l:b) Soc.r~tes of ignorance. Recounting his discoveries'.~e _now taunts quickly denounces these charges as havin~ httle vahdity. the jurors , knowing full well that the p~httcians, poets, He declares that he has no knowledge of either the.heav- and artisans present in the courtroom will be aware th~t ens or the earth, and unlike the character Socrates m The he ascribed a type of ignorance to each of them. It is Clouds, he has never discussed the relationship betw~en because of this particular behavior that he accumulated weak and strong arguments. He also asserts that, havmg enemies in the past. never imposed a fee to educate others, he may not be Socrates next endeavors to demonstrate befor~ th.e considered a teacher. He challenges the jur?rs to ask a~y court his exact method of discerning ho_w mu_ch an mdtAthenian if his declaration is false. In domg ~o, h~ m- vidual knows. He proceeds in this direct10n with a couple vites his critics to consider whether or not his actions of purposes. First, he wants to refute the formal court accurately represent his reputation. He alleges that he has charges, not as they officially stand but as they reflect the court's misinterpretation of why he stands accused .. Second, he wants to demonstrate his activity a~ a philoso1 All references refer to The Collected Dialogues of Plato , Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. Princeton; pher, the true "crime" for which he stands tnal. ~ence, Socrates addresses Meletus directly before ~he Jurors , Princeton University Press, 1961. for this accuser epitomizes a particular type of ignorance. 44 Meletus represents the aggrieved poets whom Socrates previously described as having apparent knowledge guided by instinct, but no actual knowledge. In the crossexamination before the jurors, Socrates attempts to prove that his accuser speaks in ignorance even as he seems to know. Now Meletus has asserted that Socrates "is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state." (24c) When questioned, Meletus maintains that all Athenians except Socrates are a good influence on the young. Here Socrates is able to point out to the court his accuser's ignorance. For he asserts that only skilled trainers have the ability to improve their wards, and educators, like trainers, are few rather than many. Therefore, education hinges not on the ability of the entire Athenian population to teach, but on that of a select number of educators. Meletus is then manipulated to alter his indictment to claim an intentional harm of the young. Thereupon Socrates replies, "Either I have not been a bad influence, or it is unintentional, so that in either case your accusation is false." (26a) The first charge being dispelled, he proceeds to the second one. Again he influences Meletus to amend the indictment and this time accuse him of preaching atheistic beliefs. Socrates also refutes this charge; arguing that one who believes in spiritual activities must likewise believe in deities. To demonstrate that he is not an atheist, he then refers to the spiritual activities in which he has been engaged: questioning the oracle a Delphi and fulfilling his divinely inspired quest as a philosopher. Concluding this portion of his defense, he chastises Meletus. "There is no avoiding the conclusion that you brought this charge against me as a test of my wisdom, or else in despair of finding a genuine offense of which to accuse me." (27e) So, the philosopher is successful in both purposes. He clears himself of the set of amended charges; and most importantly, he allows the jurors to witness philosophy in action. Here his performance speaks for itself. He is not so interested in proving himself innocent of the formal charges as he is in providing the jurors with a dramatization of the events. which offended Meletus and his colleagues and subsequently brought him to trial. He now occupies center stage and offers Athens the truth, that is, the truth of his actions as they have been witnessed throughout his life. For Socrates, the charges brought by Meletus are not of concern solely as they pertain to his own safety. He neglects to disprove Meletus' initial charges and instead 45 amends them in order to argue their validity. This alone demonstrates that he is little interested in the indictment. What he is interested in, though, is elucidating the ·disparity between what an individual thinks he knows and what an individual really does not know. In this, he demonstrates the profession which has occupied his entire life. Meletus is the model of an individual who appears to know something, as for example the offenses committed by Socrates, when in fact he knows nothing . The chief focus of the interrogation of Meletus is not the refutation of the charges, but something else more important. It appears that Socrates is more concerned with his so-called spiritual duty. His life as a phil~sopher is to comprehend the truth, and his desire to illuminate for others the limitations and aspirations of human kno~ledge reflects this concern. Socrates cares little about clarifying for Meletus the nature of human wisdom, but he does offer the court this demonstration of exposing the truth. In doing this, Socrates does not give the jurors what they want, not because he does not shed tears, but because he fails to provide them with a customary defense . What he gives them, though, is something much more important. He presents them with what they need to determine his guilt or innocence, for if they recognize his defense as a reenactment of the so-called crime he is actually accused of committing, then they can reach a j ust verdict. In questioning Meletus before the court and addressing the jury directly, Socrates turns away from the standard environment essential for a philosopher's inquiry. For he normally converses wi th indi viduals either on a personal basis, or within a small group. His private mission to expose what an individual knows and to help others attain goodness acquires a different quality in the courtroom. Euthyphro previously remarked to Socrates that this would be the case. He stated that Meletus brought accusations against him "well knowing how easily things can be misrepresented to the crowd ." (2b) This is precisely the case during the defen se since what Socrates asserts insults many Athenians who consider him arrogant. . Socrates never hides his guilt in committing the "crime" of philosophy, for his behavior faithfully reflects that of a lover of wisdom who seeks to know the breadth of human knowledge. By exhibiting the true nature of his life as a philosopher, he acts as if it were that life standing trial. He has put the Athenian court into the position of having to determine whether or not the philosopher has a right to operate in the city. He remarks, "So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and �elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet." (29c) Socrates flaunts his offense by daring to philosophize whether or not the law permits him. Hence it is obvious that Socrates will not allow his behavior to be censored by the state. He implies that there exists a natural order in the universe ranging from what is most important to what is least important. Man obeys God first, as Socrates does with respect to the revelation at Delphi, and obeys the state second. God deserves man's primary consideration since His pronouncements are faultless and indisputable. Therefore, Socrates maintains that individuals must adhere to the manner in which God commands them to act. His offense is a grievous one in the eyes of the state. That is to say, he will continue to philosophize in Athens despite any decree attempting to prohibit his behavior. Only if the state physically prevents him will he cease to engage in philosophy. He goads the jury with this information, declaring, "I am not going to alter my conduct, not even ifl have to die a hundred deaths." (30c) Such a statement leaves little latitude for interpretation and Socrates' critics have every right to be infuriated by his declaration. His impudence provokes the jurors again and again, especially as he continues to insult them by alluding to the extraordinary nature of his occupation. So necessary is Socrates' profession to his existence that at one point he compares himself to Achilles. He remarks: you." (30e) Socrates' examples only gain the contempt of his jurors as he proceeds from one infuriating analogy to another. His conduct indicates a man who does not fear recrimination, and who indeed tempts his jurors to reprove his insolence. Strange though it may seem, he purposely irritates the Athenians and arouses their disdain. A fear of death does not inhibit him, for he expected a guilty verdict from the beginning of the trial . In later contemplating his defense, he reflects, "I [was] quite clear that the time had come when it was better for me to die and be released from my distractions." (4 ld) His desire to pass from life to death is evident at the trial in his whole behavior while even his divine voice does not oppose his defense. Socrates' trial was the first instance where he entered the political forum of the courtroom. It seems that the only reason he decided to attend the trial was because his divine voice did not prohibit him as it had in the past. For he admits that his divine voice prevented him from engaging in politics previously: "If I had tried long ago to engage in politics, I should long ago have lost my life, without doing any good either to you or myself." (3ld) Yet now he engages in politics by appearing before the court and defending himself. He must have been aware that the nature of politics had not changed and that the encounter between politics and philosophy would not be a pleasant one. By appearing at the trial, he made a tacit agreement with the state to comply with the final verdict. Not only that, he is conscious that the conflict between Where a man has once taken up his stand, either politics and philosophy could only be resolved with the because it seems best to him or in obedience to dissolution of one, and that one would necessarily inhis orders, there I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger, taking no account of death clude him. However, Socrates neglects to reveal in his defense or anything else before dishonor. (28d) that he suffers nothing whether he continues to philosoBoth he and Achilles fear living an "ignoble life" much phize or whether he dies. In fact, Socrates will gain a more than they fear death. He then continues later to great deal when his soul is released from his body, for in assert "the law of God [does not] permit a man to be the Phaedo he asserts harmed by a worse." (30d) The announcement reflects We (i.e., philosophers) are convinced that if we his belief that he is a better Athenian than his accusers are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we insofar as he is wiser. His wisdom includes an awaremust get rid of the body and contemplate things ness of his state of knowledge and the confidence that by themselves with the soul by itself. (66e) man should not fear that which he is incapable of comprehending. He also contends that he offers the greatest service to Athens by acting as an agitator and keeping He also explains that this liberation of the soul from the the Athenians from becoming complacent. In compar- body cannot occur "until God sends some compulsion ing himself with a stinging fly, Socrates proposes that he like the one which we are facing now." (62c) So it apis a gift from God to prevent the thoroughbred horse from pears that a guilty verdict will oblige him by releasing growing lazy. Each day he must "settle here, there, ev- him from the bonds of the living. erywhere, rousing, persuading, reproving every one of Yet Socrates chastises the state for inflicting more 46 harm on itself than on him by reaching a guilty verdict. He asserts that philosophizing improves the dty, and that A~hens would lose its single best influence with his demise. It seems strange that he who wishes to remove his mortal bonds would reprove his executioners. However Socrates desires what is best for both himself and for thos~ whom he leads to a better understanding of human wis?om. As long as he lives, he will aid them in understandmg ~nowledge. Still, he also recognizes that he cannot elucidate the truth if an individual refuses his assistance At his trial, the jurors, on behalf of the Athenians. refuse t~ acce~t this assistance. Perhaps this explain~ Socrates surprise that there is only a marginal difference between the number of jurors voting for his conviction an~ th.ose voting for his acquittal. He expected the vast ~a!onty to vote agai~st him, the philosopher, but a sigm~1cant n.umber vote m favor of him to continue his life w1t~out disruption. Nevertheless, his verdict is guilty and he Is sentenced to die. In reaching such a decision the state declares the philosopher to be a criminal. ' S~crates manipulates the state in his defense to place the philosopher on trial. By forcing Athens to confront ~h~ conflict between P?litics and philosophy, he compels It to earn the reputation ... of having put Socrates to deat.h, "tha~ wise man.'" (38c) While he refers directly to h1msel~, it may be reasoned that it.is the philosopher, and not simply the man, who is put to death. His sentence reveals an ultimate truth: The philosopher and the state ca~not co-~xi_st because the two are inherently in~omp~tible. Their mcompatibility stems from the state's mab1.h.ty. to control the philosopher who is compeIIed daily to cnt1c1ze and persuade men to understand the limited scope of human knowledge. 47 �The Infinite Straight Line in Book I of Euclid's Elements D Dawn Shuman In Book I of the Elements, Euclid uses certain basic elements to design propositions and then manipulates them to do the proofs. The line is one of these elements. Euclid defines a line as a "breadthless length," (I Definition 2) and a straight line as "a line which lies evenly with the points on itself." (I Def. 4) These terms and definitions are certainly fascinating and complex in and of themselves. However, I will focus on the line which Euclid did not define: the infinite straight line. The definitions of lines and straight lines do not exclude the possibility of infinite lines. Euclid simply does not define infinity or finiteness, although he does use "finite" in Postulate 2. Euclid defines a boundary as "that which is an extremity of anything." (I Def. 13) I think I would define as "finite" anything with boundaries and as "infinite" anything without boundaries. Therefore anything which is finite has extremities, and anything which is infinite does not. Euclid says that "the extremities of a line are points," (I Def. 3) which could cause logical problems since an infinite line has no extremities and might therefore be supposed to have no points. But an infinite line would have an infinite number of points upon it without having any particular end-points. This is only possible in infinite space. In some ways, infinite space is a very impractical concept, because it is difficult to imagine, and impossible to fully comprehend. In the concrete world, every human being has location, and is limited to comprehending those things within sensory range. We can expand that range indefinitely, but we cannot comprehend all of infinity because there is no end to infinity. The same limitation of location applies to the geometrical world, an assertation which I will support using Proposition 12 in Book I. Proposition 12 is the first place "infinite" is used : "To a given infinite straight line, from a given point which is not on it, to draw a perpendicular straight line." When first reading this enunciation, I found it very odd that Euclid needed to prove that a perpendicular could be drawn from any point not on the line to any infinite line, in infinite space, rather than just using a particular finite straight line and a particular point somewhere near it. However, in a way, all of the propositions are described and manipulated in infinite space. Most propositions are applied to single elements or figures made up of several interconnected elements. These figures, in order to be truly universal, can theoretically be located anywhere in t~on. That is, each element has its own particular loca- tlo~, no 'matter what it happens to be, and those two locat10ns are related to one another. The proposition I put forth forms the r~l~tionship in a more usually E_ uclidean way than Propos1t10n 12, by placing the point within a struc~r~ base~ ~n a line. Proposition 12 is unusual because it is exph~1tly in infinite space: The point may be anywhere; the lme may be anywhere. However, in order to understand how these elements relate to each other we mus~ draw a circle, as large or small as it may need to be: but it_ must be drawn to allow us to see the relationship._ Without this limitation we cannot draw the perpendicular. Just as when we read a work of philosophy we ~an only understand what is claimed to the extent that ~t rela~es ~o :-'~at is within our own experience, when dealmg wit? m~m1t~ geometrical space we can only use as m~ch of it as is within the limits of that relationship of locat10n. . infinite space. In this case, with any givenfinite straight line and point, a problem occurs because the elements are not connected in the enunciation and there is no specificity as to their location. The point might be loc~ted beyond the ends of the line, making it impossible to draw the perpendicular. In infinite space, with an infinite line, there will always be a sure relationship between the location of the infinite line and the location of the point, hence allowing the universality needed in an Euclidean proof. This definite relationship between the locations of any infinite straight line and any point is very impo~ant to Proposition 12. The proof consists of picking, at random, an additional point on the other side of'the line, and then, using the original point as the center, describing a circle with the radius the distance between the two points. This cuts off a portion of the line which is close enough to the point to have the perpendicular drawn to it. If it did not, if there were no way of connecting the two elements of line and point, the proposition would not work. As long as there is that connection, it will. With a similar connection, a perpendicular line from almost any point to almost any line can be drawn using a finite straight line and a point. Had Euclid done this proposition it might have been like this: To a given finite straight line, from any point within the circle of which the finite straight line is the diameter but not on the finite straight line, to draw a line perpendicular to the given line. (It also might be done using parallel lines or any right-angled quadrilateral figure.) Let AB be the given straight line, and let AB be bisected at point C. Let the circle ABD be described, using point C as the center and either AC or BC as the distance. Let point Ebe found anywhere within the circle ABD not on AB. Now let a point F be taken anywhere on the other side of line AB but still within the circleABD, and let the circle FGH be described with center E and distance EF. Let the line BCA be drawn through to point G (on ciq:le FGH). Connect the points E, G and E, H; · H being the point of intersection of line AB and circle FGH. Let the angle GEH be bisected, intersecting line AB at point K. 48 I .say that the bisecting line is also a line perpen?•cular to ACB. For GE is equal to EH, and EK Is common, and angle GEK is equal to angle HEK; therefore the triangles G KE and HKE are similar and coincide. So angle GKE is equal to angle HKE; and they are adjacent. But when a straight line set upon a straight line makes the adjacent angles equal to one another, each of the angles is right, and the two lines are perpendicular to each other. So line EK, drawn from the point, is perpendicular to line AB. Q.E.D. This proof works partly because of the limitations put o~ i~s universality. The point in this proposition must be w1thm very circumscribed limits. On the other hand t~e enunciation does contain its own universality: Th~ lme c~n b~ of any length; the points can be anywhere on o?pos~te sides of the diameter of the circle, even on the ~Ir~l~ itself; the whole figure can be located anywhere in mfm1te space. Euclid's enunciation is entirely universal, although the line and point must be connected and hence are limited to the same plane of infinite space. However, what is needed to draw the perpendicular and to prove that the line is perpendicular once drawn is the most striking and vitally important similarity between Euclid's proof of Proposition 12 and this proof. Both p~oofs take place within infinite space, that ~oncept which we are incapable of fully comprehend1~g ..In _o~der to delineate the relationship between the lme, .mfm1te and finite, and the point by drawing a perpendicular, we must find what they have in common. We must be able to find, with the particular line and point we happen to be using, a relationship in terms of loca- 49 �Character, Author, Reader, God: What It Means to Read 0 Ulysses Emily Katherine Brock · izations or others like them, we begin to see by what paths m~aning will reveal itself in this book. . Joyce shows us Stephen Dedalus first: to tram us for Marie: . Leopold Bloom later. The novel starts with t~ree chapJust as the day's long and the world ancient, ters that deal exclusively with Stephen, before i~ chan~es many people can stand all in the same place, to a novel mainly about Bloom. First of all, this contmone after another. ues the similarity between this book and the O~yssey, Woyzeck, Georg Buchner, 1837 since that epic starts with several chapters centenng on Telemachus' search for news of his father. Ho~ever, that The thing that hath been, it is that ":hich shall format also allows Joyce to characterize an easier person be· and that which is done is that which shall be first to get us trained for the important one, Bloom., w~en do~e: and there is no new thing under t?e sun. his ~tory comes. Stephen ha~ a very strong sense of himIs there any thing whereof it may b~ said, see, self, and fits a fairly recogmzab~e templat.e as a young~ this is new? it has already been, m the ages charismatic artist, conscious of his own actrnns a~d pass before us. ing judgment on the actions of those around .him. AlEcclesiastes 1. 9 though he is unhappy and confused, he r~mams a very concrete individual personality. As well, it.helps us that Joyce's previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young PART I: LEARNING TO READ JOYCE'S W~RD~ Man was about Stephen, and thus that his charac~er has James Joyce's Ulysses greets the reader :'ith a title alre~dy been established, making him more easily unwhose symbolic meaning is very easy to decipher: ?bd h' viously someone in the book will parallel the classical derstood. Stephen stands out against the people ~roun. im, character Odysseus in some way, and thus every reader becoming a clearly defined person not m~vmg ~tth .the must open the cover with that in min~. We foresee an eneral flow of life, a charismatic personahty that is fairly epic imbued with timeless meaning, an im~e~ect but sym- ;asy for the reader to gauge. W,here Stephen stands out, athetic main character, perhaps even .a similar construc- however Bloom blends in. He is not very self-aware, he iion of the plot. As well, the book's title refers us to andoes not 'participate in conversations, much less mo~opo­ other book, taking it for granted that we hav~ read, or ~t lize them as Stephen does, and he tends not to pass JUdgdyssey We start to realize that this least k now of , the O · ·t t or do anything else that could let the reader get a book will draw on an assumed background of other wn ;::d fix on his personality traits . In his role as a sort of ings, that it is asking mo~e of us as reader than other more Everyman, he is necessarily much harder for th~ reader self-contained novels might. . to picture clearly, since Eve~ma~ must blend mto th~ After opening the cover, words and images that the background and not distingmsh himself. Stephen pro author presents to us get increasingly harder t? make se~se duces poems, fables, arguments and so on, and we can of as we read farther into the book. The first narrat~ve understand him by looking at what he has made. . age we get after beginning the book, for example, is a Stephen's last name fits into this image: Dedalus was :cical mass given by Buck Mulligan. It seem~ to be the artificer of Greek myth . While Stephen produces just an absurdist image, until we remember that this book objects but stays himself relatively .unc~anged, Bloom . " . ,, and every good epic-the Iliad, the Odyssey, ts an epic, . A blooms, producing nothing but mutatmg.his own self. He t . Paradts e Lost-opens with an invocation of the Muse. d gives. us no tangible offspring to examme, and because " ,, tt the end of that chapter comes the word us~rper, u ere he is in a state of change, it is harder ~or the reader t~ by Stephen Dedalus to his friends, and with that we beunderstand his character. Because of this, Joyce ~oesn t come aware that Stephen must paralle~ Telemachus, and start us off with him. By encountering Stephen first, we his friends are Penelope's suitors. With those two realWoyzeck: . ? Devil! Was it there you saw him. can get trained in understanding characters in Ulysses, and so when we get to the much harder case Of Bloom, we are ready to see him for all that he is. Joyce has begun to train us for the task of reading Ulysses, and images that reveal parallels less obviously are building upon images that are easier to understand. By Chapter Nine, for example, finding out how our Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, is sailing unharmed between Scylla and Charybdis hinges on several small phrases. Stephen imagines that the person to whom he is talking is drowning in a whirlpool of mystical Platonism, and Aristotle, on whom Stephen is basing his arguments, like Scylla, sits on a rock. 1 The most distinct of these references are the two sentences, "Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded," (9. 405) and "A like fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool." (9. 464) At the end of the chapter, Leopold Bloom, who has barely been seen in this chapter, walks between Stephen and his opponent, sailing to safety: "My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between. A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting." (9.1202) If we hadn't been trained by the eight chapters that came before, we might have skipped right over these cryptic lines. These few phrases would have been much harder to understand if we hadn't become used to thinking that every phrase is important and already been sensitized to hints of Homeric parallels. The repetition of phrases hides the key to the symbolic parallels that will help us understand the meaning of the book. The main characters embody several different sets of historical and literary parallels for us to look out for, as well. Thus, Ulysses operates on many more levels than simply plot action, character traits and so on. The readers must supply the missing links to connect Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, and recognize the other parallels that together constitute a whole other set of meanings for the novel. Joyce, through training us to read Ulysses successfully, also uses us as a way to continuously connect the events we read to those of all of history. Our memory of every other thing we have ever read does more than enhance the imagery used; it is the building block of that imagery. He comments obliquely on the role of memory in reading many times, in the ways that his characters read written words. Perhaps the best example is an advertising campaign that Bloom encounters in his wanderings. In it, five men walk in single file around the streets of Dublin, each with a letter on hi s tall hat, spelling out HELY'S, the name of a store. A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like t,hat priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats : H. E. L. Y. 'S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard , crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked .. .(Bloom) crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. (8 .123) 1 All references to line numbers in Ulysses refer to the Vintage edition, edited by Hans Walter Gabler. I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words apout the use of secondary texts in this essay. No secondary text was used for any interpretive points, but several of the symbolic connections I make during the course of the paper came from either published guidebooks or other people in my preceptorial and study group. I decided that footnoting these connections, most notably the one referring to Chaucer's "The Manciple' s Tale," was not necessary, since they are not original ideas or interpretation, but rather discoveries of what was already there. As well, they serve only as examples in my essay, and are not at all crucial to the general argument of the paper. 51 50 They pass him several more times: "H. E. L. Y. 'S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane, plodding towards their goal." (10.310) And later, "At Ponsonby's comer a jaded white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind him, E. L. Y. ' S, while outriders pranced past and carriages." (10.1238) Bloom sees, and we see, each letter as an individual consciousness, with thoughts and actions of his own. Alone, each redlettered man also recalls the image from The Scarlet Letter of being branded, publicly labeled for a private sin, and therefore be an ennobled figure. Together, however, they spell out a word which has a completely different meaning than the individuals had, a comical image, five human beings turned into nothing more than an advertisement. Likewise, when we read we see the parts as well as the whole, each individual image or event as well as the completed, coherent picture that they want to make. And likewise, the final message, the whole, necessarily neglects the intricacies of the parts. The newly trained reader 's memory and sense of continuity affect the coherency of the text. Unlike most novels, here the reader is asked to draw on his past reading experience, not only to understand small references, but �T HELY' S and the men that are forming it. It is similar to to understand the whole of the book. Meaningful things the way a believer reads the Bible; since he considers the that would be stated outright in other books are here hid- Bible the word of God, he treats each word as precious den in a maze of literary references through which we and poetically full of meaning. Thus, at the end of Joyce's must find our way. We remember when a phrase we book, we come away with a new, and ancient, way of read resembles, in form or content, a phrase from earlier reading. It becomes a reflex to study every word as if it · in the book, and get better at recognizing what is impor- held the key to great understanding, instead of just skimtant as we get more experienced. Subsequent readings ming the surface of the text for the general meaning. Joyce may tum up even more recurrences as we learn what to returns us to a time when books themselves were rarer remember. Joyce needs readers properly trained to re- and the written word more respected and valuable. We member these little things, because repeated images only are reading everything as closely as if it were the Bible. become meaningful when there is a reader who remem- Even if this reflex doesn't last long after we've closed bers, and recognizes them as repetitions . Without the the book, at least he has shown us how much we might recognition that comes from our memory, events might be missing in everything we read. We learn to treat evappear to be random events, and therefore ignored; but ery sentence as if it were very important, never ignoring the author, relying on the reader to recognize them, loads anything because it seems inconsequential. them with significance. Because we learn that our recEven more interesting are those recurrences, coinciognition of his symbols and parallels helps establish the dences, and parallels that don't seem to have anything to coherency of the book, we try very hard to understand all do with the book's obvious symbolism or themes. The of them. We realize this early on, when the Homeric sailor in Chapter Sixteen has a tattoo that reads "6-16," parallels are first introduced, and as connections get more which just happens to be the date of the day chronicled in diverse and more difficult to find, we try harder to ex- Ulysses, for example. This is just something to remark tract meaning from the events. Although Joyce cannot upon, a chance occurrence at which to wonder. Howbe sure that we have read everything to which he refers, ever, Joyce has purposefully placed that tattoo on that he does seem to use books which are firmly placed in the sailor to convey some meaning and remind us of the omcanon of Western Literature, thus keeping the require- nipresence of the author. Not merely a coincidence but ment for the proper reading his book as the classical edu- rather a conscious act, we see in the history of such items cation in literature, history, and religion that any person a decision by the author to include such "accidents." If could, or perhaps should, have. We begin to see any and we saw such a coincidence in our daily life we would no all superficially meaningless references, objects and doubt think very little of it, and dismiss it as meaningless events as containing, somewhere within them, a seed of chance, as Bloom does. As far as the action of the plot meaning that will give us deeper insight into Joyce's "big goes, it is an inconsequential coincidence, but for the readthemes" of the novel. Thus Joyce is counting on our pres- ers, it can only be an encrypted message from the author ence to hold together the book, and what his words call to us, reminding us of his presence. In a work written up in our minds is not incidental, but rather something on with such care, we cannot dismiss it as chance, as a result which he relied very much as a level of meaning for the of randomness , but instead must consider it as having book. He can only hope that we take what he has given meaning, since it is deliberately placed in the text by us and interpret it correctly, now that we know what to Joyce. Other examples of this sort include the crazy man Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farell, whom do with it. The world that Joyce has created gradually becomes Bloom keeps seeing on the street, who can be seen as a filled with meaning, alive and organic in its circularity, message from Joyce to us about what happens to form where otherwise it might seem inert. We don't want to without any content. Another example is when Bloom let a single reference pass us by unnoticed or misunder- unwittingly predicts the outcome of the horse race. He stood, and thus most people that wish to read the book did not intend to say anything about the race but is miswell read it with other readers or published guidebooks. understood as having offered a betting tip on it, and the Very few people are going to have all the background prediction he unwittingly made turns out to have come Joyce cites, and a perfect memory besides. For this same true. reason, it is beneficial to read it many times, and flip back However, Joyce also warns us that words are treachand forth in it while reading. We learn from Joyce, as we erous for us. We learn from him both on the one hand progress through the book, that to read well is to read in not to take words at face value, rather to recognize the that way, and that a good reader sees both the word awa~en~ss presence of a possibly undiscoverable deeper meaning, and on the o~her hand not to trust in the truth of written ~ords. A wntten word differs from the object it signifies m that th~ word had to be written by a person, and therefore cames a particular intent that we may never understand. So~e. force had to inspire the person to write, and thus all wntmg carries such hidden motives. A person must choose between writing one word instead of another, or even whether to write a word at all . A word is . bo f . ~ o a wnter, and must be consciously brought into ex1~t~nce, b~t a physical object exists without human activity. Whil.e a tangible thing may be manipulated by human h.ands, its substance, its material being, exists without any mtent we know of. We give more thought to the ~ords we. read than the objects we see because of this history, this connection to a writer that words have. A h . t t e. same time, however, Joyce asks us to view these pr~c10us. words as untrustworthy. We could mist~e the mtent10n we want words to have for the intenti~n they actually do carry. As an example of this kind of mistake, he shows Stephen in a heated argument about Shakespeare, Hamlet in particular. As Stephen's f. d Buck po rt.rays it, " He proves by algebra that Hamlet's . nen gran?son IS Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father." (1.555) We don't hear th~ ~ctual argument until Chapter. Nine, and when we do •. It IS as tenuous and complicated as Buck jokingly made It .out to be. Stephen argues it earnestly, but then on lookmg back realizes, as we do, just how far on the wrong track he has gotten. rat1ve techmque, the filter through wh1.ch we view the . 1 pot, changes periodically. Yet this change i's no acci. d ·h ent, e1t er. Each chapter's narrat1·ve techmque corre. sponds to the plot's action at that point, to a greater or lesser degree. In the beginning the choice of tech . . f ·l b · · mque is air y o 'viou.s, with. chapters centering on Stephen from Stephen s pomt of vie':", presenting his thoughts, and with chapters from Bloom s point of view in Bloo ms v01ce, ' . b ut as the b~ok goes on the narrators become less and less co~vent10nal. For example, the chapter in which Bloom he~rs people singing in a bar not only includes a lot o.f musical phra~es in it, but also is itself arranged in a musical pattern, w.1th motifs introduced in the beginning that . . f then are used m the construction of the piece, as m a ugue .. An?ther good example is the chapter in which Blo~m is ~ith a group of doctors, all waiting for a woman to give birth'. The chapter is arranged as the development of Engh~~ prose style, from druidic incantation to modem expos1t10n, echoing the development of a fetu After the birth occurs, the narration deteriorates into amalgam of slang, almost mimicking a baby 's babble. B~caus~ of the training that Joyce gives us, and the ':ays m which we are reminded of the author behind his lmear plot, we feel that author's presence, who reciprocally felt our pres.ence as he wrote his book. He assembles a worl~ out of.literary motifs, historic events, and real pl~ces m Dublm. .As he guides his characters through this wo~ld , h~ mampulates it deliberately to mirror them and their act10ns, creating the recurrences and parallels that we then n?t~ce. He affects every level of this world down to the tlmest detail, making every aspect of the ~?rid ~ddress the story and the characters. For the reader It is as if Dublin has been turned into a giant amusemen~ ~ark ~.here Leopold Bloom is the theme. His intentions ~n wntmg phrases that see~ cryptic are at the front of our houghts, and much of our mterpretation of the book thus takes the fo~ of the statement, "What the author means when he wntes such and such is .. ." The effect of this is tha~ we feel the presence of some mind at work with .which we never have direct contact, but which we' sense as someone who ca:es that we understand the book, someo~e who took the time to build up our new reading techmques. The r~ader of Ulysses distinctly sees that there are two consc10usnesses aware of the action, the reader and the au~hor. We cannot be as self-centered as we are when read1.ng more conventional things where the writer conceals himself. We have responsibilities. Both the reader and the author are part of the narra- a~ You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show _ s a French triangle. Do you believe your u own Lheory? - No , Stephen said promptly (9.1064) . Thus, even as we grow more adept at reading Ulysses e:ents i~ the book warn us of how untrustworthy a me~ dmm wntten words are. As well, we see that we, as read~rs , are untrustworthy. We could be reading too much mto ~he t~xt, or reading with biased eyes and omitting certam pomts . Part of Joyce's training is teaching us to open ourselv~s to every part of the text. We are left always suspectmg that we could be misreading-attaching more, less,' or the wrong meaning to any word. . Joyce s use of multiple narrators is one of the most noticeable ways in which this novel differs from most other ~ovels. and epics. The technique of using everchangmg vmces to tell a continuous story increases our 53 52 of something behind the narrator. For the lot co~tmues to .progress chronologically even while the ~ar- �1 , I tive, but while the reader always experiences the book as a linear chronology, it seems that the author does not. We get this impression from little recurrences, of the sort that indicate the author at work, some occurring many chapters apart, each time existing only as one small phrase. A good example of this is the image of a drowned man who has just been found in the sea near Dublin after floating for many days, a news story that both Stephen and Bloom hear. We see the man in their thoughts here and there, and Bloom runs into a friend, a coroner's assistant, who must handle the body. The drowned man floats through the first half of the book, a symbol of Bloom drowning in the backwaters of his life, the odious, bloated corpse always turning up in different conversations. Without a careful, trained reading, however, one might skim over each of these references as it occurred, however, and thus never see the recurrence. Once the reader notices the references as similar, they give him the impression that they were placed all at the same time, although each time it fits perfectly into the story. When a thing is recognized as recurrent it becomes more obvious that Joyce intends it to have real meaning; a word said twice might be accidental, but not a word said repeatedly. It is as though the entire book had been written all at the same time, had happened all at the same time, instead of over a period of time. We can imagine the entire book appearing suddenly out of his head, already fully formed, having the same sort of birth as Athena's, out of the head of Zeus, rather than the Old Testament creation of man in which it takes time and toil for God to fabricate his creation. We see Joyce as one who knows everything, one who is atemporally omniscient. We begin to see a meta-narrator, manipulating the host of voices used in order to make certain statements about the characters or emphasize certain parts of the plot. This so-called meta-narrator must be none other than the author himself. Thus, because there is no single static narrator like in other novels, but a series of static narrators successively carrying the same plot line, the plot and himself and Joyce himself become independent of a single point of view. We are couscious that Joyce has chosen the different narrators, whether clear voices like Chapter Seven's newspaper headlines or Thirteen's voice of a romance novel heroine, or cryptic voices like Chapter Fourteen, the embryonic development of English prose sty le or Chapter Fifteen, a drama starring Bloom's unconscious, subconscious and conscious minds. Narrators are generally taken from text styles that we have already probably read in other places, but here they have meaning apart from what is the usual. Joyce's hand in this, separate from that of the narrators, is obvious; we know that there is a human intelligence behind the story. Since the story, on its most basic level, comes from Homer, and since much of the other material comes from various historical and fictional sources,most of what we read has the tone of reorganization rather than the Biblical creation from dust. The characters' traits, roles, their world, everything is derived from other sources, so that they are just newer embodiments of timeless tern-: plates. Yet we still can see Joyce as a creator thanks to his manipulations of the symbols and motifs that he has pulled from various places, and in the wide array of narrators that he has conjured up from our common literary background. Because the reader senses the presence of the author in the book, we treat the book much more as if it were the author's product than we otherwise would . That the SYf!lbolism was conceived in the author's head, and conveyed directly to the reader, gives the work a tone of commentary. We see the phenomenon of chance, of blind luck, playing an important and prominent role. Joyce thus molds us into the readers he wants and needs for the book he has written. He makes a new reader by writing a new kind of novel, and then slowly reteaching us how to read. As we realize this, the question why he does this nags us more and more. We will have to examine the material that is presented to us before we can fully understand why such a roundabout, cryptic process was chosen. PART II: BLOOM'S EXPERIENCES IN JOYCE'S WORLD The symbols, motifs, and parallels taken from our shared tradition of Western philosophy, history, and literature are more than simply clever ways to reinterpret and revisit the books of our heritage. Most often, they serve as commentary on the action taking place in the story. For example, Bloom encounters in the course of the day at least three things that are on the surface confusing and cryptic, but are actually warnings about the adultery that Molly is committing at those exact moments. The first of these is the image of a crowing cock that recurs several times, connected with the name of a romance-writer that Molly Bloom has been reading, "Paul de Kock." The cock's crow becomes an image of betrayal in Chapter Eleven, when Bloom sees Blazes Boylan leave the Ormond Hotel bar to go see Molly, ostensibly about a singing performance for which he is booking her. Bloom idly suspects that they are probably having an affair, but does nothing to stop it, and sees in his mind Bo~ Ian, in his horsedrawn taxi, .approaching the Bloom residence where Molly awaits him: By Bachelor 's walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bach.elor'. in sun in heat, mare 's glossy rump atrot, with fhck of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience ardentbold. ' a bell chimed ... Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuckoo The clock on the mantelpiece in the priest's house cooed ... Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuckoo bec.aus~ it was a little canarybird that came out of its httle house to tell the time that Gerty MacDowell noticed. (13.1 285) Several pages later he sees Boylan knocking on the front door,. and he~e he hears the knock sounding like a cock The cuckoo clock sounds nine times altogether, audible crowmg as his betrayal grows imminent: "One rapped on the beach to both Bloom and Gerty from the nearby on a door'. one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de house, a.nd thus th~ chapter ends. The cuckoo is not simK ock with a loud proud knocker with a cock ply to. signal the time; It recalls a passage from "Th ~arracarracarra cock. Cockcock." ( 11. 986) The sound Manciple's Tal~," of The Canterbury Tales in which : carracarracarra" is interjected twice more in the text man learns of his beloved wife's adultery. before the chapter ends. The sound of the knock rese~bles ~cock's crow, bringing to mind Christ's converWhen Phoebus, the master, returned home, sat10n with Paul after the Last Supper. The crow greeted him with "Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" Peter said ~o him, "Though all become deserters because ",W~at, crow?" said Phoebus. "What song are you of you, I will never desert you." Jesus said to him "T l smgmg? ... " I tell you, this v~ry night, before the cock crows, ;ou ~i{i "B y God'" said the crow, "I don't sing incorrectly · . deny ~e. three .times. " (Matthew 26. 33 ) Combrnmg this reference to Christ with the obvious For I saw him make love with your wife on your sexual connotations leaves us with a clear image of adulbed." tery. Peter's wor~'s are like Molly 's marriage vow, and W~at more do you wish? The crow then told him the rooster-soundmg knock signals her betrayal. With convincing evidence and bold words Another ex~~~le of a warning to Bloom of Molly 's How_ his wife had conducted her adultery, ~dultery, and .cntic1sm of his complacency, occurs twice, To his great shame and dishonor. m Chapter Nme and at the end of Chapter Thirteen: the The crow said it had seen the act with its own call of a cuckoo. The first instance occurs while he overeyes. hears Stephen debating about Shakespeare. ("The Manciple's Tale," lines 242-261 In Cymbeline, in Othello, he is bawd and cuckModem edition paraphrase) old. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or.a perversion, like Jose he kills the real Carmen. Thus Bloom he~rs ~he same bird 's lament again, but still His unremitti?g. intellect is the hornmad Iago does ?ot recognize it as a warning. He does not question ceaselessly w11lmg that the moor in him shall why It has s.ounded at this exact moment, when he was suffer. · a~le to he~r it. If he thinks of it at all, it is only like Gerty "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" Cuck Mulligan clucked t~mks of It, .on .the most superficial level of marking the lewdly. "O word of fear!" tm~e, an~ thm~mg of a clock reaching the top of the hour Dark dome received, reverbed. (9.1021) at JU st this pomt does not seem significant to him. .Bloom. does not recognize these or other references ~h~ cuckoo reappears as Chapter Thirteen ends . Bloom to hterar~ i~ages of betrayal and cuckoldry, but treats s1.ttmg on the strand after Gerty bares her underwear him. from afar, thinks about Molly, and about sex, sitting, them a~ mc1dental events. Indeed, the reader too may not decipher all thes~ things on the first reading, since restmg, looking out at the water. they appear to be ummportant. We have an advantage over Bloom, however. The training Joyce has given us A bat flew. Here. There. Here. Far in the grey for proper reading of his novel means, first, that we are fo; 54 55 �not willing to treat any word as meaningless.' and second, that we will be studying, not merely readmg, the te~t. That is to say, we will read it multiple times and with groups of people, and if there is an image th~t seem~ meaningless to us, we will work together until we fmd the meaning we know is hidden in it somewhere. Eventually, then, we understand these things for ~hat th~~ ~re, and will be able to interpret them. We can view critic1sr:i of Bloom that he does not notice, much less heed, as primarily commentary from the author directly to us. We are already very aware of the presence of t~e author, and we already know for a certainty the unfaithfulness that Bloom only suspects. We are expected to have the background in literature to see these warnings for what they are. Even if one reader has not, for example, re~d "T~e Manciple's Tale," for example, no doubt some~ne m on~ s circle of fellow readers has read it, and the i~age will resonate for that person. Joyce is a spectator J~St ~s we are, and just as we are, he is criticizing and pa~smg J~dg­ ment on Bloom's actions. Indeed, on closer i~s.p~ctlon, most of the symbolism can be regarded as cnticism of Bloom. . ·· d We see symbolic meaning in Bloom's _act1vitl~s an surroundings, and we interpret some of this meanmg as critical of him. Bloom, too, perceives the recurrences and coincidences, reflecting on the chance an~ vagary of life when, for example, he crosses paths with Blazes Boylan three times in one day, .or when ~e tosses away a stick he has been holding and It lands with one end embedded in the sand, perpendicular to the ground. "Now if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn't. Chance." (13.1271) To some extent, he even half-consciously realizes the similarities tha~ ?e has to the great character types of the western tradition, most distinctly to the betrayed martyr template represented ~y Christ and Socrates . But the only time we really. see h.im run away with this idea is in the fifteent~ chapte.:, m which there is a large part dedicated to the idea of . The New Bloomusalem," and where Bloom is put on.t~ial. The difference between Bloom's recogmt10n o~these parallels and recurrences and our own,. howev~r, ts that he does not see them as anything special, or give them anything more than idle thought. To him, they are a sort of background noise, easily ignorable, present every day oflife. Others he obliviously passes by, such as the :'arnings of Molly's imminent betrayal mentioned earlier, or the parallel between himself ~nd .Throwaway: the proverbial "dark horse" in the day s big race. He is dressed in mourning, thus "dark," generally co~sidered. a loser, and considered somewhat inconsequential by his peers, like a throwaway brochure. Boylan, then, is Sceptr~, t~e favored horse, the bright star with a hint of royalt~ m its name who in the end is beaten by the dark horse, JUSt as . Bloom wins Molly back from Boylan. It seems equally unlikely that anyone would fmd a parallel between one's marital problems and a horse race as that anyone would find the parallel between oneself and Odysseus, or Jesus Christ, God the Father, t~e famous Irish politician Parnell, or the fairyt~le hero Smbad the Sailor. Such a recognition would brmg the detachment that might help us to solve our problems, but we tend to think of literature and history too impersonally to equate them with our own situations. w_e do ~ee the benefit that Bloom would get out of thinkmg this way, a~d perhaps Joyce is telling us that we should look to classic character templates for insight about ourselves . If we think that we resemble the Odyssean "wanderer who wishes to return home," perhaps we should pinpoint what tasks we need to do to get there, what "suitors" we ~ust slay. If we resemble the "lover martyred by the ~raitor­ ous beloved" template of Christ, then we need to ~md out what forgiveness we have to grant to get back ~nto the heart of the beloved and be resurrected. Our heritage of story and history ought to be alive, not dead and mounted in a museum. . During the whole day, Bloom thinks often. about his wife's suspected infidelity, the letter he ~eceived. from Martha his relationship with her, even simply his unhappy Job or new ad ideas. J?espite this, he_ do~s not share these thoughts with the fnends he sees, his wife'. or anyone at all. He has big problems, and one would thmk that he might ask advice from the people he trust~. Bloom has no one that he trusts, however. No one strikes up a real conversation with him, or seems to want to talk to him either, even though several people know about Molly's infidelity and pity him for his ignorance. At the funeral, at the bar in Chapter Twelve, and at the ~estau­ rant where he eats lunch, among other places'. he is continually perceived by other characters as the silent, cry~­ tic, unapproachable man. A good example comes up m Chapter Eight, in the restaurant w.he~e he eats !unc~. The point of view has been firmly withm Bloor:i s mmd for several chapters at this point, and suddenly it pulls away for several paragraphs to a conversation two men are having behind Bloom's back, after ~e leaves his table. They ask each other questions about him that, for some reason, they didn't want to ask him ~irectly: Whether he had recently changed his occupat10n, whose death he was mourning. They find him odd and unapproachable, based mainly on his Jewish background and the fact that he 56 never gets really drunk. After some insinuations about Molly, one of the men gives his own theory for Bloom's cryptic quality and supposed secrecy: He is a freemason. This seems unlikely and out of character, but we never ascertain the facts on this matter. -He's in the craft, he said. -Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said. -Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He's an excellent brother. Light, life, and love, by God. They give him a leg up ... They stick to you when you're down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it. But they're close as damn it. .. -And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. (8.962) late in the book, also fraught with meaning, but referring to Bloom instead. He views it as merely a meaningless error, although it can be deciphered in a way similar to Martha's. The error in this case cannot be attributed to a single person, since it occurred as a glitch in the newspaper typesetting system. Bloom reads the announcement for the funeral he had attended that morning in the evening newspaper. So to change the subject he read about Dignam R.I.P... This morning (Hynes put it in of course) the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence .. . for interment. . . The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother in law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John Power, .)eatondph I \8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather [typesetter] about Keyes's ad) Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, ... L. Boom, CP McCoy and several others. (Bloom was) nettled not a little by L. Boom (as it incorrectly stated) and the line of bitched type. (16. 1248) Indeed, he never even has any real conversation with anyone at all until Chapter Seventeen, when he and Stephen sit in his house talking. Thus, before the last two chapters of the book, and the accompanying breakdown of structure which I will speak of later, the author is the only one who can show him how he's acting and what his life looks like from a detached perspective. The "scientific mind" Bloom is so proud of possessing, the craftiness any good Odysseus must have, is more With random chance as the culprit instead of a particular person, it is easy for him to ignore the error as annoying, than a gift; it is a tool. With it he is meant to discover the but meaningless. Yet "L. Boom" does have meaning: clues to decode the message, which exist in coincidence "The decent quiet man" is being described as an exploand parallel. We know Bloom is capable of looking besion. A reader can interpret from this that Bloom needs hind the obvious to infer a deeper meaning from several to do something out of character, to break the fog of idle events, most notably when he reads the slightly sadistic complacency in which he finds himself. He must do love letter from Martha. In it, she says, "I do not like that something violently different to make Molly notice him other world" (5.245) instead of, we presume, "I do not like that other word," since she is writing about Bloom's again as a man. That explosion would flatten the rickety structure of their current relationship leaving a clean, bare word usage at that point. If one reads that as something foundation upon which they could rebuild their lives and more than a typo, Martha appears to be someone who their relationship. We understand this because we are fantasizes and holds a lot of hope for the world of which looking over the shoulder of the author, while Bloom is she imagines Bloom to be a part. She unwittingly prenot aware that he is Joyce's creation. If Bloom were willsents herself as someone who wishes she were also in ing to anticipate that meaning can come in unexpected that world, and is not at all satisfied with her own life. ways, he could see these signs. But he has not been trained Bloom reads this as a sort of Freudian slip, as do we, and the way we have, however, and although he has the abilsenses a great dependence on hir.1 to rescue her. He mulls ity to see these things, an hour of life is not looked at as over that sentence on and off for the rest of the book, and carefully as a page of text. sees it as a valuable glimpse into what is really happenAnother example of Bloom's inability to interpret ing in their relationship . He has the gift of a very rational seemingly meaningless events as having any message for mind, and the insight to use it for prophecy when he him occurs in Chapter Thirteen. After Gerty leaves, he wishes, just as Odysseus does. begins to leave her a message in the sand, which she could Although a typo gives him insight into Martha's mind, read if she returned the next day. He is sitting alone watchhe does not analyze misprints, partial words, and so on ing fireworks over the water, thinking of Molly, fantasizas addressing his own situation. There is another typo ing about Gerty, and worrying about Martha. He gets as 57 I '/ 1 �---' far as I AM A before he stops: ity: Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a message for her. Might remain. What? I. Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide comes here ... What is the meaning of that other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not like. AM. A. No room. Let it go. Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand . Nothing grows in it. All fades ... We' ll never meet again . But it was so lovely. Goodbye dear. Thanks. Made me feel so young. (13.1258) We are first left trying to figure out what he was actually going to write: "I am a-." The answer cannot known. But what we, and he, should be reading here is wh_at_ he did write, "I am A." Bloom erases it without givmg thought to any unintended meaning. But in the midst of his gloomy thoughts he has actually given himself the answer to all his problems, if he were to read th~ sentence written as "I am the alpha." It counsels him to make a new beginning, in light of the Biblical passage, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the ~ast, ~he beginning and the end." (Revelation 22.13) He is_ bei~g told that he needs to stop drifting, complacent, ffilred m the middle of life, and become a fire-and-brimstone, ~x­ plosive beginning. This messag~ is ~ot purpos~~lly ignored by Bloom, since to ignore implies recogmt10n, and he never identified it as a message, even though he wrote it. It is hard even for us, detached though we are, to stop wondering what he intended to write and lo?k at what he actually did write. It does, however, remam a mess~ge of criticism, not from the author but from Blo~m ~im­ self. Bloom could have benefited if he had noticed it: This brings us to the moment when the prop?esied explosion actually occurs, the point towards which all Joyce's criticism of Bloom has been driving. Through the course of the book, we have seen Joyce criti_ciz~ Bl~om and suggest that he do something to change h1.s s1tuat10~. Bloom has not noticed these encoded suggestion~, but i~ the second to last chapter of the book, the author s fabncated superstructure of symbolism begins to break down as Bloom nears the climax. He comes close to true recognition of his mirroring of histo.rical and lite~a~y ~em­ plates as he enters the bed, reflectmg on Molly s mf1del- ?e If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. (17 .2127) The explosion occurs when, in bed , Bloom asks 1'.1olly to day. He w~shes ~o bring him his breakfast in bed the next_ wake up the next morning in a new kmd of ~elatt?ns_h1p with her, be greeted by the vision of her feedmg _him ~n a reversal of the unhappy roles of this day. The first tune we saw Bloom, he had been fixing breakfast for Molly. Now he demands that she feed him, as she did at the beginning of their relationship. An image is repeat~d through the book, both in Bloom' s thoughts and m Molly's, a reminiscence of an instance befor~ they ~ar­ ried in which, in Molly's words, "I gave him a bit of seedcake out of my mouth." (18.1575) This is a mothering image, a bird feeding her newly-hatched young, and he wants to return to the relationship where she sheltered and nurtured him. In a way, the odyssey of his entire day can be looked at, not only as a return to his Penelope, but also as a return to the bed, which is also Molly's nest, and metaphorically the womb. The most interesting thing for us, the readers, _about this explosive question is that it does not occur m the narrative. The prophesied "Boom" from the newspaper misprint is neither at the end of Chapter Seventeen n~r the beginning of Chapter Eighteen, although as Molly s monologue begins, it has already occurred. In fact, the only way that we find out that he has asked ~er _to do anything is through what Molly says at the beg1~nmg_ of her monologue: "Yes because he never did~ thmg hke that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs." (18.1) It is as if the first seven.teen chapters constitute Bloom 's past, the eighteenth his future, and the question his present. He will ~ot know Molly's answer until he wakes up in the mommg, so her monologue represents his unknown future . We leave him suspended in the uncertain present, having ended the day and the life that it represented at the moment he got into bed, but not in the future yet. As T.S. Eliot said in "Burnt Norton," Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past ... Time past and time future Allow but little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time. ers that sh.e has gotten her period, which gives us another way to view the chapter as a renewal, an end to all the problems that existed the day before, and the chance for a new beginning. For Bloom had been worrying all day about his own virility. He seems disappointed in, or at least unfulfilled by, their daughter Milly, and he is haunted The bed, and Molly's half-awake thoughts, are outside by visions of their son, who had died while still a baby. of linear time, existing only in the sense of a now time, He has not had sex with his wife for many years, and he and represented by the unanswered question. The queswonders if he would or could ever produce another son, tion cannot be included in either the past or the future, someone to carry on his family name, a duplication of and thus it isn't written about in either Chapters Sevenhimself. He also worries that Molly might be pregnant teen or Eighteen, but between them. We can connect the with Boylan's child, in which case Boylan would have explosion to the layers of commentary urging Bloom tostolen Bloom's dream of fatherhood. With this, the last wards it, fabricated by the author in the first seventeen barrier to Bloom's happiness has been removed, and the chapters . To understand this connection perhaps one two of them can still try to conceive a son in their new needs first to understand what the last chapter constitutes. relationship. The end of the book, traditionally called Molly's The other thing that stands out in this chapter is the monologue, has none of the punctuation or grammatical last "sentence," which begins with Molly rejecting Hugh structure of the rest of the book. It is designed to be a "Blazes" Boylan: look at the thought patterns of this person as she lies, unmoving, in bed. This is the first thing that strikes a no thats no way for him he has no manners nor reader; it isn't even divided up into real sentences. It has no refinement nor no nothing in his nature slapnone of the linear plot line of the rest of the book, either, ping us behind like that on my bottom because I but orbits around several topics of conversation, with difdidnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt ferent layers of circularity. The word "yes," for example, know poetry from a cabbage thats what you get begins the chapter, ends the chapter, and in the middle for not keeping them in their proper place pullpairs up poetically with "no." We get a view of how ing off his shoes and trousers there on the chair thought processes might link together in someone's head, before me so barefaced without even asking perand there is no sense of the passage of time here. This mission and standing out in that vulgar way voice is entirely without artifice, with none of the con(18.1368) sciousness of the reader that first seventeen chapters had. It does not have mastery of the language as all the other and ends with her accepting Bloom again in a reiteration narrators did, using the beauty of words to seduce the of her acceptance of his marriage proposal many years reader. Here language returns to its primal state as a feaago, and, at the same time, answering his request for tureless medium, communicating all ideas. But most breakfast in bed: importantly, this voice has none of the artifice of symbol, recurrent image, and encrypted commentary that the first yes that was why I liked him because I saw he seventeen chapters had. If we accept that all those things understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I were present more to help Bloom than to entertain us could always get round him and I gave him all with empty but beautiful symbolism, then then the reathe pleasure I could leading him on till he asked son for their disappearance is obvious. All those things me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only were there expressly to goad Bloom into action, and with looked out over the sea ... and the rosegardens his question to Molly, he has acted. and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses Almost all the linearity of the plot disappears from and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of this chapter as well. Molly's thoughts could be put down the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair in any order and the entire chapter rearranged, since it is, like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a for the most part, a random access of all her memories. red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish But two things stand out in this flood of memory. The wall and I thought well as well him as another first is the only physical motion of the chapter; Molly and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again gets out of bed to go to the bathroom. There she discovyes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes 58 59 �I stead of the indifferent visage of "fate" or chance there might be a caring face similar to his own. In the modem age, it seems, we attach meaning only to those things which explicitly .tell us they are meaningful: written words, speech, memory. We pay attention to things that obviously come from the mind of ourselves or other humans, with the mark of having been conceived in our Thus the entire novel ends, looking back in a retrospecown mind or in one like ours. We think of information as tive arrangement to the genesis of their relationship. The something born of man. We, in this rational, data-packed final "yes" is both a remembrance of their early days toage, find it difficult to think of messages coming to us gether and an immediate answer to Bloom's question. through channels not based on language. At the same Fusing these two affirmations together shows that she time, we put our history on so high a pedestal that even wants to return to their earlier form of love for each other. if, like Bloom, we do resemble Christ, or Odysseus, so She, too, wants to begin again; after the return to the womb that thinking of ourselves in those terms would be helpthat this chapter represents, with the new day they will ful, we will not pay attention to the similarities. Cerbe reborn. The last image one has of the chapter, of Molly, tainly even if one recognized the similarities, one would of the whole book, is an absolute, all-embracing accepnot make the next step and say that what happened to tance. This recalls the first image we have of her, and the Christ is happening to oneself. first word she speaks in the book, as Bloom stands in the Joyce's role in the book, his relation to the characters hallway calling in to her, still in bed, to ask if she wants he has both created and reassembled, mimics the relation any meat for breakfast. "He added: 'You don't want anyof man to God. If we believe that the author means for thing for breakfast?' A sleepy soft grunt answered: 'Mn. ' authorship to be analogous, in the context of at least this " (4.58) He interprets this as a no, but it could just as one book, to being God, then the attributes he has given easily been a yes-she is portrayed as a completely amhimself within the finite bounds of the book make sense. bivalent being, not stirred by her husband enough even All authors have these attributes, but he plays them up: to articulate her desires, much less get out of bed. creative power, omnipotence, atemporality. And if Joyce Through examining the ending of the book, both how is analogous to God, then it only follows that we, as people Chapter Eighteen is written and why it is written as it is, rather than as readers, are analogous to Bloom. Bloom is we better understand Joyce's manipulations. Indeed, we the quintessential Everyman even as he resembles the can understand all his literary parallels, encrypted warngreat heroes of literature, being, in a way, the perfect exings, and meaningful coincidences as advice for Bloom ample of man's estrangement not just from God but from that the character himself can perceive. The role and the everything natural and good. His obliviousness to the responsibilities that the author has taken on can now be warnings the readers find so obvious must mimic the avclearly seen. He has conceived of the characters, aserage man's relationship to God. The ratio sembled their world, and created the progression their story will follow, and having done all this, writes the book. Character : Author :: Reader : God, He loves his characters as any maker must love his creation, and wishes the best for them as they play out the seems to .be what Joyce is finally suggesting, the ultiHomer-based plot. Since he is atemporal and hence the mate analogy of this book. only being involved that knows what will happen, he is We see Bloom, in his role as the both Christian and spurred, through his benevolence, to inco,rporate clues Jewish Everyman, try these methods and reject them. and warnings into Bloom's surroundings. He grants himBecause he has belonged to both religions , he is an outself the ability to talk to his creation as he writes the book, sider as well as an Everyman, and the alienation from to attempt to help that creation reach happiness. religion that may be inside us is visible in him. Early in From Bloom' s perspective, the situation is this: He the course of the day "the cold smell of sacred stone called is surrounded by urgent warnings and criticism of his him," (5 . 338) and he enters a Catholic church and actions, but he ignores them all. Some of them he may watches a service in progress. The process seems to have not have the literary background to decode, but most of very little to do with God, in his eyes. them he notices but regards as mere random events not deserving understanding. It does not occur to him who Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. might have placed these events in front of him, that inmy mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (18.1577) 60 It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called. There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. . . Thing is if you really believe it. (5.360) Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to . And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? . .. God's little joke. Then out she comes. Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes. (5.424) Joyce senses that the average reader has similarly given up hope on God, and the disconnection that Bloom portrays here shows just how empty much of the ritual of religion has become. The people he sees in the church don't seem to him to have much spirituality. With the message he is conveying to us here, he·shows us how we might better be able to find significance in the world after rejecting the methods that are conventionally acceptable. Perhaps, then, Joyce is saying that we are as terminally oblivious as Bloom is. We could interpret the constant drone of "random" coincidence and parallel in our own lives as having direct meaning for us, instead of discounting it as ignorable background. In the same day, each one of us has a different set of thoughts and sights, pieces of internal and external data, which perhaps is as custom made for each of us as Bloom's was for him. We should be looking for sense and order in the white noise of events in our days, deciphering messages meant for us from what seems like a chaotic, impassive world. Recall the augury, through bird flight, that is practiced in The Odyssey, among other places. Specifically, we should keep in mind the passage in Book Two in which the suitors ignore an old man's prophecies about a pair of eagles. He said that Odysseus lived still and would return soon to slay them if they didn't change their ways. They scoffed at his augury, made no change, and were all proved wrong at the end of the book. It would seem that Joyce is trying to tell us to look for God, not just through the normal channels such as prayer, ritual, and revelation, but re- united wjth the older, classical conception of a higher power. God is fate, luck, chance, as well as a discrete bei~g. C?od is r~absorbed into nature, the chaos upon which this world is based. Faith in God means then faith ~n the abs~nce of random activity, that all activity has mtent behmd it. If a thing was created, it was created at the hand of a rational maker, and thus no facet of the world should be considered ignorable. By extending the analogies in this way, we see that there is indeed a force in the universe that is helping us, but not in the rational ways to which we might have always looked before. Our God wants to help us as the gods helped Odysseus, but we are not attuned to hear his commentary. He is not neglecting us, we are just not looking at the right part of our world to find these divine messages. "Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made." (Romans 1.20) Thus chance, part of nature, is one of the things God made. In the end, Joyce shows us a way back to God, that if we look for him in his creations instead of ours, we will find guidance. What seemed like a negligent God, an uncaring universe, is a very personal one, with guidance tailored to each and every person. When we accept chance as a powerful force of nature, we come back into alignment with our ancient philosophy about deities, and the universe welcomes us back with a resounding Yes. 61 I �\ An Attempt at Unlocking "Benito Cereno" D Gregory Alan Brandt "Benito Cereno" is the story of one man's assaying the character of another: Captain Amasa Delano tries to comprehend the ambiguous words and actions of his counterpart, Don Benito, in order to determine wh~t~er he is a pitiable figure, unhinged by misfortune, or a sm1ster one. The American withholds judgment until Cereno leaps into his boat-seemingly to attack him-and he errs in judging then. As readers we must assay Delano's character and, further, the narrative as a whole. Is he an obtuse man who saves himself and his ship by dumb luck, or is his decision "to leave open margin" to "the Spaniard's black-letter text" a shrewd one? (55) 1 Is the story incidentally about slavery or is that institution at its heart? We should note that essay and assay both derive from the French essai, "an attempt, a trial," for this etymology points to a truth about writing: An essay is an attempt to grapple with a problem that jumps at us from the books we read and the text of our own lives. The problem that I have been wrestling with, and the one that I hope will afford a means of understanding "Benito Cereno" as a whole, concerns the many religious references in the tale. To put it simply, what are they doing there? How do they flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. (37) Something is not right with the foreign ship as well; it fails to show its colors, possibly a sign of piratical intentions , yet it is so badly handled that Delano dismisses any fears and soon goes to its aid. As we are not sure what to make of the grayness of the morning and the actions of the vessel, so we are perplexed by the religious overtones of these words. They do not seem to harmonize with the scene. For example, wimple carries benign associations, but here the sun, fit in? The first few references are slight and easily overlooked. The sea on the morning that the Spanish ship enters the harbor of St. Maria is "undulated into long roods of swells." (37) A rood is an English measure of length varying by locality from about five to eight yards. · Yet the word originally denoted a crucifix, in particular one placed at the chancel entrance of a medieval churc_h (hence the Old English poem The Song of the Rood). This overtone is quickly strengthened by the descriptions of "the far matin light" streaming from the cabin of the stranger and of the clouds that "wimpled" the .sun. (3.8) The words matin and wimple are both associated with religious orders, designatiilg respectively the first hour of prayer in the canonical day and the headpiece worn by nuns. These three references contribute to the feeling of strangeness that prevails at the opening of the story. The wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intrigante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loophole of her dusk saya-y-manta. (38) More importantly, these passing references prep~re us for the first explicit one, the likening of the Spamsh ship to "a whitewashed monastery after a thunderstorm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees.~' (38) Melville's simile is a rich one. At a simple level, it communicates the isolation and foreignness of the scene. The stranger seems cut off from both the land and other ships. Moreover, to one from Duxbury, Mass~chuset~s, even to a captain who has sailed on the Spanish Mam, the vision of a monastery in the Pyrenees might evoke thoughts of medieval romances, of the long ago .and.f~r away. When Delano steps aboard the San Dominick, i ~s no exaggeration to say that he enters a world that he ts not prepared to understand. . .. The word "whitewashed" is especially s1gmficant because of its association in the New Testament with feigned virtue. Paul refers to a hypocritical priest as a "whitewashed wall." (Acts 23:3) In the most widely known example, Jesus says, day is placid, but "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." (Mat- (f)lights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with 1 All citations refer to the Dover Thrift Edition. thew 23 :27) 62 We think ofBabo, whose appearance of simple loyalty to his master so touches Delano while concealing the "hive of subtlety" inside him. (104) The words "dead men's bones" certainly remind us of Don Alexandro Aranda's fate, for his skeleton lies underneath the sun-bleached canvas wrapped around the prow of the ship. The San Dominick has become his tomb, and we get a slight foreshadowing of this fact when Melville, in the paragraph describing the shrouded area, calls the roll of the ship "hearselike." (40) A far stronger hint is the allusion to Old Testament prophecy which preceeds this description: The stranger's "keel seemed laid, her ribs put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones." (39) For the first-time reader, these references ready oneperhaps not even consciously-for what is to come; for a reader going through the narrative again, they create a powerful resonance. I observed at the outset that this story is about ambiguity, about how one judges the shades of grey in words and deeds. It cannot be an accident that Melville uses the word grey so many times in the opening of the tale. White is no less an ambiguous color, however, and few have thought more deeply about whiteness than Melville. He devotes an entire chapter to it in Moby Dick, published four years before "Benito Cereno." In the novel he notes the many associations of white with "divine spotlessness and power," "the majesty of Justice," and "the benignity of age." (Chapter XLII) But it can also be the color of disease and death. Babo makes a great deal of the connection between white skin and skeletal whiteness: According to the deposition, when he re vealed Don Alexandro's remains, he asked the Spaniard "whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's ... " This question is followed by the injunction "Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader." (95) The problem of whiteness has bearing on the story because we can be tempted to break it down thematically to a conflict of white and black, good and evil. When Cereno says that "[t]he Negro" has cast a shadow over him that he cannot escape, we can interpret this remark to mean that the wickedness embodied by the blacks has overwhelmed his spirit. (The word negro in Spanish is itself equivocal, meaning both "black," as in the color or the man, and "wicked.") Delano resists this temptation and so should the reader, precisely because it is too reductive. The American not only is unwilling to resolve grayness into white or black but he also refrains from judging whiteness and blackness. We shall develop this idea further below. One last observation about the color white concerns a change Melville made from his source for the tale Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels. I~ Delano's work, the Americans take the Spanish and blacks to Concepcion, where the trial is held. Melville, however, alters the setting to Lima. He could have made the change simply for its own sake, that is, to fix his story in its own imagined place and assert his authority as its creator, not a mere reteller of another's narrative. Chapter XLII of Moby Dick provides us, though, with a more compelling reason. Here Melville gives the awful vision of a city rocked by "cathedral toppling earthquakes" and pounded by "frantic seas." He concludes: 63 -it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its distortions. These three sentences point us at once back to the "whitewashed monastery" at the opening of the tale and forward to its closing image, the view across the white city, whose church holds the bones of Aranda, to the monastery on Mount Agonia (agonia means "death agony" in Spanish) where Cereno is ensepulchered. We can now move forward to the next religious reference and the problem that it raises. Adding to the monastic appearance of the foreign vessel is its carrying what seems at first "a shipload of monks." (38) The narrator tells of "Black Friars pacing the cloisters." (39) Shortly thereafter we learn that the Spanish craft is named the San Dominick-after, we assume, the founder of the Dominican order, also known as the Black Friars. It quickly follows that the Spanish captain is "like some hypochondriac abbot"; (42) he listens to the reports of the ship's status in a manner not unlike that which might be supposed to have been his imperial countryman's, Charles V, just previous to the anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne. (44) The consistency of these references is pleasing, and again we see foreshadowing of Cereno's eventual fate. I want to argue, however, that the choice of San I �Dominick as a name is more than merely consistent. It is illuminating, giving us a way of approac.hing. the theme of "Benito Cereno." First we shall co~sider i~s ety.~ol­ ogy. Dominic is derived from the ~atl~ ~ommus, . lord or master." The Spanish title Don is sim1larly denved, and the Dons in the story are the slaves' masters- at least in name. Baba invariably refers to Cereno as "mas.ter." Dominic, however, comes from an inflection of dommus , dominicus, "belonging to a master." In the case of the saint the name indicates his servitude to the Master of Crea~ion and reminds us of Donne's claim in Holy Sonnet 14 that "I, I Except you enthrall me, never shall be f ree.. ." The name is a knot of master and slave, and we 1 are not any more certain of what to do with i.t than De ~n.o . 'th the knot thrown at him by the old sailor. Dominic IS Wl .. is properly the name of a servant, yet St. Domimc was one of the lords of the Church. Don is properly the name of a master, yet Don Benito is the slave of Babo and ~tufal. San Dominick is a fitting appellation for a slave ship, but the question for Delano and the reader is, who really pos- hardly then, to indulge in personal ~l~rms any VY_,~Y involving the imputation of malign evil m any man (37) might be a kind of wisdom distinct from "accuracy of intellectual perception." (38) What he himself refers to is Providence. After the old seaman tosses him the knot, he feels uneasiness and tries to resist it. His qualms pass away not through the agency of prayer but through the sight of his boat Rover, which "had often press~d the beach of Captain Delano's home ... " He says to himself: What, I, Amasa Delano- ... I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth on board a haunted pirate ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is someone above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed .. . (67) We can read these words in two different ways .. On ~he one hand, they might show a movingly simple faith, hke that of a child. On the other hand, we can argue more cynically that here is a man with ~ remar~abl~ lack of imagination. He cannot even conceive of his bemg murdered. He does not deserve the fate and hence whatever it is that is above-he himself never uses the wo~d God~ will not let it happen. Later in the story when his suspicions of Cereno return, he immediately feels remorse, . feanng that "he should by implication have betrayed an b " atheist doubt of the ever-watchful providenc~ ~ ove. (86) In this case, it is again the presence of his . household boat" and, above all, the beauty of the evenmg that sess the key? Another problem with the name concern~ the actual on Delano's narrative. The incident our story ts based _ lved the Spanish ship Tryal in 1805. Melville . mvo . · 1 · changed both the name and the date, settmg his ta e m 1799. He could have done so for the reason ·se~ o~t above, to put the story in a frame of his own imag.mmg. But why not, say, the San Salvador in 1801? Lea~mg through a chronology of world history, I found a possible answer. In 1799 Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former sl~ve, led an uprising against the Spanish on Santo Dommgo.' (San Dominick and Santo Domingo are, of course, d1~ferent versions of the same name.) This fact, along with the etymological analysis,suggests that Melville's cho~ce was purposeful and that he wanted the reader to consider the story as a commentary on slavery. . . Before we undertake this cons1derat10n, I want to examine one further religious aspect of "Benito Cereno," the faith-if that is the right word-that guides Delano. VY_e can compare him to a blindfolded man who walks unwittingly along the edge of a precipice ~here .the smallest misstep will destroy him. He has ghmmenngs that .the situation is dangerous but puts his feelings of.unease aside. And it is precisely his good-natured se.remty that saves him· if he were to act suddenly out of ill temper-to object 'too strenuously to Babo's hovering around Cereno perhaps-he would surely be at.tacked. It might ~e God that delivers him to safety or JUSt luck,. or he .~1ght be responsible for his own deliverance. Ht~ unw1.llmgness "except on extraordinary and repeated mcenttves, and restores his confidence. . In Delano's defense, we should note that he has little time to ponder theology during the .rescu~. He acts unreservedly to help a stranger in obvious d.istress when he could sail the Bachelor's Delight away. Like many people acting in the moment, he relies on his visceral sense of the situation. When faced with words or deeds that demand interpretation, he judges as magnanimously as.possible. So, for instance, he explains Cereno's occas10nal incivilitv as a product of his misfortunes. We can wonder abo~t Delano's mental acuity, but we cannot question his charity. Ultimately, Melville might not supply us with enough information to measure the. depth of the captain's faith, but, given Delano' s own km?ly .way of viewing others, we might hold that this behef is more than just a lack of imagination. In the remainder of this essay, I want to apply the 64 analysis of religious references to the conclusion of "Benito Cereno" and to determine whether, as suggested above, we can read the tale as an indictment of slavery. After giving the reader the deposition of Cereno, Melville makes the following enigmatic statement: If the deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick's hull lies open today. (101) This sentence recalls to us an earlier exchange among Babo, Cereno, and Delano. When Atufal, bound in chains, appears before the two captains to be given the opportunity to beg the Spaniard's pardon, Babo draws the American's attention to the fact that "master here carries the key." Delano then notices the key "suspended by a slender silken cord" around Cereno's neck and says, "So, Don Benito-padlock and key-significant symbols truly." (53) (So they are, although the American does not realize how truly and ironically he speaks.) The key is a symbol of dominion, whether over a man, the Church, or a narrative. It is interesting to observe that we say we have "mastered" a work and thereby "made it our own" when we attain a thorough knowledge of it and can unlock its complications. Melville here suggests that we have been given what we need, yet the hull of the San Dominick and the whole of the tale lie open to us only if Cereno 's statement to the court is the key. Melville does not write, "Thus the deposition serves as the key ... ";he leaves the matter open to doubt. For many who read the story, including Melville scholars, its central mystery is why Cereno at age 29 loses the will to live, "the Negro" having cast a shadow over him. The deposition provides little help with this complication. Taking up this problem, we should first remember Delano's remarks earlier in the story on the power of anguish to unhinge one's mind. Not only does Cereno endure physical hardships but he also suffers the effects of prolonged terror. He has seen his friends murdered and has lived in fear for his life for many days. One of Delano's most penetrating observations about the Spaniard occurs after Cereno recoils from one of the American's many innocuously meant comments: "He is like one flayed alive, thought Captain Delano; where may one touch him without causing a shrink?" (83) For one flayed alive, the mere weight of the air on one's skin"the thousand natural shocks I That flesh is heir to"-is intolerable. What makes Delano's thought especially powerful to the experienced reader is the fact that after the blacks hack Aranda to death with hatchets, they strip the skin from his body. (It is significant that Don Alexandro's bones come to rest at last in a church named for St. Bartholomew, for this saint was flayed alive while preaching in Arabia.) Don Alexandro's skin is tom off after his murder; Don Benito's spirit is rended while he is still alive, and the damage might simply be irreparable. Delano does not believe so, however. On the voyage to Lima, he does his best to cheer his fellow captain and understand his ailment. "Again and again," writes Melville, their conversation turned to Cereno's acting the part forced on him and Delano's failure to grasp what was really happening aboard the San Dominick. Don Benito sadly remarks: 65 ... you were with me all day, stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To such degree may malign machinations and deceptions impose. So far may even the best man err in judging the conduct of one of the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted. But you were forced to it, and and you were in time undeceived. Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and with all men. (102-3) At the broadest level, we might conclude from this passage that Cereno despairs to live in a world in which such misjudgments can occur. If malignity and the deceits that it inspires can fool even the best of men, can one ever truly be sure that he understands another person? In this interpretation, Cereno is overwhelmed by his realization of the power of evil among humanity and so retreats from it, first to a monastery and then to a grave. I wonder, though, whether Cereno's insight is not more personal. Don Benito is a young man from a wellknown family, "a sort of Castilian Rothschild, with a noble brother, or cousin, in every great trading town of South America." (55) At least some of his family's wealth has undoubtedly come from the slave trade, and he is comfortable with the institution before this voyage. He might well never have thought about slavery-it was merely a necessary part of his country's mining and agricultural interests in the New World. What then if the "deceptions" that he mentions are those one puts upon himself? That is, when Cereno speaks of an error in judgment, perhaps he is thinking of Aranda's and his own in under- �estimating the desire of the blacks for freedom and overestimating their tractability. The two probably assumed that the slaves were reasonably content with their lot and, in any event, incapable of organizing and carrying out a rebellion. They deceived themselves about the capabilities of the blacks because their fortunes rested on a slave labor, an institution premised on the slave's lack of humanity. They are brutally undeceived: to gain their liberty, the blacks act with all the craft, vigor, and ruthlessness that rebellious whites are capable of. If errors in judgment are possible when the two men involved share occupations and cultural heritage, how much more difficult is it to weigh the conduct of one from another race and culture? Don Benito himself is made a slave. He is compelled to say things that he does not want to say and to do things he finds repugnant. He knows the fear of one whose life is entirely at the whim of another, and we sense that Baba enjoys provoking terror in the Spaniard. The shaving incident supports this last generalization and also provides a good example of the curious reversal of the master and slave relationship we noted when we examined the etymology of Dominic. In this scene the ostensible servant is wielding all the power while "master" is in his thrall. For an instant Delano's mind grasps this fact, and we are told that " ... in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block." (74) The more Cereno shudders, the more coolly professional Baba acts. To follow out this reading of the story's conclusion, I would argue that what leads to Don Benito's despair and lies behind his utterance "The Negro" is not wickedness but "subtlety." (104) He cannot believe how badly he misjudged the blacks until they become his master. The reason, therefore, that he never again looks at Babo--faints before the tribunal rather than do so-is his unwillingness to admit that the black ruled over him, used him as a means to an end. His former assumptions about his own superiority have been destroyed and he cannot live without them. In other words, he has had an experience and learned something about himself that he cannot bring into his understanding of the world and of his place in it. He cannot forget what has happened and he cannot live with it. After Cereno's enigmatic two-word reply, Melville writes what are among the saddest sentences in the tale: There was a silence, while the moody man sat, slowly and unconsciously gathering his mantle about him, as if it were a pall. There was no more conversation that day. (103) Like Bartleby turning hi s face to the wall of the Tombs, Don Benito resigns himself to the quietness of dust. Captain Delano, by contrast, is untroubled by whatever it is that afflicts Cereno en route to Lima. Fanned by the mild trade winds, he enjoys the beauty of the sea and sky, and cannot fathom why his companion does not. He acknowledges the role of Providence and the importance of his own "good-nature, compassion, and charity" (102) in carrying him through the danger. His own thinking about human malignity and slavery seems unchanged by his experience on the San Dominick. One cannot deny that Delano does patronize the blacks throughout the story. Melville writes that "like most men of good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to Negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs ." (73) Elsewhere he thinks of them as "too stupid" to be in complicity with Cereno. (65) Yet he also sees "pure tendernes s and love" (63) in a black woman's treatment of her infant and, under the misapprehension that Cereno has injured Babo to retaliate for the shaving cut, sympathizes with the black. He thinks, "Ah, this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.Poor fellow!" (77) When the water arrives from his ship, the American doles it out equitably: ugly passions" in both master and slave. Captain Del who thinks of blacks in terms of "the unas . . ano , pmng content. . ment of a limited mind" (73) is no paradigm of enlightenment; he would be an incredible character if he were. Bu~ he does trea~ the blacks as if they have as much right to 1t;e as the whites . Constitutionally unwilling to assay men s h~arts by their ambiguous words and actions, he acts chantably to all and so delivers himself and his crew to safety. The original investigation of religious elements has th~refore led us to one way of reading "Benito Cereno." Given th~ nature of this "grey" tale, we cannot claim to have the i~terpretation of it or the best one, but we have made quenes and con~ections that merit further thought. In ans:v~r to the openmg question, we can now say that th~ rebgi~us references serve three ends: They help to umfy. the i~agery of the story, contribute to our under- stand1~g of Its central characters, and thereby point us to a crucial theme. These "significant symbols" are not the key that ~nlocks the tale, but perhaps they bring us closer to knowmg how to find the key. He complied, with republican impartiality as to this republican element, which always seeks one level, serving the oldest white no better than the youngest black, excepting, indeed, poor Don Benito, whose condition, if not rank, demanded an extra allowance. (70) Judged by today 's standards, Delano is a racist, but he does do what Cereno cannot, namely, regard the blacks as fellow humans and treat them accordingly. He is a decent man, and his virtue, as noted earlier, is that in a situation where he feels unable to draw clear distinction , he withholds judgment, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. "Benito Cereno" thus sounds no strident tocsin for the abolition of slavery but instead makes a quiet argument. If one is willing to entertain the notion that another race possesses at least some measure of humanity, then he cannot wonder when that race plots revenge for its enslavement. After Babo is captured, he gives every indication that, offered again the chance to revolt, he would do so, and he goes to his death with noteworthy dignity. During the passage to Peru,"[h]is aspect seemed to say: since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words." (103) Denying the human qualities of such a man "breeds 66 67 �St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland 21404 NON-PROFIT ORGAN. U.S. POSTAGE PERMIT NO. 66 PAID LUTHERVILLE, MD � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. 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Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Spring 1995 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d74c9b17cafddaddef1603965a4613b4.pdf ae383d19d225cd2b273d8301fda978a4 PDF Text Text r FALL 1987 �ENERGEIA: The activity in which anything is fully itself. it ... vou EVEpyEta ~wit ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) Cover: "IMPRESSIONS OF A POLISH ARTIST" by Patricia Dawson Acrylic Painting Photographed by Greg Ferguson Printed by the St. John's College Press St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland Staff: Rachel Boyce Anne Carpenter Carloss Chamberlain Jana Giles Glenn Haya Erika Hoffman Daniel Hoh Michael McShane Ange Mlinko Kenneth Paradis Dwayne Rodgers Sarah Waters Co-Editors: Laurie Cooper Rhonda Datcher Faculty Advisor: Henry Higuera Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published three times a year and distributed among the students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis. The Energeia staff welcomes submissipns from all members of the community-poems, stories, essays, artwork, photographs, original math proofs, and the like. �CONTENTS BEFORE FIRST SEMINAR Beth Cross 1 PRIZE-WINNING SENIOR ESSAY (ANNAPOLIS) PENTHESILIA: -A LOVE AFFAIR WITH ACHILLES-BELONGING AND HAPPINESS IN THE WORLD Catherine Irvine 2 ON THE SONNET Daniel Hoh 35 CONVERSATION #4 Brian Cole 35 UNTITLED Dwayne Rodgers 36 IOCASTA'S SONG Rachel Duel 37 ON MECHANICS, GEOMETRY, AND NEWTON'S CONCEPT OF GOD; OR, AN ATTEMPT TO READ THE PRINCIPIA AS A PHILOSOPHICAL WORK Jana Giles 38 CARTESIAN EQUATIONS FOR RECTILINEAR FIGURES Kim Paffenroth 43 IMAGINARY GEOMETRY? Marcus Eubanks 47 THE BUS RIDE Jennifer Mischer 48 THE PASSION Ange Mlinko 50 THE DEATH OF ROMEO Erika Wilson 51 ARIADNE ASHORE Claudia Probst 52 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE MOON Beth Cross 53 PRIZE-WINNING JUNIOR ESSAY (ANNAPOLIS) REFLECTIONS ON LEIBNIZIAN SUBSTANCE Robert Demajistre 55 AT CALVERT CLIFFS Gretchen Berg 64 UNTITLED Anne Carpenter 64 THE CONVERSATION Adam Eggers 65 BRIDGE Tequila Brooks 66 IN THE BLACK Patricia Dawson 67 HONORABLE MENTION-FRESHMAN ESSAY (ANNAPOLIS) A DISSCUSSION OF JUSTICE AND ITS EVOLUTION IN AESCHYLUS' ORESTEIA TRILOGY Kenneth Paradis 68 A LETTER FROM AN ALUMNUS 79 �-----~-~------------------------------- -------- Before First Seminar Beth Cross ('88) The evening from solid stone rises s o sure of itself that our footsteps only echoe, the blue that does not stir with out passing words. In the twilight our ideas fold into themselves, their impression forms silent curves in the conversations held under the twinkling sillhouettes of locust leaves . What we cover in our eyes what is hidden from our gaze, the night already knows as if whispered far out at sea where the tide unbridled decides its heav ing weight in favor of the shore--a balance, returning We are returning t o each other ' s ta l k to the quiet of well- lighted rooms where behind straight back chairs black ·rectangles of night hang listening. We bend with intent and pending breath to the voyage. 1 �Penthesilia: -A Love Affair With AchillesBelonging and Happiness in the World Catherine Irvine ('87) My essay is concerned with finding happiness in the world. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us, "all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness " (Bk. I, Ch . 3 : l i nes 13-21). He goes on to say that the nature of happiness, however, is not so easily agreed upon. I can only offer a personal thought: happiness is a contentment which is achieved when an individual is in harmony with himself and has gained the things he deems are important for him. I may perhaps be forgiven for the vague character of my def inition, since it is not happiness that I want to explore. I would like to show that the ability to be happy depends upon an important relationship: an individual's feeling of belonging in the world. It is my impression, and I readily admit it stems from personal experience, that in the modern world we lack a sense of place . It is a world in which the laws governing behavior are constantly shifting, and the notions of the 'the good' are always changing. No doubt these things were t rue in Aristotle's world also, but I think that without a sense of place in the configuration of the whole, it is much more dif ficult to come to be happy in the world than it has been in the past. In support of this notion that we lack belonging in the world and that this af fects our ability to achieve happiness, I will compare two charac.ters from literary 1 works. The first is Homer's Achilleus • The second is Penthesilea , Queen of the Amazons, from a play of her name . It was written by the early nineteenth century playwright Heinrich von Kleist. The premise I go on is that the nature of an artist's work reflects, in some measure, the consciousness of the people of his time . The time gap between these two works will then allow a comparison of how a classical individual and a modern individual each feels in relation to his world , and , base d upon that, a sense of whether or not he can come to be content in the world. The choice of these two characters from these particular wo r ks is not a random one, nor does it rest entirely on the fact that they were pr oduced in such different times. Penthesilea purposefully invites comparison with The Iliad . The most general way in which the two works are connected i s in t he action of the p l ay: i t t akes place during the Trojan War, after Achilleus has killed Hektor . Kleist makes use of the myth that the Amazons, led by Penthesilea, went to the battle at Troy as allies of Priam. Kleist also plays upon the story that Achilleus slew Penthesilea and fell in love with her as she died at his feet . But the interesting thing about Penthesilea is that Kleist alters these myths. In the play, the Amazons are allied with no one, and it is not Achilles who kills their Queen, but Penthesilea who kills her beloved, Achilles, in a maenad-like frenzy that calls to mind Euripides's Bacchae. The s i mi l aritie s be t ween the works connect them closely , but it is alterations like these that make it intriguing to try to discover what Kleist intended to convey in the play . Kleist brings to bear his interpretation of Achilleus in his treatment of his own characters, Penthesilea and Achilles. Penthesilea reflects certain aspects of Achilleus, while Achilles takes on other characteristics of the great hero. Penthesilea displays many of the striking feature of Achilleus. For example, she too 2 seeks fame, the fame gained through conquering the most renowned figure in The Iliad . She says, "Once more the battle calls me to the field./ That young, defiant war- god I will tame him . / My friends , ten thousand suns melted into one/ Vast heat - ball seem not half so bright to me,/ So glorious, as victory over him" (Scene 5: p. 186). She is also protrayed as splendid, decked out in "war's rich panoply" (Scene 1: p. 168), and thirsty for the clamour of battle. Odysseus describes his first sight of her in the following way: as the dawn comes creeping up the sky Amazement seizes us ... For there in the wide valley at our feet Fiercely engaged with all the Trojan force We see the Amazons! Penthesilea, As storm winds sweep and rend the scudding wrack, Tumbles the fleeing Trojans down the vale As though her only though across the Hellespont, Ay, off earth's orb itself, to scatter them. (Scene 1: p. 168) Penthesilea, like Achilleus, is the child of an immortal and a mortal, Ares and the Amazon Queen Otrere. She also has about her the air of haughtiness that Achilleus possesses. There is another important respect in which Penthesilea and Achilleus resemble each other. Just as Achilleus must weigh his two fates against one another, Penthesilea must struggle with the way in which she should live her life: as a woman or as a warrior who thrives on the violence of battle. Achilleus, once Patroklos has died, moves in fury towards the end of his life and the glory that will be his. So too does Penthesilea strive after the fall of Achilles, because of the good she thinks this act will bring her. Achilles resembles his namesake in less striking and less flattering ways. He falls short of the image one has of Achilleus, for the depth of spirit and strength of character that Achilleus displays in The Iliad are transferred from his character into that of Penthesilea. For example, Achilleus' s refusal to participate in the fighting following his conflict with Agamemnon is interpreted by Kleist as an insensitivity to the needs and desires of his fellow Greeks. In the play, when Agamemnon orders his forces to stop fighting senselessly with the Amazons, Achilles disregards the orders and instead pursues his own personal goal, which is to capture Penthesilea and have his way with her. He says, Fight then like eunuchs, if it pleases you. A man I feel myself to these women, Though alone of all the host, I'll stand my ground. ••. All's one to me; by heav'n you have my blessing, If you would creep away to Troy again. ••. In short, go off. I'll follow you to Troy; I'll soon have had my way with her. But though I had to woo her many long months through Ay, years - I will not guide my chariot there ••. Nor once again see Ilium's tower'd heights, Until I first have had my sport with her. · (Scene 4: p. 185 ) Here Kleist's contempt for the cause of Achilleus's anger, the abduction of Briseis, 3 �is revealed. He makes Achilles involved only in satisfying his own desires, which in this case involve no high goal of honor, but simply the bedding of a woman. Kleist also protrays Achilles as dishonest and manipulative. In Scene 11, he walks into the Amazon encampment completely unarmed and speaking words of peace. Yet he comes accompanied by men who are armed, and he feels no compunction at ordering them to kill the women who threaten him. This is Kleist's reading of what Achilleus does in Book IX of The Iliad: he presents himself as being moved by things that inspire his desire for a swift return to Phthia, when he is actually moved by pride and bitter anger against Agamemnon. One thing that Kleist does do, however, is to give the character of Achilles the epithet 'god-like.' No other character in the play is consistently given such an epithet. In line with this, Kleist retains the Homeric image in the clear way he describes Achilles: Radiant he stands upon the rising ground, Cased all in steel his steed and he; sapphire Nor chrysolite cannot throw back such rays! The earth herself, the gay, flower-sprinkled earth, Wrapped now in thunder vapors' blackest gloom, Lies but a dark background, a murky foil, To make his flashing glory brighter yet! ( Scene 7: pp. 198-199; First Girl ) This passage calls to mind the image of Achilleus standing upon the ditch and screaming, helped by Athena who drapes the aegis about his shoulders and sets him all ablaze with fire ( Iliad, Bk. XVIII: lines 203-206) . Yet it is nothing but a description that has a resemblance to that scene. It lacks the power Achilleus wields in that moment and the sorrow that has engulfed his heart. Kleist's Achilles is incapable of such depth of emotion. Though both Achilles and Penthesilea share aspects of the Homeric hero, nevertheless it is Penthesilea who captures the attention. It is her on whom I will concentrate with respect to Achilleus. Because my purpose is to examine how a feeling of belonging is crucial to finding contentment in the world, I will first lay out the natures of the worlds in which these two characters live. Then, I will examine whether or not they belong in their worlds. Finally, I will present my analysis of how both characters come to contentment and of whether their contentments are compatible with their worlds. In each case, I will first put for th the Homeric situation and then contrast Penthesilea's situation with it. The world that Homer puts before us in The Iliad is a sharply defined one. Each thing has its proper place and mode of being, and each is portrayed in a detailed, clearly described manner. The most striking element in this carefully outlined world is the presence of the Olympian gods. They are introduced fully formed, and rather than being unearthly in character they are potent forces, supernaturally and physically. We see their strong presence in the very first pages of The Iliad when Apollo angrily strides down from Olympos to punish the Achaians for their treatment of Chryses (Bk. I: lines 43-52). The gods are often the inspiration for men's actions. In almost every way that a man can be moved to do something, the gods are found to be the cause. Zeus, for example, is the reason for Hektor's extraordinary valor as he makes his way unhesitatingly toward the Achaian ships in Book XV. This is a case in which the spirit of some emotion or physical attribute is instilled into men by the gods. There are also instances in which the gods introduce notions into the minds of men. In the beginning of the poem, it is mentioned that Achilleus called the Achaians to assembly be- 4 cause the thought was "a thing put into his mind 'by the goddess of the white arms, Hera" (Bk . I: line 55). Agamemnon's experience with Zeus's deceptive dream (Bk. II: lines 20-47) is another example of how the gods put ideas and courses of action into the minds of men. The gods even appear physically and attempt to make mortals do their wishes. In one memorable case, Athena appears to Achilleus and grasps him by the hair in order to stop him from attacking Agamemnon (Bk. I: lines 194-214). In a later passage, the river Skamandros, angered at Achilleus's slaughter of the Trojans, sends his flooding waters out to hold Achilleus occupied with saving himself rather than with killing men (Bk. XXI: lines 235-272). Given the unavoidable presence of the gods in their lives, the men of The Iliad put great stock in communication with the deities. Achilleus's response to Athena's words of counsel is this: 'Goddess, it is necessary that I obey ... [you] •.• /angry though I am in my heart. So it will be better./If any man obeys the gods, they listen to him also.' (Bk. I: lines 215-218) Achilleus feels the ne9essity, and the advantage, of dealing with the gods in much the same way as he would with men. It is not simply that the gods are more powerful and capable of bringing disaster down upon men. It is also because the influence of the gods in the lives of men is just as immediate as the influence that men have upon men. Libation, prayer, and sacrifice are therefore integral parts of the Homeric man's life. He seeks to know the will of the gods by observing natural phenomena, and he seeks to preserve his well-being through prayer and the rendering of proper respect. He knows that, just as men, the gods like to be shown favor. Phoenix's advice to Achilleus, when he warns of the danger of such immovable anger, captures this principle of communication with the gods: The very immortals I can be moved; their virtue and honor and strength are greater than ours are,/and yet with sacrifices and offerings for endearment,/with libations and with savour men turn back even the immortals/in supplication. (Bk. IX: lines 497-501) These words bring to light another aspect of the relationship that men have with the gods: the gods exceed men in all things, yet these things are shared in the natures of both. Indeed, all parts of the Homeric world reflect one another. Natural phenomena re fl ec t t he mood of the gods, and men are compared to both the gods , as in 'god-like Achilleus,' and to animals in nature. For example: So these lords of the Danaans killed each his own man/ . .• as wolves make havoc among lambs or young goats in their fury,/catching them out of the flocks. (BK. XVI: lines 351-353) Yet the connection between man, god, and nature goes further than this. All three are intimately tied together. There is a thread of commonality running through them. Rivers and winds are gods, men are children of the gods, and even the gods and the animals may love and produce offspring (Bk. XX: lines 215-225). Thetis, mother of Achilleus, is a good example of this merging of diff.erent beings into one another. She is a goddess, but her realm is not mystical. It is utterly natural: she is of the sea. And though she is a goddess, she was given in marriage to a mortal and bore a son from that union. 5 �Though the world of The Iliad is held together by the meeting and mixing of its parts, nevertheless it is a world of war. This means that it is a world in which all things are opposed to one another . All the parts, while overlapping into one another, remain distinct and struggle to maintain that distinction. Thetis through her association with Peleus does not forfeit her immortal status, and when she bears a son he is not a hybrid of god and man. Achilleus is human and subject to all the laws that other humans are subject to - most significantly , death. Although having a goddess for a mother endows him with privileges (such as knowing what his fate will be ) , Achilleus belongs to one specific mode of being, and that cannot be changed. One of the taboos that prohibit the attempt by a being of one kind to place himself among the ranks of another kind is the ban upon a warrior for bidding him to battle with a god. Zeus's comforting words to Aphrodite, when she suffers from an attack by Diomedes, revea l this ban: 'It was the godded Athene who drove on this man / against you; poor fool, the heart of Tydeus' son knows nothing / of how that man who fights the immortals lives for no long time.' (Bk. V: lines 405 - 407) And Achilleus too, despite his fury, stops pursuing Apollo when he discovers he is chasing a god: Deeply vexed Achilleus of the swift feet spoke to him: / 'you have balked me . . . most malignant of all gods, / when you turned me here away from the rampart, else many Trojans / would have caught the soil in their teeth .. . Now you have robbed me of great glory, and rescued these people / lightly, since you have no retribution to fear hereafter . / Else I would punish you.' ( Bk. XXIII : lines 14-20) Striving to maintain one's proper place reveals itself internally among the separate beings and it takes its form in self-assertion . There is, for instance, a constant struggle between Zeus and the other gods. Zeus finds himself compelled to pr oclaim his superiority over and over again, since the other gods are always thinking of ways to circumvent his commands. Many of the descriptive passages linking men to animals also illustrate this self - assertiveness. The passages not only show how man and animal come into conflict (like the wolves who attack man's livestock) (Bk . XVI: lines 351 - 353), but they also depict animals battling one another in an attempt to prove t hemse l ves t he stronger (Bk. XVI : l ines 823 - 829) . Among men, this self-assertiveness is displayed in vaun t ing. The war riors meet, hurl threats at one another, and when one falls or flees from fear, the other immediately begins to declare his dominance. Diomedes's fear of Hektor's boasting grasps the importance that this assertiveness has for the men of The Iliad: 'this thought comes as a bitter sorrow to my heart and my spirit; / for some day Hektor will say openly before the Trojans: / "The son of Ty deus, running before me, fled to his vessels." / So he will vaunt; and then let the wide earth open beneath me. ' (Bk. VIII: lines 147-150) The strong presence that the past has for both gods and men contributes to the significance of autonomy in the Homeric world. The closeness felt to the people and events of the past causes men and gods to be acutely aware of their own being and position in the world. The value that is placed upon genealogies illustrates the 6 weight which the past carries . When Glaucos and Diomedes face one another in Book VI, they give up any hostile stance as soon as they discover the friendship t hat had existed between t heir fathers (Bk. VI : lines 119- 231) . Connected to the proximity that the past has to the present is the power of fate in the world . Jus t as all t hat has occurred has a strong influence on the way that men and gods behave, so too does fate bring them close to the world in all its forms . It gives all their actions an important and immovable place in the patterns of their lives, and this in turn gives their lives a definite place in the pattern of the whole . Despite the opposition between groups and within them, everything is once again connected by a thread of commonality through fat e. Fate exists externally to all things . It operates from the outside, reaching into the world to tie it up into a whole. No one, not even a god, has the ability to evade it . Zeus has the power to direct the course of events and set the mechanism of fate in motion. He looks far ahead to see what must occur in order that all the ele ments in the cosmos (actions, emotions, etc.) may come together and bring destiny to fulfillment . He tells Hera, 'le t Pho i bos Apollo stir Hektor back into battle,/breathe strength into him • .• Let him drive strengthless / panic into the Achaians, and turn them back ... Let them be driven in flight and tumble back onto the benched ships/ ... And [Achilleus] shall rouse up Patroklos/ . . . And glorious Hektor shall cut down Patroklos / .•. In anger for him brilliant Achilleus shall then kill Hektor.' (Bk . XV : lines 59-68) Although from passages like this it might seem that Zeus can arbitrarily arrange what is to take place , it must be remembered that behind all the scheming lies the general question of Achilleus's destiny and the manner of its fulfillment. It is not simply the accomplishment of Thetis's request that Zeus grant her son glory , it is also t ha t Achilleu s must die if he is granted that glory . If he kills Hektor , t hen he will die. Even Zeus must work under the dictates of fate. His own wishes are irrelevant. He cannot save Sarpedon from death (Bk. XVI : lines 433 - 457), and when Hekt or finally faces Achilleus, Zeus mus t check his golden scales if it is truly the right moment for Hektor to die (Bk. XXII : lines 208 - 212) . The world of The Iliad is hence very ordered . There are certain laws which op erate in specific ways , and each object has its own place in the scheme of things. It can be looked at alone, clearly outlined by the things around it , or it can be seen as a distinct unit that goes into the structure of the whole . The world of Penthesilea could no t be mor e different f r om the Homeric one . The comment that best describes i t is uttered by a Greek man whom the Amazons have captured . He asks , "was ever dream so crazed as this reality?" (Scene 6: p. 197). Penthesilea' s world is full ~f confusion. It consists of a swirling mass of circumstances which do not come together in any coherent whole . There is nothing in the play which can be looked at in its own right without reference to other things, things both in the play as well as those brought to it by the reader. For instance, the memory of The Iliad is present throughout; Euripides's Bacchae, in its most hor rifying moment, is reproduced in Achilles's death; Phaedra's consuming passion for Hippolyt us i s c l e a r ly pre sent in Penthesilea ; and the myth of Actae on 's death, his punishment for looking upon Artemis while she bathed, is also woven into the tale. The descriptive passages bring to a focus the c9nfusion which is prevalent in the play. The dust which the armies raise up as they wage war obscures the vision, so that those looking on cannot see what is happening: One great dust cloud, 7 �With flashes here and there of arms and armor: The eye is helpless, strain how it will to see. A struggling mass of maids - and horses too All in a jumbled welter. Chaos' self, The aboriginal, had more of order. (Scene 3: p. 180; Dolopian) The contrast between The Iliad and Penthesilea is pointed out descriptively by Kleist himself. There is a vision of Achilles rising over the top of a hill, clearly visible in every part: Look! Look! Do you not see? Above that ridge A head appearing , plumed and helmeted? And now the neck - the massive neck beneath? The shoulders now, the arms in flashing steel? Now! Now! - The mighty, deep-set chest; oh see! ... His horses now, their white -starred foreheads - See! His chariot's steeds; still but their legs - their hooves Are hidden by the summit of the ridge. Ah, now! Clear-cut against the sky behold The whole equipage, blazing like the sun That rises jubilant in his early spring. (Scene 3 : p. 177; Myrmidon) Yet within a very short time, a cloud of dust billows up in pursuit of Achilles: But, look! Behind him - ! ••• At the mountain's foot Dust Dust, uptowering like a thundercloud And like the lightning sweeping on (Scene 3: p. 178) The world of confusion in Penthesilea is pursuing the clearly delineated figure from the Homeric world. The first clue in the action of the play pointing to the confusion in this world is provided in the opening scenes. The Greeks and the Trojans have no idea why the Amazons have burst into the midst of their conflict. Each thinks that Penthesilea must have come to fight beside one or the other , but she quickly disabuses them of this idea. The Amazons' are at Troy for their own special reason: to reap a crop of magnificent warriors to take back to Themiscyra as future fathers of their children. The Amazons' independence in this war between the Trojans and the Greeks spreads confusion. The sensible way in which the war was being waged, Greek against Trojan, is disturbed. The antagonists find themselves allied against the warrior women. Odysseus says in bewilderment , Each force in Nature , creates its opposite And fights with this; no room for any third. What quenches fire will not make water boil And turn to steam; likewise the opposite. Yet here appears a deadly foe of both, That makes fire doubt: should it not flow like water? And water; should it haply burn like fire? 8 The hard-press'd Trojan, .fleeing the Ama3on Shelters behind a Grecian shield; the Greek Defends him from the maiden's blade, and both Trojan and Greek are almost forced, despite The rape of Helen, to hold each o~her friends And join to fight a common enemy. (Scene 1: p. 170) Among the Amazons themselves there is much confusion. Penthesilea is thrown into confusion at her first sight of Achilles (Scene 1: p. 169; Ody.), and from that point on her disturbance communicates itself to her army. Bent upon pursuing Achilles, she ceases to pay careful attention to her role as leader of the Amazon host. As a result, none of her people knows exactly what is going on. Penthesilea a lso ultimately causes the physical disbandment of her army. She orders that no one other than herself may harm Achilles. Hence, when he comes marching into the Amazon camp no one can stop him. Penthesilea refuses to leave, and the army must abandon her and flee leaderless in many directions. In this world of confusion, nature, so communicative in Homer's Iliad, is hostile. The landscape is hard and cold, full of dust and rfck. Indeed, it serves only as a landscape, a place in which human action is staged. Through its lifeless dust it clouds the sight, and with its rocks it hinders human progress, unrelenting in the face of human advances (Scene 2: p. 175-176). We see young Amazon girls eargerly seek for roses in the plain, but the land is not bountiful. It will not serve their need, but keeps itself protected from interaction with them: 'tis harder far to win Roses upon these fields than prisoners. Though on the hills around the bounteous harvest Of Argive youths stand rank on rank and wait Only for reaping by the eager scythe, Yet in these vales so sparingly, believe me, And so well-fortified the roses bloom, That it is lighter work to hew through lances Than break a way through their entwined thorns. (Sc ene 6: p. 194; Second Girl) In this world no river god, not even in anger, would raise its voice to speak with a mortal in the way that Skamandros spoke to Achilleus (Iliad, Bk. XXI: lines 211-221). Just as nature is devoid of communicative life, ~oo are the gods far away. This is seen in many ways, and it is even said by Prothoe, queen Penthisilea's closest companion: "what thy eyes behold, /It is the world, our transient, brittle world,/On which the gods look down but from afar" (Scene 24: p. 261). When the gods are present, it is in name only. They do not speak, they do not come down from Olympos to aid or to hinder, and they send no omens or dreams. A good example of the distance that the gods have from the lives of men is found in Penthesilea's relationship with her father, Ares. Whereas Achilleus always has close contact with Thetis and hears what his fate will be from her lfps, Penthesilea never comes into contact with her father. Though she does hear from him that she is to lead the Amazons against the men at Troy, it is her mortal mother Otrere who tells her this. Another sign of man's alienation from the gods is the presence of a priesthood. Although there are priests in The Iliad like Chryses and interpreters like Kalchas, these do not play as great a role in the lives of men as the gods themselves do. But in Penthesilea, the priestesses of Diana serve as mediators between the goddess and her people . Diana's words and Ares's words come through the mouths of mortals (Scene 7: 9 �p. 199; High Priestess). It is not, however, quite correct to say that the gods have disappeared altogether. In their external manifestations, the way we know them from The Iliad, they are gone. But they reappear in Penthesilea in different form. They are stirrings within the individual. They belong to the human soul. Penthesilea is the character through which we see them. She often speaks of the powerful presences that are with her, but these presences are companions of her emotions, not the causes of the emotions. In her passionate haste to bind Achilles to her on the battlefield, Penthesilea feels the presence of the furies, and when she believes she has conquered him she feels beneficial deities joining her. She tells Prothoe, Let my poor heart Like a dirt-dabbled, happy child, sink deep One wondrous moment in the stream of joy. With every splash in those exultant waves A stain is washed from my sad, sinful breast. They flee at last, the dread Eumenides; I feel the approach of godlike presences And I would join my voice to their happy choir. (Scene 14: p. 221) These furies are not of the same kind as those who pursued Orestes, seeking vengeance for his matricide. They are not given external form. They are tools with which Penthesilea describes the nature of her own passions and desires. These 'furies' push Penthesilea in the same way the Eumenides drove Orestes to Apollo's sanctuary, but they push from within. There can be no such statements as "He [Apollo] spoke, and breathed huge strength into the shepherd of the people [Hektor]" (Iliad, Bk. XV: line 262) in Penthesilea, for such stirrings belong entirely to the soul. Penthesilea also says, "Man can be great in grief, ay, even a hero, /But only in happiness is he a god" (Scene 14: p. 222). What she is conveying through these words is that the clear boundaries between man and god that exist in The Iliad are lacking in her world. The gods have moved from Olympos into the human heart, and man himself can, upon achieving happiness, become a god. He is not 'god-like,' he is god, and he can be ruler over all things, not just over other men. Penthesilea, in her one moment of joy commands, "Out then and seek o'er the fields! And if /The niggard spring refuse me roses, breathe,/Breathe on the plain and it will burgeon for me!" (Scene 14: p. 220). Since the gods no longer are jn their own right, there are no ceremonious attempts to be in harmony with them. There are no libations, no hecatombs, and the only time something like a prayer is uttered, it is in a call of desperation - a cry that begs for the aid and presence of the gods in a world that is empty of them: nThee, Ares, I invoke, thou terrible one! /Thee, awful founder of our house, I call!/Oh! Swiftly send me down thy brazen car" (Scene 20: p. 246; Penthesi5ea). In the same way that the gods have lost their own forms and have become part of human heart, fate loses its external power to pull the world together in a grand scheme. It is changed into an extension of the human will . When Penthesilea refuses to flee from Achilles and his henchmen who come to raid the Amazon camp, Prothoe tells her, "Then, as thou wilt!/ If thou canst not, wilt not - good! Dry they eyes./ What thou canst not achieve: the gods forbid/ That I should ask it of thee" (Scene 9: p. 20~And when the High Priestess remarks contemptuously, "Cannot! I Though nothing holds her, no fate binds her here/ Only her infatuate heart!" (ibid), Prothoe retorts, 10 That is her fate!· You'd say steel fetters are unbreakable, Would you not? I say: she could break them, perchance, But never this feeling you treat so lightly. What darkly stirs within her, who can say? A riddle is every heart's deep-flowing tide. (ibid . ) Penthesilea's world lacks the nicely constructed pattern of Achilleus's world. The rules are harder to understand, since both the power of the gods and of fate have been transported into the individual. Penthesilea must bear all responsibility for her thoughts and actions. She cannot say, as Agamemnon can, that her anger comes from Zeus (Iliad , Bk. XIX: lines 76-138 ). In addition, Penthesilea lacks the security of knowing that her actions are fated to be as they are and that they are leading her toward a definite and unavoidable end. She must also bear the burden of choice: she governs the direction that her life will take. Again, the High Priestess says of her, "Oh, she runs steeply down to the abyss!/ 'Tis not to Achilles she will fall, when he/ Encounters her, but to this inner foe" (Scene 7: p. 200). The world of Penthesilea is turned upside down. Though the play takes place in the same world that Homer described, nothing is as it was in The Iliad. Order has become confusion. The next question is to see if the relationships that these two characters have with their worlds undergo the same reversal: is Achilleus at home in his world while Penthesilea is not? The first thing to notice about Achilleus is that he does not doubt his world. He does not question what he sees or hears, and he does not doubt his own judgments about what is around him. For instance, he accepts Athena automatically when she descends to stop him from raising his sword against Agamemnon: The goddess standing behind Peleus' son caught him by the fair hair,/ appearing to him only, for no man of the others saw her./ Achilleus in amazement turned about, and straightway/ knew Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. (Bk. I: lines 197-200) To someone not comfortable in the Homeric world, it seems incredible that Achilleus does not think he is seeing things when he turns to see a mighty goddess at his back. But if we take Homer at his word, then we must say that Achilleus not only sees Athena, but faces her without a qualm. A similar thing occurs when Skamandros speaks in anger to the manslaughtering warrior on his banks (Bk. XXI: lines 211-213). It is no surprise to Achilleus that a river should be holding a conversation with him, nor is he shocked when his horse, Xanthos, given voice by Hera, prophecies his death (Bk. XIX: lines 404- 424). In the same vein, Achilleus is always capable of telling a friend from an enemy. Once he has decided that Agamemnon is against him, he never wavers in his distrust and dislike for the lord of the Achaians. Even when Achilleus 'unsays' his anger, he indicates that he must force himself to do so, to push away from his mind the anger "'sweeter ... by far than the dripping of honey"' (Bk. XVIII: line 110). 'We will let all this be a thing of the past, though i t hurts us,/and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.' (Bk. XIX: lines 65 - 66) Achilleus judges friend from enemy on the basis of behavior . If he finds that their sympathies are not truly with him, then he will put no trust in men . For instance, when Agamemnon sends Phoenix, Aias, and Odysseus to Achilleus to try to lure 11 �him back into the fighting with gifts, Achilleus responds with aloofness. This indicates that he feels, and rightly so, that the embassy is working towards Agamemnon's benefit rather than his own. Achilleus does not believe that the embassy comes to him because Agamemnon has truly acknowledged his value. He knows Agamemnon sent them from fear. His response to Odysseus in particular revels his skepticism: 'Son of Laerties and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus:/without consideration for you I must make my answer,/the way I think, and the way it will be accomplished,that you may not/come one after another, and sit by me, and speak softly./ For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who/hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.' (Bk. IX: lines 308-313) Achilleus also has conviction in his fate. This is shown in the way he takes action based upon what he knows, from Thetis, of his fate. For example, Achilleus's decision to kill Hektor following the death of Patroklos, though it certainly stems from grief and a desire for revenge, is also influenced by his knowledge that after Hektor dies he too is doomed to die . It may sound odd for a man to wish for his own end, but Achilleus knows that if he dies young he will achieve everlasting glory ?nd he wants this glory more than anything else. Thus, Achilleus intends not only to kill Hektor, but to do so in as spectacular a way as possible: 'Now I shall go, to overtake that killer of a dear life,/ Hektor; then I will accept my own death ..• Now I must win excellent glory.' (Bk. XVIII: lines 114-121) Although Achilleus does have moments in which he doubts that his fate will come about exactly as his mother has promised, the most striking of which occurs when he is trapped by the swirling waters of Skamandros (Bk. XX!: lines 273-278), he generally is sure that his fate will take place as his mother has foretold. He takes her words seriously . This is shown when he sends Patroklos out to drive the Trojans from the Achaian ships. Achilleus later reveals that he suspected, or perhaps even knew without a doubt, that Patroklos would die: 'May the gods not the way my mother while I yet lived light of the sun the strong son of accomplish vile sorrows upon the heart in me/in once made it clear to me, when she told me/how the bravest of all the Myrmidons/must leave the beneath the hands of the Trojans./Surely, the, Menoitios has perished.' (Bk. XVIII: lines 8-12) This passage explains why Achilleus so urgently warns Patroklos to return once he had driven the Trojans from the ships. Achilleus knew in his heart that he was sending Patroklos to his death, but because he wanted the accomplishment of his fate, for which he knew Hektor must die, he sent Patroklos out while warning him strongly: 'You must not, in the pride and fury of fighting , go on/slaughtering the Trojans, and lead the way against Ilion,/for fear some one of the everlasting gods on Olympos/might crush you. (Bk. XVI: lines 91-94) His next statement truly indicates that Achilleus knows much more about what will happen than he lets on. Though he has, "deeply troubled," told Patroklos, "'I have 12 no prophecy in mind that I know of'" (Bk . XVI: line 50), he now tells him , "'Apollo who works from afar loves these people/dearly. You must turn back once you bring the light of salvation/to the ships'" (Bk . XVI: lines 94-96). And indeed it is Apollo who brings about Patroklos's destruction (Bk . XVI: lines 786-792). The serious way in which Achilleus treats his fate suggests that he has an understanding of how his world works, and this in turn indicates that he is at home in his world. The shield which Hephaistos fashioned for him is a tribute to Achilleus's belonging in the world. Though we do not see him experience all the different facets of life on the shield, he is the one who carries it, and he is the only one who can look upon it: The goddess ... set down the armour on the ground/before Achilleus, and all its elaboration clashed loudly./Trembling took hold of all the Myrmidons. None had the courage/to look straight at it. They were afraid of it. Only Achilleus/looked. (Bk . XIX: lines 12-16) Achilleus belongs in his world. Penthesilea, however, is displaced in the already twisted character of her world. There are individuals in the play, like Prothoe, who do belong in that world. That means that it is possible to be comfortable in that world, though it is not the case with Penthesilea. The Amazon way of life and character in itself isolates and displaces Penthesilea from the world at large. The Amazons live in a secluded community, in the company only of women. When they do leave the confines of the community, it is only to go on raids to win men from whom they can continue their race (Scene 15: p. 232-233; Penthesilea) . Strict rules maintain that they can only gain these men as lovers by conquering them in battle. Penthesilea tells Achilles, Son of the dread sea-goddess! Not for me The common arts of gentler womanhood! ... I may not, as do your maids, chose my love And draw him to me with shy downward eyes Or with bright wanton nosegay ... I may not in the dark- leaved orange grove, ..• Sink on his breast and tell him it is he. No, on the bloody field of war must I go seek him, That youth my heart has chosen for its own, And clip him to me with harsh arms of brass. (Scene 15 : p. 228) The Amazon tradition of only coming into contact with men through war, and their custom of searing off one breast to facilitate use of the bow, set them apart from the usual mode of being for women. The Amazons inhibit the female inclination to love and be loved by men, and they only allow for it in the warped context of agression and dominance. Achilles asks Penthesilea, "But whence can spring, how ancient is that law,/Unwomanly, forgive me, nay, unnatural,/A custom strange to all the tribes of men?" (Scene 15: p. 228). Yet even mor e unnatural than this style of life and approach to the female constitution is the Amazon ability .to mix together both the feelings involved in aggres sive conflict, feelings of hate, with feelings of love and affection. Once the maiden warriors have gained their prize, they let their warlike feelings fade away, and they cultivate feelings of · love from which they can unite with their prisoners to produce offspring. There is a passage in which this odd 'reversibility of ·the Amazon character is protrayed: a group of Amazons tries to approach their Greek prisoners 13 �with love . But the prisoners, just recently confronted with these women in battle, cannot comprehend this friendly behavior. To make the situation even more bizarre, the Amazons cannot understand why their prisoners do not realize that they intend them no harm, but would like to treat them like kings in the lap of luxury . One Amazon asks, "Strange- mooded men! What gnaws thus at your hearts?/ Now that our ar rows sleep within the quiver,/ How can the sight of us affright you still?" (Scene 6: p . 196). Penthesilea is therefore not in harmony with the world because of this Amazon duality: the ability to one moment feel the hate necessary to wage war and the next moment to feel love. It is as Odysseus remarked: "Should [water] haply burn like fire?" ( Scene 1: p. 170 ) . The Amazons not only completely atter their perceptions and emotions, but they do so towards the same individuals. But Penthesilea is displaced in this already odd situation. For the Amazons, these feelings of love or hate should only accompany the suitable circumstance of war or victory and peace. Penthesilea cannot keep these feelin~ apart. She wants to conquer Achilles in battle, and the same time she has chosen him out specifically because she is infatuated with him and wants to become his lover. When Penthesilea looks upon Achilles, she is beset by both her emotions of love and hate: I long to see him grov'lling at my feet, This haughty man, who in this glorious And gentle field of arms, as no man yet, Sows strange confusion in my warlike heart . •.. Do I not feel - ah! Too accursed I While all around the Argive army flees, When I look on this man, on him alone, That I am smitten, lamed in my inmost being, Conquered and overcome - I! Only I! ( Scene 5: p. 186-187 ) The High Priestess points out how strange a thing it is to have among the Amazons a especially a Queen, so overcome with love: wo~an, The Queen, you say? Impossible my friend! Pierced by love's shaft? How can that be? ... She who doth wear the girdle of diamonds? The daughter of Mars, who lacks even the breast Where Cupid's poison'd shafts may strike and lodge? (Scene 7: p. 200) Because Penthesilea cannot untangle her aggressive feelings from her softer, yielding ones, she finds i t impossible to see anything in a unified way. Unlike Achilleus who puts much trust in what he sees other men do, Penthesilea cannot judge others. Her own thoughts and emotions make it hard for her to see what people are actually doing. For example, she has both admiration and affection for her Amazon people, yet she swiftly turns against them in anger: Curses upon this beastly, wanton haste! ••• A curse on lusts that in my Amazons' Chaste hearts like unleashed dogs do howl and quite O'erwhelm the trumpet's brazen-throated voice And all the leaders' cries of shrill command. Victory - is that yet won, that you should thus 14 In fiendish mockery pluck triumphal garlands? (Scene 9: p. 204) Penthesilea herself has given the order for the plucking of the roses, and she herself is the one who longs for love while the battle still rages on. But in her distracted state she is not aware of these things, and she sees those who are merely carrying out her orders as ridiculing her and as trying to take away her last chance of winning Achilles in battle. This is anger against herself., but the anger is so potent that it infects her ability to see objectively. Therefore, she strikes out at friends as though they were enemies. Penthesilea' s displacement both in the world and in .the Amazon environment does not just show itself in her projected anger or in her conflicting emotions. She is in real doubt about her world and herself in that world. Compared to Achilleus who i s sur e of himself, Penthesilea is a lost individual. She questions what the ru l es are that govern her behavior. She wonders if it is right to try to win her beloved through battle: Is mine the fault that I must woo him thus, Here on the field of war must force his love? What is it I long for, when I strike at him? Is it to send him headlong to the shades? I long - ye gods above! I only long To this warm beast I long to draw him close! (Scene 9: p. 203) And she wonders if it is not, rather, right to give way to her womanly feelings and yield herself to Achilles as any other woman would. Her questioning of Amazon law reveals itself in her discussion with Achilles: like the fiery hurricano's blast, We sweep into the forest of the menfolk, Snatch up the ripest of the fallen fruit .•. And bear them with us to our native plains. •.• Here we conduct them in Diana's temple Through many a solemn rite ... •.. The seed is sown, and when the crop is up, We heap on them full measure of glorious gifts; On steeds richly caparisoned we send Them home. The Fea~t of Fruitful Mothers this, In soo t h a fes t ival of little joy. Ah, son of Thetis! Many a tear is shed, And many a heart, fast gripped by dresry grief, Must ask itself: is Tanais The Great For every binding word so praiseworthy? (Scene 15: p. 233) Penthesilea does not just question, however. She actually loses all ability to recognize things for what they are. When she sees herself reflected in Achilles's armour, she is not sure who she sees (Scene 5: p. 186-187). And though she is very dependent on Prothoe, at one time she believes Prothoe to be working for her cause, while at another time she thinks her friend wants only to thwart her (Scene 5: p. 189-193). This is because Penthesilea is never positive about what her cause is: is it the well-being of her host, or is it her own satisfaction? 15 �Am I selfish? Is it !!!I desires Alone that call me back into the field? Is it not my people, threatened by the fate That even in the maniac flush of victory With audible wingbeat hastens from afar? ••• These captive youths that you have taken in fight. You'll never lead them to the fragrant vales Of our homeland ••• •.• Lurking in ambush, crafty, insatiate, I see him everywhere - Achilles, ready to spring Upon your happy train and scatter it. (Scene 5: p. 188) Ev.e n when Achilles is before her Penthesilea wonders i f h~ is really the man she has heard so much about: Achilles! That man that slew old Priam's greatest son Before the walls of Troy - Say! Was it thou? And didst thou truly, thou, with these thy hands Pierce his fleet ankles, then behind thy car Drag him headlong around his native city? (Scene 15: p. 225) '0 wrapped in shamelessness, with your mind forever on profit, /how shall any one of the Achaians readily obey you/either to go on a journey or to fight men strongly in battle?' (Book I: lines 149-151) Achilleus, with his genuine desire to halt the crisis and find a way to placate all concerned, thinks himself a better man than Agamemnon. The accusations that follow, however, point to an envy that Achilleus has long harbored for Agamemnon: "Never, when the Achaians sack some well- founded citadel/ of the Trojans, do I have a prize that is equal to your prize./ Always the greater part of the fighting is the work of /my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty /yours is far the greater reward.' (Book I: lines 163-167) At this moment it is evident that Achilleus is resentful because he is not given the kind of recognition he thinks he deserves. He knows himself to be the 'best of the Achaians,' and he cannot endure the thought that another man, whom he considers both less noble and less warlike, should receive more honor simply because he is lord over many men . Taking into consideration Achilleus's knowledge of his two fates, it is possible to reconstruct the way he must have felt about the enterprise at Troy, in order that this disappointment over Agamemnon be so bitter for him. Knowing that in Troy he faced death, but also everlating glory, Achilleus must have envisioned a splendid career in the Argive host. But though he is recognized as the mightiest warrior among them, Achilleus is never treated as well as Agaemenon is • He finds himself continually dominated by Agamemnon. He ·is disillusioned. When Agamemnon threatens to take Briseis, Achilleus can no longer control his envy. This the ultimate dis honoring, and he is furious because instead of being honored as he had dreamt of being, he has been humiliated. He says, At times, so bewildered and immersed in her powerful emotions is Penthesilia that she does not know where she is. In her joy at discovering that Achilles is her prisoner, 9 though this is a deception, she is so elated that she thinks herself in Themiscyra (Scene 14: p. 221), and when she wakes from her final madness she thinks she is in Elysium (Scene 24: p. 261). Finally, Penthesilea herself embodies that strange Amazon duality of love and hate. She feels in extremes: joy, bitter sorrow, anger, or all three synthesized into one blinding emotion. In her physical appearance, too, she brings together the conflicting elements of the dufoity. She is very beautiful, and her eyes have enough allure to draw any man to her. She is soft and delicate, the epitome of a yielding woman. Yet her beauty is encased in war gear, and she seems indestructible. Antilochus says of her, "A foaming-jawed hyena! 'Tis no woman!" (Scene 2: p. 176). In embodying this duality, Penthesilea is not at home in the world. She is made up of teeming opposites. Though Achilleus also has conflicting elements within him, he belongs in his world and because of this is able to bring those conflicting parts together - to achieve a resolution. Penthesilea, who has no firm ground to stand upon, cannot find resolution in the world. She does attain a kind of harmony with herself, but when she does so she must do it in madness, and when it is over she cannot remain in the world. Achilleus, on the other hand, comes to a resolution which endows him with a fulness of character that is truly great in the world. I will now examine how each of these characters comes to a resolution, and what those resolutions mean. Achilleus belongs in the world, but he is dissatisfied with the way it treats him. His criticisms of Agamemnon suggest certain things about the way Achilleus thinks about himself. He becomes angry at Agamemnon's behavior over Chryseis, and he accuses Agamemnon of being, in effect, childish in his attachment to his prize (Book I: lines 122-129). This suggests that Achilleus is sensitive to an ignoble side of Agamemnon's character. The Achaian men are dying because of Apollo's anger, and Agamemnon will not give up the girl to rectify the situation. Achilleus is astounded that such a man would be considered a kingly leader: Through the course of the story, however, a change takes place in Achilleus. At the start, he is acutely aware that his desires are not being satisfied. But from the moment that the entreats Thetis to plead with Zeus on his behalf (Bk. I: lines 393-412), he sets in motion a chain of events that not only results in the fulfillment of his desires, but also causes a growth in his understanding of himself in the world. The death of Patroklos is the pivotal point in this process. Hence, an examination of Achilleus 's attitudes towards himself and towards what will make him happy, both before and after the death of his companion, wil~ afford a view of what this change in Achilleus entails. In Book IX, Achilleus is a young man with a dream of glory. He is drawn to the warrior's life and the fame that accompanies excellent deeds , but he does not have any notion of what that dream will be when it is translated into reality. Achilleus concentrates on the glory which is foretold, and he does not give much thought to the death that is involved. On one hand this is odd, since as a warrior Achilleus has been faced with death many times, and he is at home on the bloody battlefield. On the other hand, Achilleus sends Patroklos out into the fighting even though he knows that his friend will die. Achilleus does this for the sake of his fate. He knows that he is sac- 16 17 'the heart in me swells up in anger, when I remember/the disgrace that he wrought upon me before the Argives,/the son of Atreus, as if I were some dishonored vagabond.' (Bk. IX: lines 646-648) �rificing Patroklos. Yet, despite prior knowledge of the event, Achilleus experiences real agony over his friend's death: the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilleus./ In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it/ over his head and face~ and fouled his handsome contenance, I and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic./ And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay/ at length, and took and tore at his hair with his hands, and defiled it. (Bk. XVIII: lines 22-27) Thus, though Achilleus knew he was to suffer a great loss, he was thinking more towards what that death would accomplish than towards the death itself. Neither does Achilleus feel the force of fate, its completeness and its finality . He accepts fate as a given in his life, but he does not comprehend the range over which it operates, that it brings together many events and emotions in order to come to its accomplishment. he concentrates so much on the end result that he pays no attention to what must happen and what he must experience in order for that end of glory to be gained. Achilleus's withdrawal into the fate which promised a long but obscure life illustrates that he is not truly in touch with what life is. Because of his disappointment with the way the Achaians have treated him, he persuades himself that he wants the long life undisturbed by the turmoil of war. it is clear, however, that Achilleus has no inclination toward that life: he is an aggressive man who craves the opportunity to prove himself the bravest and the strongest of all men. He is not a man who would be happy in the confined and unchallenging world of Phthia. In Book IX, when Achilleus puts forward his reasons for wanting to return to the land of his fathers, he is speaking out of frustration. He is striking out at the Achaians because he feels hurt by them. It is a real moment for Achilleus, but he does not believe what he is saying. He explains: 'For not worth the value of my life are all the possessions they fable/ were won for Ilion ... Of possessions/cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting,/ and tripods can be won .•. but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted/ nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth's barrier.' (Bk. IX: lines 400-409) This is a profound statement, but Achilleus does not know what it means. he has already revealed the real reason for his threat to return the Phthia: his anger at Agamemnon . 'Go back and proclaim to him all that I tell you, I openly, so other Achaians may turn against him in anger/ ••• I will join with him in no counsel, and in no action./ He cheated me and he did me hurt •.• Let him of his own will/ be damned ... I hate his gifts. I hold him light as the strip of a splinter./ Not if he gave me ten times as much .•. not if he gave me gifts as many as the sand or the dust is,/ not even so would Agamemnon have his way with my spirit/until he had made good to me all this heartrending insolence.' (Bk. IX: lines 369-387) Agamemnon offers him because he cares no longer ·for gifts. He wants complete and utter recognition of his superiority. He will accept nothing less than Agamemnon's subordination beneath him. Achilleus hungers for transcendence over others, and his eyes look only toward the brightness of his fate. This is why his threat to leave for Phthia is nothing more than a threat. He intends to stay at Troy and be present for the unfolding of his destiny: 'I shall not think again of the bloody fighting/ until such a time as the son of wise Priam, Hektor the brilliant/ comes all the way to the ships... slaughtering the Argives, and shall darken with fire our vessels.' (Bk . IX: lines 650-653) Achilleus's lack of unqerstanding of the force his fate will have upon him indicates that he is not quite in touch with himself. He has a splendid vision of what he wants to be, but he has not yet found out who he is. He has not come into his own. Following the death of Patroklos, however, Achilleus is forced to confront the world that exists outside of his dreams. He tells Thetis, 'My mother, all these things the Olympian brought to accomplishment./ But what pleasure is this to me, since my dear companion has perished, I Patroklos, whom I loved beyond. all other companions,/ as well as my own life. I have lost him.' (Bk . XVIII: lines 79-82) Now, instead of being like the king on the shield Hephaistos wrought for him, who contentedly watches the reapers bringing in his crop (Bk . .XVIII: lines 550-560), Achilleus suddenly finds himself deeply involved in the work itself. All this time, from his ships, Achilleus has watched the events paving th~ way towards accomplishment of his fate, and now his fate has reached out and pulled him into the midst of it. The shining goal of glory seems as nothing compared to the sorrow and the desire for venge<;ince. Achilleus is also forced to confront himself, not in the terms he had done so before , thinking only of his own hurt and what he wanted from those .who had hu~t him, but in terms of how he affected other: 'I must die soon, then; since I was not to stand hy my companion/ , when he was killed. And now, far away from the land of his fathers,/ he has per ished, and la~ke d my fighting str ength t o de fend , him. I Now~ . . since I was no light of safety to Pat·roklo.s, no.r to my other/ companions, , . who in their numbers went down before glorious Hektor,/buc sit here beside my ships, a useless weight .on . the good land,/ .I, who am such as no other ... in battle .•. why, I .wish strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals,/ and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind,/ that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart/ and becomes and thing .sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.' (Bk. XVIII: lines 98-110) There is only one way in which these words about the value of his life come from any genuine motivation. It is true that his anger does not stem from the stingy way Agamemnon has treated him. Achilleus will not now accept all the magnificence Though there still lurks, in the background, the memory of an Achilleus who works steadily towards the gain of glory - that same Achilleus who knew Patroklos would die - here there is an Achilleus who recognized he lived for more reasons than the achievement of glory . He realizes that there are things dearer to him than he 18 19 �had thought. He reassesses his judgments about what it means to live. As he confronts himself, he must also contemplate what his own death will mean. He had said that no possessions could equal the value of his life. With Patroklos 's death, Achilleus sees that there is one possession for which he would gladly sacrifice his life: the companionship of a beloved friend. With this recognition, Achiileus feels the completeness of fate. He sees that it is not a dream far removed from the innnediate experience of living. He knows now that it touches him in every way, and that it takes away from him things that he values. The ruthlessness with which he pursues Hektor is not, then, simply inspired by desire for vengeance. It is also inspired by a need to clear himself of his guilt in Patroklos's death. He loathes himself - even to the point of guaranteeing his own death. He tells his mother, 'there must be on your heart a numberless sorrow / for your son's death .•. since the spirit within does not drive me / to go on living and be among men, except on condition / that Hektor first be beaten down under my spear.' (Bk. XVIII: lines 88-92) Achilleus refuses even to eat or drink until he has both atoned for and avenged his companion's death (Bk. XIX: lines 319-321 ) . When it is all over, and Achilleus has taken the life from Hektor and may turn to the burial of Patroklos, we see a different man emerge. He resembles neither the fiery youth of the first sixteen books, nor the man consumed by murderous rage. Achilleus still suffers moments during which his rage controls him and he drags Hektor's body furiously around Patroklos's tomb. But these moments do not deny him his new character; rather, they show that he is not yet secure in it. During the funeral games, Achilleus acts with the same kind of grace and courtesy he gave a hint of when he received Agamemnon's embassy in Book IX (lines 185-198) . Here, however, there is more substance to his behavior. Achilleus is not merely pleasing his heart with music, dreaming of mighty warriors and deeds of fame. He is taking part in the interaction between such men. He carefully treats with the feelings of each one, and having learnt of the dangers of quarrelling, he says during a dispute, '"No longer now, Aias and Idomenus, continue / to exchange this bitter and evil talk./ It is not becoming'" (Bk. XXIII: lines 492-493). The consideration and civility that Achilleus exhibit during the games extend to the time when Priam comes alone to him in supplication. Achilleus is following the connnands of Zeus, yet he treats Priam with genuine sympathy and respect. He takes him in, and together they mourn their losses. Achilleus is honestly moved by this man who has wielded so much power, but who has suffered such devastation in the war with the Achaians. he $ees Priam as a fellow human being who has been granted by the gods both joy and misery and who is worthy of admiration (Bk. XXIV: lines 542-551). Even when Achilleus responds warningly to Priam's request to see Hektor's body, he does not indicate that his sympathy was simply an act. He warns Priam because the freshness of his grief is still with him, and he does not want his rage to come to the fore. 'You must not further make my spirit move in my sorrows, I for fear, old sir, I might not let you alone ... suppliant as you are, and be guilty before the god's orders.' (Bk. XXIV: lines 568-570) Achilleus does not want to disobey Zeus, and this is strong reason for his restraint. Yet, he could have complied with the gods without showing the consideration and rev- 20 erence that he does show Priam. By the end of the poem, Achilleus has come into his own. Despite the rage that still smolders beneath the calm exterior, Achilles has discovered who he is in the world. The dream has been translated into reality: he has all he wished for. Achilleus has achieved great fame, and he has achieved dominance over Agamemnon. Throughout the funeral games, Agamemnon defers to Achilleus's wishes, and Achilleus says to Priam, "' (The Achaians ) keep coming / and sitting by me and making plans, as they are supposed to'" ( Bk. XXIV: lines 651-652 ) . Achilleus acknowledges that consideration for others is important. He is like Aristotle's 'proud man' (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. IV: Ch. 3) who is secure in himself and magnanimously recognizes the value and worth of others. Now Achilleus extends to Agamemnon the respect he deserves as lord of the Achaians . because Achilleus is no longer threatened by Agamemnon. The sense that one has at the end of The Iliad is also that Achilleus is far more aware of the value of his companions Automedon and Alkimos than he was of the value of Patroklos. They serve him, but he does not take them for granted. Achilleus, because he has a place in his world, is able to come to contentment in that world. penthesilea has a very different path to her resolution. it is full of tension, and the only way for it to be resolved is through madness. Certain passages in the play indicate that Penthesilea, unlike Achilleus, is not inclined to the warlike way of life. While he causes himself sorrow by abstaining from the war, Penthesilea suffers because she is in a state of war that she does not want to be in. While in Themiscyra, though Penthesilea was undoubtedly given military training, she was kept from engaging in real war with real opponents. She tells Achilles that until 1 fhe was twenty-three, she had not gone to war with the Amazons (Scene 15: p. 234 ) . She also tells him that she was so overcome with grief at her mother's death that she could not find any interest in taking her own place in life: Long, long I wept, a whole grief-laden month, At my dead mother's grave, neglecting still The crown that lay beside me masterless, Until at length the oft-repeated cry Of the people, who, eager for joyful war, Impatient, lay encamped around my palace, Dragged me by force to mount the throne. (Scene 15: pp. 235-236 ) This suggests that Penthesilea protection of her mother's power, the Amazon people she is destined In addition, Pentesilea is grace: was more inclined to her life at home, in the than she was to going out and proving herself among to rule. remembered as being a girl rull of compassion and Oh, such a virgin, Hermia! So modest! So deft in all the arts of women's hands! So lovely when she danced or when .s he sang! So full of wisdom, dignity, and grace! •.. The mottled worm that sported in the dust Before her delicate feet, she would not crush; She would recall the shaft ere it could pierce The savage wild boar's shoulder, and his eye,· Glazing in death, could drag her to her knees Before him, melted quite in soft remorse. (Scene 23: pp. 254-255; First Priestess ) 21 �l Penthesilea does not fit into her Amazon environment. She is dependent on her mother, and gains from her a false sense of belonging in the Amazon community. Her strange nature among these women who clamour for battle can be seen when her situation is compared with the feelings of a young amazon girl who appears in the play: Another time when all the Amazon host Marches to war with cymbals and with drums, We will go too, and not - oh promise us! Only to grace the mother's victory With rose-plucking and winding toilsome wreaths! My arm here - look! - can hurl the javelin, And from my sling the stone flies swift and true. Why not? Why not? I am no more a child. (Scene 6: p. 195; First Girl) Penthesilea is reluctant to go to war, just as she is reluctant to kill any living thing. She does not care for the dominance that her position as Queen would give her. She is also, perhaps, frightened of assuming the throne, since she feels alone. and vulnerable in a community which thrives on self-assertion. When the priestesses come to tell her that Ares has called her to war, Penthesilea begs, "Oh, let me stay beside thee, Mother!/ Use it once more, thy royal dignity,/ - For the last time - and bid these women go" (Scene 15: p. 235). She wants to stay beside her dying mother because she cares for her, but she is also afraid to leave her nest of security. As the host travels to Troy, Penthesilea begins to be filled with warlike feelings. These are not, however, natural to her. She describes them as though they were a new experience, and exhilirating for that reason. Her feelings are fueled by two things, neither of which stem from her own nature: her desire to fulfill her mother's last wish (Scene 15: p. 235; Pen th.) and her hope that in overcoming Achilles she will achieve a sense of belonging in the Amazon community. She says, Nearer I drew to old Scamander's stream, And every vale around through which I swept Echoed the clash of battle before Troy, So did my grief abate, and my wide soul Drank in the universe of joyful war. To myself I said: if they should all together, The mighty moments of the daedal past, Return for me, if all the company Of heroes whom the songs of minstrels sing, Should step down from the stars, I should not find Not one more excellent to crown with roses, Than that man whom my mother chose for me So dear, so wild, so sweet, so terrible The slayer of Hektor! (Scene 15: p. 236) The importance that conquering Achilles has in Penthesilea' s mind is seen in Scenes 14 and 15 when she believes she has won him. Up until this point, Penthesilea has been wracked by indecision and frustration, but here she falls easily into the role of Queen. She begins to think of preparations for the hosts' return to Themiscyra, and she has an air of confidence about her (Scene 15: p. 227) The surety and joy Penthesilea gains from the belief that Achilles has been tak- 22 en by her illustrates Penthesilea's notion of who she should be in the world. her ideal is an Amazon one: to be completely detached from any submissive, loving, feelings and to be physically capable of subjecting any man to her will. In taking Achilles, she will have proved to herset~' and to her people that she is truly Amazon and that she deserves her Queenship. Her happiness is thus dependent on her winning of Achilles. She explains to Prothoe the unhappiness she has suffered prior to this supposed capture of Achilles: They say misfortune purifies the soul, But I •.. have never found it so. Bitterness still, rage against gods and men, Unseeing passion are its fruits in me. With strange perversity I then have hated On others' faces every mark of joy; The blithe child playing in its mother's lap Seemed but conspired to mock my sullen grief. (Scene 14: p. 221) She was a woman who felt her means to fulfill her natural then have given her both the While she experiences Penthesilea incorporates her of Achilles that she becomes displacement among her people and who did not have the inclination to be loved. The capture of Achilles would love she craved and her place among the Amazons. those warlike feelings on the way to Troy, however, own nature into them. She builds up so great an image intoxicated with him. He fills all her thoughts: 0 thou son of Peleus! Ever my single thought when I awoke; Ever my dream in sleep wast thou! The world Lay stretched before me like a patterned web, And in each glorious, wide-gaping mesh One of thy deeds with craftsman's skill enwoven; Upon my heart, as on silk white and fine, I burned each deed with colours steeped in flame. (Scene 15: pp. 236-237; Penth.) As a result, when she sees Achilles, she falls passionately in love with him (Scene 15: p. 237; Penth) . Her problem of trying to make a place for herself among the Amazons is hence made even more difficult - and the solution even more important because while she tries to establish herself, her own inclinations towards love pull her in the opposite direction: towards succumbing to Achilles. Such an act would, of course, automatically dishonor her in the eyes of her people. At the opening of the play, Penthesilea is in this state of tension. Achilles stands before her as the shining key which will give her both happiness and belonging in the world. The path she takes is one of frantically trying to capture Achilles on the battlefield. His capture will make her what she wants to be. In this respect of having a bright goal to strive for - Penthesilea is like Achilleus. But whereas he looked for his own ability and splendor to be recognized by the world, Penthesilea looks for this through another: through Achilles, as though his brilliance might be incorporated into her . Penthesilea tries in every way to reach her goal, but she is hindered by several things. Nature itself seems to put itself up as a barrier between Achilles and herself. At one point, she is near enough to reffh out and grasp him, but he swerves and she falls as her horse stumbles on a rock. By the time she recovers, Achilles is far beyond her (Scene 3: pp. 178-179). Penthesilea's feelings of love also hinder 23 �her from striking at Achilles in battle. At crucial moments she stays her hand and Achilles goes unscathed (Scene I: pp. 171-172). Finally, as Achilles again and again eludes her, Penthesilea begins to feel desperate. She is overcome by doubts that she can gain him at all. She also worries that in her headstrong pursuit of Achilles she is endangering her host. This worry in itself undermines her ability to be the leader she yearns to be. It is in Scene 9 that Penthesilea comes to terms with the futility of what she is trying to do: work against her own nature. She has pushed herself to make one last attempt to conquer Achilles, and she herself has fallen in the confrontation. She feels then how much she does not want to meet Achilles in the context war. She is stunned that he could treat her with such aggression: So crush and bruise this breast! - How could he do it? Oh Prothoe! It is as wanton-cruel As though I were to rive the innocent lyre That hangs in the night breeze, whispering my name. At the bear's feet I would cower, nestling close, Would stroke and fondle the blotch'd panther, who Approached me with such feelings as I him. (Scene 9: p. 203) Penthesilea now abandons her hope of establishing herself among the Amazons, and of finding love with Achilles. She admits, The utmost I have done that human strength Is able - I have tried the impossible I have staked all upon one throw - all that I have. The fateful die is cast - it lies before me: And I must understand - that I have lost. (Scene 9: p. 207) She also strikes out at those who have helped her think that she could ever reach her Amazon ideal: That hand I curse that decked me for the fight This day, and that deceiving serpent-word That told me I should conquer. Accursed! Accursed! Oh, how they stood around me with their mirrors Flatt'rers! - on either hand and praised the form Divine of my smooth limbs, molded in steel! 14 Pestilence smite you with you tricks of hell! (Scene 9: p. 206) Penthesilea regains this state of mind in Scene 15 after she discovers that Achilles has, in fact, taken her in battle. The urgency of her request that he come with her anyway to Themiscyra is a sign that one final time she is trying to achieve place among the Amazons, and love with Achilles, in the context of Amazon thought (Scene 15 : p . 240 ; Penth . ) . But when Achilles leaves her , Penthesilea abandons any agressive stance. She accepts the shame of her un-warlike nature, and indeed, she feels she can do so since she has been legitimately conquered in battle. In anger she says: Was I not his by every use of chivalry, By fairest chance of war his lawful prize? 24 When man on man makes war .... ... Show me the law - I say, show me! - which then Permits the prisoner who has yielded him To be set free again from his captor's bonds. (Scene 19: p.241) Penthesilea, now trapped in an unsolvable situation, refuses to act at all. In shame she says, "I must bury me in endless night!" (Scene 19: p. 243). There is, however, a hint that Penthesilea expects Achilles to return and take her for his own. That would be the only way in which she might escape her present alienated situation among the Amazons. In Scene 20, when she hears that a herald comes from Achilles, she says in anticipation, "'Tis from Achilles! - Ah; what shall I hear?'" (p. 243). And though she follows this remark ~ith a command to bid the herald leave, she is mer~ly feeling the impossibility of · her situation. Penthesilea wants nothing more of the Amazon life. She wants only to follow her inclinations. towards love. Now that she has heard from Achilles's own lips that he loves her, Penthesilea is willing to leave behind the world she knows for another foreign one in the arms Achilles. This fragile reconciliation is doomed to be disrupted. Achilles is himself the agent. He, assuming that Penthesilea is comfortable in her world, and that she would never think of coming to without first~aking him in battle, challenges her to single combat. He intends to make a farce out of their confrontation, fall to her, and to go with her Themiscyra (Scene 21: pp. 248-249). But Penthesilea, having rejected the warlike stance and having reconciled herself to her womanly ' inclinations, cannot accept - or comprehend - that Achilles approaches her in terms of war: He, he, who knows I am too weak by far, He sends this challenge, Prothoe, to me? My faithful breast here moves him not a whit Till he has crushed and split it with his spear? Did all I whispered to him touch his ear Only with the empty music of the voice? (Scene 20: p. 244) Penthesilea feels betrayed. This challenge reawakens all the tensions that had been present before she came to terms with her lack of belonging in the Amazon world. In their rebirth, they are much more powerful. Penthesilea, experiencing the re-emergence of all these tensions at once, is in agony in her awareness of them. She retreats into madness and accepts Achilles' s challenge: "Now I do feel the strength to stand against him: Now he shall down and grovel in the dust" (Scene 20: p. 244). And Penthesilea goes to meet him, c~lling the gods down to witness her deed: with maniac tread among her hounds With foam- flecked lip she goes and calls them sisters, Who howl and howl; most like a Maenad she, Dancing across the fields, her bow in hand, She urges on the pack that pants for blood Around her, bidding them seize the fairest prey That ever, so she tells them, ranged the earth. (Scene 22: p. 251; High Priestess) In this Bacchic frenzy, Penthesilea kills Achilles, who means her no hf5m. As he hides in the boughs of a fir tree, she brings him down with an arrow and th.en 25 �proceeds to tear him apart, in the same way that Agave destroyed Pantheus, · her son. It is a scene of horror and insanity. The Amazon who witnessed the act reports, like the messenger who looked into the hidden chamber where Oedipus put his eyes out before Jocasta's hanging body: Oh you, Diana's holy priestesses, And you, Ares' chaste daughters, hear me speak: I am the Afric Gorgon, and to stone Behold ! - Your bodies' warmth I freeze at once. (Scene 23: p. 252; Meroe) This madness, despite its existence in the realm of abomination, does resolve all of Penthesilea 's tensions. In her madness she destroys them by killing that which brough t them a ll t oge the r fo r her: Achille s. I n killing him, Penthes ilea proves beyond a doubt that she is Amazon and that she is worthy of descendence from Tanais. Penthesilea had earlier-assured Achilles that despite her lack of a breast, Here in this left breast (all youth's tenderest, sweetest feelings ) have take refuge And are, by threat much, nearer to my heart. Not one shalt thou find lacking, friend, in me. (Scene 15: p. 231) But now, as Tanais symbolically tore her breast from her body at the founding of the Amazon race, Penthesilea has wrenched out of her very being the feelings that that breast symbolized. As Penthesilea drops the great bow of the Amazons at the feet of the High Priestess, the priestess says, Great Queen and lady! Oh, forgive, I pray! Diana is full well content with thee. I see thou hast atoned; her wrath is turned. The mighty founder of our women's realm, Tanais' self, I cannot well deny, She did not wield the bow more worthily. (Scene 24: p. 258) Penthesilea also resolves the tension she has felt between being true to her Amazon upbringing and therefore taking Achilles in battle, and being true to herself and hence taking him in love. She takes him in war, and yet in her tearing of him she is di ssolving t he barrieyg between herse lf and Achi lles. She is joining with him in the most literal of ways. When Penthesilea wakes from her frenzy, she feels· the peace which release from tension brings: "I am so happy sister! More than happy! / Quite ripe for death, Goddess, I feel myself" ( Scene 25: p. 261). She senses that she has achieved all that she could have wished for in life. She is ready for death because there is nothing more she can accomplish. And although she is horrified when she discovers what she has done, she finds that she can account for it: Surely I kissed him? Or did I tear him?... 17 .•. So - it was a mistake. Kissing - biting Where is the difference? When we truly love It's easy to do one when we mean the other. How many a girl, her soft arms fast entwined About he man's neck, says that she loves him so 26 lieyond words she could eat him up for love. And then, poor fool, when she would prove her words, Sated she is of him - sated almost to loathing. Now, my beloved, that was not my way. Why look: when my soft arms were round thy neck, I did it word for word; it was no pretending. I was not quite so mad as they would have it. (Scene 24; pp. 265-266) But in her realization of what she has done, Penthesilea also realizes that she does not have an understanding of herself in the world. She had tried to compromise: to think of what she ought to be, and the'ilto think of what she could be with Achilles. She never actually dealt with what she was. After her murder of Achilles, Penthesilea has no context to put herself in. She has rejected the Amazon life, even though she has now proven herself in it ( Scene 24: p. 266; Penth. ) , and she has destroyed Achilles, so that she cannot find belonging in him either. She can therefore, perhaps hoping to find her place in another realm, only assert her presence in the world through her death: now I will step down into my breast As into a mine and dig a lump Of cold ore, an emotion that will kill. This ore I temper in the fires of woe To hardest steel; then steep it through and through In the hot, biting venom of remorse; Carry it then to Hope's eternal anvil And sharpen it and point it to a dagger; Now to this dagger do I give my breast: So! So! So! So! Once More! Now it is good. (Scene 24: p. 267 ) And Penthesilea dies. It can already be seen that there is a great difference between Achilleus and Penthesilea. He finds himself in the world, and though he is fated to die, it is not necessary, by the very nature of his relationship to that world, that he die. Should he have lived, Achilleus would have been the most glorious product of the homeric world. Penthesilea finds herself and asserts herself. But she does this through the aberration of madness. That in itself shows what an impossible thing she wanted to do . She cannot, like Achilleus, consciously experience her coming into her own in t he wo r ld. Thus, when she has forced a resolution, she cannot remain in the world when she returns to consciousness. In order to spell out the distinction between these two characters, an analysis of the acts that facilitate their resolutions will be helpful . Achilleus wants glory, and in order to gain it he must kill Hektor. Penthesilea wants to find love and place in the world. In order to gain it she must kill Achilles. The ways in which they kill, and the motivations for the killing, are very different. Achilleus treats Hektor with utter disregard for Hektor's own glory and worth as an idividual . So full of r age and pur pos e is Ach i lleus t hat t he re i s no escape for Hektor. In the typical manner portrayed in The Iliad , Achilleus and Hektor face one another and hurl threats at one another: they assert themselves. And when Hektor falls, Achilleus vaunts: 'Hektor, surely you though as you killed Patroklos you would be/safe, and since I was far away you thought nothing of me , / o 27 �fool, for an avenger was left far greater than he was, I behind him and away by the hollow ships. And it was I; I and I have broken you strength; On you the dogs and vultures/shall feed and foully rip you; the Achaians will b¥8Y Patroklos.' (Bk. XXII: lines 331-336) There are two things to notice in this boast. Of the greatest importance is Achilleus 's use of 'I.' He uses it emphatically three times, and what he is conveying to Hektor is this: I am the greater man. You are nothing in comparison. Here Achilleus reveals his need to dominate, to stand alone as the most glorious of all men. The next thing of interest is Achilleus's juxtaposition of Hextor's doom to be devoured by carrion with Patroklos's imminent burial. Achilleus is stressing that while Hektor will receive no funeral rites and will thus never gain access into Hades, Patroklos, the man Hektor had dominated, will. Achilleus therefore not only supercedes Hektor by taking his life, but he further impresses his dominance upon Hektor by threatening to annihilate Hektor' s individuality in death. In being consumed, Hektor will be split into many parts, and he will be distributed among many. To make his point strongly , Achilleus says, 'I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me/ to hack you meat away and eat it raw for the things that/ you have done to me. So there is no one who can hold the dogs off I from your head.' (Bk. XXII: lines 346-349) For Achilleus, this is the supreme statement of dominance: a threat to destroy the individuality of another by ingesting it into one's self. Achilleus's treatment of Hektor's body is in the same vein. He abuses it and tries to mar it in every way. His wish is that its unique form and beauty be destroyed. What Achilleus wishes he had spirit and rage enough to do, Penthesilea carries out. But Penthesilea's treatment of Achilles stems from motivations that are not the same as those of Achilleus. This changes the meaning of the act. Penthesilea' s desire to conquer Achilles does not primarily come from a need to dominate. She acts with tremendous agression, but it is not directed a supercession. It is directed at absorption of Achilles. She moved to meet that youth whom she so loves, •.. In the confusion of her youthful senses Aiming with all the horrid terrors of war Her hot desire to seize and possess him. (Scene 23: p. 252; Meroe) Penthesilea does not want to destroy Achilles. She wants to merge with him completely. Her deed demonstrates not a contempt of Achilles, but a valuing of him as a special individual. She would go to any lengths to grasp him, and she is so blinded by her eagerness that she does not realize that what she is doing destroys the very thing she seeks. The Homeric Achilleus wishes to comsume Hektor, but he cannot do i t because in that he would be bringing himself into the closest of contacts with Hektor. What he wants to do is separate himself from Hektor as much as possible. Achilleus must hence content himself with abusing the body in the dust behind his chariot. Penthesilea, having inadvertently marred Achilles in her killing of him, treats the body with love (Scene 24: p. 266). Having seen the different meanings that the deed has for Penthesilea and Achilleus, it is possible to gain clear insight into how very opposed these characters are to one another. For Achilleus, who belongs in his world, assertion of his 28 individualtiy is the most important function in liis life: the glory he will gain ensures his shining dominance over men even after his death. For Penthesilea, who has no place in her world, assertion of her individuality has no meaning until she finds belonging in the world. She tries to find this through another individual: Achilles. And because she put her goal in the being of another, her resolution in the world became, with his destruction, only something which destroyed her also. There are many ways in which Penthesilea's love affair with Achilles and the end in which it results can be read. Return for a moment to the idea introduced at the beginning of this paper that Kleist's Achilles and Penthesilea represent two sides of Achilleus. Looking at the two characters as parts of a whole, the play becomes Kleist's interpretation of how Achilleus finally comes into his own in The Iliad. Achilleus is a divided man. Part of him has great depth of feeling and great splendor, and the other part is calculating an manipulative. This part looks only to the end it desires. It will sacrifice anything to bring that end to realization. Through the course of the story, both sides of Achilleus are at work, and he is not in harmony with himself. But through the events that are fated to be, his emotional side and his calculating side are forced to merge with one another. In the death of Patroklos and Achilleus's resulting rage in which he destroys Hektor, these two parts are synthesized. Achilleus becomes whole. That is what makes his youthful death tragic: he has just recently become a mighty man. Kleist's Achilles and Penthesilea try to come together in the same way that the sides of Homer's Achilleus do. There is great conflict between them, and there is much conflict in the character of Penthisilea that represents the part of Achilleus that passionately desires and must feel the pain which the actions of that other, colder side cause. In this, Penthesilea and Achilles are like Artistophanes's hermaphrodites. the female half, Penthesilea, and the male half, Achilles, want desperately to come together. This accounts for Kleist's portrayal of Penthesilea as a Phaedra who, without the love of Hippolytus, cannot live her own life and wishes only to fade into death. It also accounts for why Kleist make Penthesilea an Amazon: being one half of Achilleus, she must have both a female yearning to be united with the male half and the ruthless rage of a warrior who blooms in battle. Penthesilea's killing of Achilleus in the way Achilleus wished to kill Hektor is very elegant, for it is in that moment, standing over Hektor, that the passionate side of Achilleus is fused with the calculating side: at Hektor's death Achilleus's glory is ensured, and he also atones for the sacrifice of Patroklos. Penthesilea, the passionate half of this split entity, does away with calculating Achilles in the same way the Achilleus loses his calculating side into a unity with his emotional side when he kills Hektor. It is also appropriate that Penthesilea must die. Just as it is tragic that Achilleus must die, it is tragic that there is nothing more she can do in the world. And as part of a whole, once Achilles is dead, Penthesilea cannot live. Prothoe says of Penthesilea (and this applies to the Homeric Achilleus also), Her blooming was too proud and glorious! Vainly the gale will shake the withered oak, But with a crash he flings the living down, 19 Grasping with ruffian hands her copious locks. (Scene 24: p. 268) Yet there is more to Penthesilea than this connection to one aspect of Achilleus 's character. Recall Keist' s portrayal 'of Achilles with all the distictiness that the figure is given in The Iliad. With this in mind, Penthesilea can be read as a contrast between the classical Achilleus and a modern one: Penthesilea. Kleist has worked the classical account of a man's struggle to come 29 �into his own in the world into a modern context. The world of Penthesilea and that character's difficulties in the world represent Kleist' s perceptions of the world of his time and the problems he saw hindering an individual from finding contentment. The sense of existing in a world where the individual struggles alone to find himself is Kleist' s evaluation of modernity. He purposefully incorporates The Iliad (and things like Racine's formulation of Pahedra 'a character) into his play in order to make explicit the difference he saw between the modern individual and the classical one· He then relies upon what the reader knows of the classical tale to make h~s meaning cl:ar. Penthesilea captures for Kleist the tensions a modern individual experiences· Given a lack of place in the world, the individual desires both to assert himself and to lose himself by attempting to find belongin~ through other individuals· The 0 (which is an unusual occurrence importance that Kleist gives to the power of love in classical works - only in Euripides's Phaedra do we see such a consuming emotion) suggests that love in this unbounded, blinding mode has become, in the modern world, the answer to this lack of belonging. Keist's opinion seems to have been that the classical individual, because he had definite place in the world and rules that governed him in that place, had no need for such passion. In line with this, · Kleist's Achilles does not have the same kind of love for Penthesilea as she has for him. He is fascinated by her, he wants to share his life with her, but he does not want to be utterly merged with her. 21 Penthesilea's madness is Kleist's judgement of what a modern individual must do if he insists upon achieving harmony with himself in the world. He implies that it is impossible to do such a thing naturally. It requires a madness that is monstrous. Penthesilea's death, achieved by drawing out of her soul an emotion that is powerful enough to kill, is the only thing Kleist sees as glorious and beautiful about the individual. He aggrandizes human mortality by depicting the human self at its greatest height when it rejects its world. It is not just her Amazon world that Penthesilea rejects; in destroying Achilles, she also rejects the shining image of that classical individual who does belong in his world. She has forced even glorious Achilleus to acknowledge the mightiness of her pure being which is uncluttered by things of the world. I think, however, that there is a more positive side to Kleist's analysis of the modern situation. Penthesilea can ,also be read as an allegory of romantic approach to Achilleus: the idealization of, and fascination with, that heroic figure. Penthesilea then represents the modern romantic who is infatuated with Homer's Achilleus. The love affair between the two characters is hence a description of how people like myself, as readers of The Iliad, become intrigued with Achilleus. We, like Penthesilea, chase after an image which exists in thought, wishing to overtake him, wishing to discover his tantalizing secret, wishing to assimilate into ourselves his secret that we might become like such a man. This interpretation of the play makes several things clear. Kleist may have made use of the Amazon character - the love / hate duality - to illustrate the relationship that the lover of Achilleus has with the splendid image. He both idealizes him and yearns to be like him, and yet he feels that Achilleus outshines him. He therefore envies Achilleus. The romantic wants to unveil Achilleus's secret because he does not want the image to loom so far above him. In the light of this idea, much of the disjunction between Penthesilea a nd Achilles is made understandable. If one tries to imagine actually meeting the Achilleus whom one has idealized, the situation would certainly be full of misunderstandings, and perhaps full of some disappointments as well, when the man did not live up to his image. Penthesilea day-dreams about Achilles, and when she meets him she is overcome by that vision out of the 'daedal past' that stands before her. 30 Yet when she talks with him, she is shocked because the man she is speaking with does not seem to be the one she imagined. She asks him if he is really that man who with such a heart of iron abused the body of Hektor. Achilles, too, does not know how to understand Penthesilea. She fills him with wonderment. At one point he says to 22r, "I was wond'ring/ If thou wert come down to me from the moon" (Scene 15: p. 232). The inability, therefore, that Penthesilea and Achilles have of coming together and understanding one another is an indication that they embody two completely different consciousnesses. Achilles is very much himself. He is in his proper environment. Penthesilea is misplaced both in his environment and in her own. She admires his stability and harmony in the world, while he is drawn to her literal unearthliness: 0 thou, who with soft, heavenly radiance, As though the realms of light had open their doors, Descendest on me, strange beyond with: Who art thou? How do I name thee? ( Scene 15: p. 226; Achilles) That it is impossible, however, for these lovers to come together except in the frenzy of Penthesilea' s madness, suggests that this play is a bitter comment on Kleist' s part, resulting from disillusionment with such romantic idealization of Achilleus. The black nature of the play may imply that Kleist thought this 'looking back to the past' and searching for the secret of being a whole individual is not the answer, that it could, in fact, be dangerous. It could go beyond all bounds and leave the modern individual floundering in an image that is truly imaginary. Just as Penthesilea is doomed to fall as she reaches out to grasp Achilles, in looking backwards too fervently the romantic is bound to fall. The presence of the myths concerning voyeurism - Pentheus peeking at the maenads, and Actaeon watching Artemis bathe - might suggest that in delving so deeply into the images of the past one is trying to see what is best not seen. In this attraction, the romantic could become an Oedipus, drawn almost against hi$ will towards an end that is horrifying. The element of punishment in these two myths might also be important with respect to this reading of Penthesilea. Although exact parallels cannot be drawn, it might be that Penthesilea is being punished for refusing to work on understanding and belonging in her world. Actaeon was punished for trying to gain access into a world of the goddess that was forbidden to him. Pentheus denied Dionysus. Agave's fault was much the same as his, though not as extreme. She refused to believe that Semele had lai12 with Zeus and was bringing forth into a world a new kind of god. Both 3 Pentheus and Agave resisted working on understanding how the new god would change their lives. Penthesilea, like these people, took refuge in something other than what could give her place in her world. She tried to find place through another, Achilles, who is not only a completely distinct individual from her, but who comes from another world altogether. It is possible that Kleist felt that looking back to the past was good thing, as long as it did not involve idealization. He might have felt that the approach that idealized would result in an eclipse of what is great in 2 the modern individual. I said earlier that this interpretation of Penthesilea as an allegory of the romantic idealization of Achilleus was more positive than the preceding interpretation. It is so because it does not make the·modern situation impossible. It does not suggest that death, and glorification of that death, are the only acts available to the displaced modern individual. If Kleist's message is to be careful not to lose what is great in the modern individual in looking back to the past, then 31 �Kleist would also advocate careful observation of the modern worzg: trying to see it clearly without having the vision blinded by images of the past. Perhaps Kleist never meant the play to be read as an allegory. Nevertheless, I find such a reading helpful. As I prepare to leave behind the images that have filled my thoughts for the past four years, I wonder about that world that lies beyond St. John's College, and I wonder how happiness can be found there. I have learnt from Kleist that, despite my own tendency to idealize the images of the past and search fervently for their secrets, I must look for what is splendid in modernity also. And though I do not feel at home in that world, I take Kleist's advice to work at finding a place in it. There is much that the images of the past have taught me, but I must hold myself back from turning blindly to them. They can give me a sense of comfort, because of the stability they convey to me, but through them I will not find belonging in my own world. Those images can guide me, since the past remains embedded in the present, but they cannot replace the present. ENDNOTES 1. I shall use Achilleus to refer to the character in The Iliad. Since he also appears in Penthesilea, this will help to distinguish between the Homeric individual and Kleist's Achilles. 2. Kleist is undoubtedly making fun of Homer's 'crafty Odysseus' in this speech. 3. Penthesilea is divided into twenty-four scenes. There are no acts which hold it together. Thus, the play is itself like this landscape in which events simply occur. 4. At least, no ceremonies that we see in the play. 5. It could be said that even the gods of The Iliad represent movements in the human soul. But they are not depicted as such, and I am concerned with the ways in which these things are described by the authors. 6. This is unlike Glaucos and Diomedes, who exchange armor as a sign of friendship. They meet as general foes, but in discovering the specifics about one another, they agree not to fight, though they fight others in the enemy camp. 7. The Amazon law also forbids that a woman pick her man. She is supposed to take whomever the god sends her (see Scene 15: p. 235). Thus Penthesilea, in her love for Achilles, is out of line in her Amazon world. 8. Tanais was the first Queen of the Amazons and the founder of their traditions. 9. The scenes in which this deception occurs correspond to Books XIV and XV of The Iliad in which Hera deceives Zeus. Both texts describe a love scene. Hera is able to alleviate, for a time, the dire circumstances Zeus has put upon the Achaians, and in the play Achilles's deception also, for a short time, keeps Penthesilea away from her tensions and the end they will bring her to. 10. According to myth, the look in Penthesilea's eyes as she died from Achilleus's blow made him fall in love with her. In the play, her gaze as she falls before him in battle drives away all thoughts of violence that Achilles had towards her. 32 . 11. Penthesilea may have accompained the host, as' the young girls who pick roses do in the play, but she would not have engaged in battle. In order to participate in the Feast of Roses, an Amazon must have conquered her man in battle. Since Penthesilea has not taken part in the Feast of Roses, she cannot have battled with any man. ' 12. What is initially taken to be a desire from fame (see p. 2, this paper) now turns out to be a desire to gain place in the world. Thus, though she and Achilles seem to be pushed by the same motivations, they are not. Diomede say~ to Achilles, concerning this well-timed swerve, Yet all that I have seen convinces me That thy so masterly retreat was not constrained But of free choice. One might indeed suppose That with the crack of dawn .... Already thou hadst marked that lucky stone O'er which the Queen should stumble .... With such sure course, by the eternal gods, Didst thou ent~ce her to this very stone. (Scene 4: pp. 182-183) Kleist, therefore, responded to the character of Achilleus in much the same way this I did, seeing him as manipulating his way to his gain of glory and seeing him as willing to sacrifce Patroklos for this goal. Kleist also saw the ~reatness inherent in Achilles. But he gave that greatness to Penthesilea. 13. 14. This is the moment in which Penthesilea most resemble Phaedra. It is interesting, however, that she is most like Racine's Ph'edre: Que ces vains or'n ements, que ces voiles me pesent 1 Quelle importune main, en formant tous ces noeuds, A pris soin sur mon front d'assembler mes cheveux? Tout m'afflige et me nuti, et conspire'a me nuit. (Larousse - Act I, Scene 3: lines 158-161) Kleist copies this passage almo$t exactly. It is significant, I think, that he chooses the modern interpretation of the character over Euripides's portrayal of her in Hippolytus (this passage can be found in Scene 1: lines 198-202). In his reinterpretation of the character of Achilleus through Penthesilea, Kleist uses a reinterpretation of the character of Phaedra. 15.Here Kleist mixes the story of Actaeon, who was changed into a stag and devoured by his own . hounds, with the story of fentheus hiding in the boughs of a tree in order to peek at his mother and the other maenads . 1 16. In Euripeides 's Bacchae, the mother, Agave, · des troys the separate individuality of her son, the being to whom she had given that individuality. . In her consuming of him (though that section of the text is now missing), she and her offspring become one again. Pentheus returns to whence he came. In calling fort,h The Bac~hae, Kleist is emphasizing the oneness of Penthesilea and Achilles at this moment. 17. In the German this reads: So - it was a mistake. Kisses (Kiisse) - bites (bisse) [They rhyme] . . When we truly love/It is easy to. grasp ~ne instead of the other. 18. Penthesilea's killing of Achilles . also occurs in the twenty-second part of the play, though it is not described in full until later. 33 �19. The German reads: But with a crash it flings the living down/ Because it can grasp the crown of the tree. 20. There are also many Christ images present in the play. Achilles is, for example, crowned with a wreath of laurel thorns by Penthesilea after she has killed him (Scene 24: p. 260; Pen th.). She also offers to sprinkle water upon his head, which has overtones of baptism. Penthesilea herself comes back from her deed crowned with thorns (Scene 24: p . 235; First Amazon). This connects Kleist's use of Phaedra and her love with the emphasis that is put upon love in the Christian religion. It also makes sacrifical beings - saviors - out of both Penthesilea and ' Achilles. These images too, as copies of the maenad frenzy in The Bacchae, suggest the presence of Dionysus: the breaking down of all rational barriers and the freedom of the individual to forget his isolated individuality for a time through the gift of wine. Thus, merging with others and finding salvation through that merging, are clearly issues the Kleist wanted to include. 21. Kleist himself committed suicide on November 21, 1811 . 22 . When the play is read in this way, it becomes much less dark . Some of the interactions between the characters, and especially between Penthesilea and Achilles, become very funny . They reveal a sharp humour in Kleist. On the Sonnet Daniel Hoh ('88) Is it mere waste, a trap made just to bind, An ill command, or prison, made to hold One'~ words as fettered to an ancient m ld, .o Denying freedom to the po'~t 's mind? With ornament and pretty meter lined, So that the tongue into a ball is rolled And meaning in the poem be annulled: Is such the cost when poets are confined? Look closer though, and read the words with care, For in such bars are worthy thoughts held fast. And though its stature's small and strict its frame, It says far more .than words of order bare.: A frame of wor'd s, which wood or gold outlast. And if a trap, let beauty be the game. 23. Though the names Pentheus and Penthesilea exist separately in myth , since Kleist wove Pentheus's story into Penthesilea's he must have connected the two together both because their names begin similarly and because he had some notion, whatever it might have been, which connected them together in his mind. .·. 1. 24. Penthesilea, as Kle ist's portrayal of a modern splendor of Homer's Achilleus. But she, in her acknowledge her own splendor. Kleist is suggesting, human soul is (KaAbv ) just like that of Achilleus, put into its own context. individual, has within he r love for Achilleus, does I think, that in modernity and i t should be cul tiv a t ed the not the and 25. The dust which is predominant in the play might also b.e a sign of the way our eyes are blinded by the grandeur of the past. The dust clouds t he vision of those who are looking at Penthesilea's mad pursuit of Achilles, and we, as readers of the play, see through the eyes of those who are looking . We, then , become confused by the confusion inherent in that pursuit. The texts I have used in the paper are as follows : 1. Homer, The Iliad; Trans. R. Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Edition: 1961. 2. Kleist, Penthesilea; Trans. H. Trevelyan. The German Library: Vol. 25 , pp. 167-268. New York: Continuum Publishing Co.: 1982 The passages which I quote are marked beneath by Book and line for The Iliad, and by Scene and page (and if necessary, speaker) for Penthesilea. If a passage is pointed out in the text, this indicates that the passage supports the argument, and may be referred to if desired. 34 Conversation #4 Brian ·cole( '91) Scattered corners of important papers like clanging ief tove t pennies 'or smoldering con~ort ions of ·some emotionIn trust they remained safe, . under r usty snap~ in jacket pocke t s. · Until challenge d by t~e middle- aged librarian, who, speaking through her doctor's mask . -. claims they should . be numbered under plastic Laminate d to last a lifetime. I make my r eply gen t ly, asking Why do you wear stockings to cove r your shaven legs? And why haven' t you r eally looke d at the colou r s in a rainbow ? The y t oo s eem desolat e and uno r ganize d , but combine in blinding whi tene s s , She swore by her steri l e scalpe l t hat 'one day I would have t o s t op asking que s tions, But I know then I would just be l e f t wit h answers. 35 �Untitled Iocasta's Song Dwayne Rodgers ('90) Rachel Duel('89) t One hundred twenty-fifth street lies prostrate and still. Having spiralled down a gaping till, Crudely smothered in flat black paint, Not "Sam I am , " but "No I ain ' t " Is spattered on concrete walls, Loudly slanged from tenement stalls Where a screaming man, formerly of four Skid Row, Showers the gasping boys below With "smelling salts for a wasted land!" Where etherized phantoms drown in sand. Night whispers, seducing the day, Like a line of verse might say. But useless are poetic wisdoms of the universe When the boys glimpse a woman's beckoning purse, Glimmering beneath a cracked lamplight In the midst of this late summer's night. They take the purse with stiffly intent fingers Where the spectre of the whimpering woman lingers, Where my grandfather jazzed to Coltrane's tune, Drowsily dying and coming soon. Where nubile girls with needle tracks And peach fuzzed boys are laid on their backs In graves shovelled by their own hand Where etherized phantoms drown in sand. Where the screaming man places his wreath, Streaming from his dangling sheath. "Smelling salts for a wasted land!" And more trickles down his hand Onto the foot of a grieving mother Whose whimpering spectre grieves another. Dwayne Rodgers 36 'I Ah Oedipus , my sweet, my center; what was Laius compared to you? Naught but a shade, like you in form but in substance lacking! You entered my life like a king, by nature splendorous, and saved our city from the dreaded Sphinx. A young and strong monarch you then became, strong where he was weak, giving where he'd been immovable. Thinking back, you were much like him in features; but I don't wonder it escaped me, so different were you in kind. You and he may have resembled one another, but our souls were akin and I had eyes for this only. And what is it to ~w that I've offended the gods with my impure love for you? You are my reason for living; while I tremble to remember Laius' passion when he learned that I had borne him a son, I tremble even more to think that I endeavoured with him to bring about your destruction. I glory in a fate that allowed you to survive and to achieve the greatness that was truly your heritage, and one that allowed me great, all-consuming love! For I love you in all ways, as my son, as my self, as my lover. Oh that god is jealous who tries to destroy this passion by exposing it to the corrosive air. Does it really matter how our love came to be if it is in itself pure? Oh Oedipus, I love you more than life itself for you are my existence! I cannot bear to think that you who have truly known me will shudder with revulsion to have done so. By the god of the flames I am shredded up inside. Your inquiry has forced my hand and I sacrifice myself, not to Apollo but to you, my self augmented! 37 �On Mechanics, Geometry, and Newton's Concept of God; or, an Attempt to Read the Principia as a Philosphical Work Jana Giles ('88) Newton begins his Principia with a discussion on the differences between mechanics and geometry and their relation to philosophy. He concludes the Third Book with the necessity for a Supreme Being to exercise dominion over the world. Between these two very genera l s t atemen t s t hat descr ibe his i ntent i ons , and perhaps his motivation for writing the Principia, lie his mathematical principles and propositions which collectively allow him to apply his universal law of gravitation to the phenomena in his world. He describes the way he associates mathematics and philosophy in his Preface to the First Edition: Therefore I offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy, for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this- from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena. (Preface, p. xvii) To understand his "experimental philosophy" requires an understanding of his' distinction between mechanics and geometry. He describes mechanics as corresponding to motion and matter, and geometry to the magnitude of that matter. Mechanics describes the existence of bodies and their motions, while geometry allows us to analyze the qualities of those bodies and to attempt to explain how they move and affect each other: The description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn, for it requires that the learner should first be taught to describe these accurately before he enters upon geometry, then it shows how ·by these operations problems may be solved. To describe right lines and circles are problems , but not geome t rica l problems . (p. xvii) Mechanics would seem, then, to correspond to that part of us which is immediately affected by the physical world. His definition of practical mechanics as that to which all the manual arts belong indicates that we use practical mechanics in the art of drawing a line or in seeing the motion of an object, or in being hit by a moving object. However, practical mechanics has no self awareness. A hand is capable of drawing a circle, but it has no knowledge as to whether that which it has drawn is indeed a circle or is instead a right line. This requires the first purpose of geometry: to define a described circle as a circle, both in itself and in contrast to a right line. While mechanics presumes the application of the relations of the mind of--for example, resemblance, cause and effect, and contiguity in space and time (to use Hume's terms)--geometry analyzes the action that the mechanical artificer has performed, and distinguishes between the different relations. We then can apply the second faculty of geometry: the ability to rearrange those objects and relations and 38 to synthesize new combinations. This is merely an interpretation of this statement: "Therefore geometry is founded in mechanical practice, and is nothing but that part of universal mechanics which accurately proposes and demonstrates the art of measuring" (p . xvii). Notice that he describes that art as that of measuring and not of measurement. It is important to recognize that he is speaking about actions and mo tion, rather than a static state. For , as was explained above, mechanics is concerned with motion, and geometry with the analysis of that motion. But to analyze something already requires that one stop the motion in mid-movement and examine its distinguishable features: matter, position, time, speed, etc. Yet even more confounding is the fact that the act of abstraction is just that: an action. To abstract we must remove the burden of specific examples, locate the essential suppositions, and reunite these in a more general form. To synthesize we must ~ resemblances in different objects, actions, or ideas, we must be able to divide thes e into parts, and we must substitute similar parts from different things so as to create new ones. Therefore, geometry is, paradoxically, the act of describing a dynamic action in static terms. If practical mechanics is the original description of objects, and geometry is the demonstration of the act of that description, then rational mechanics is the explicit joining of the two. In Newton's understanding: "Rational mechanics will be the science of motions resulting from any forces whatsoever, and of the forces required to produce any motions, accurately proposed and demonstrated" (p. xvii). This procession from practical mechanics to geometry to rational mechanics seems analogous to Newton's "burden of philosophy" cited above. This becomes even more apparent when noting the organization and presentation of the Principia. He begins by presenting a few universal laws and definitions taken from the general phenomena he observes. In formulating these definitions, he is applying the first use of geometry to mechanical objects. From these first premisses, he moves on to combine these general definitions and laws with each other and with new mathematical objects to create the propositions that lead him to the universal law of gravitation. And in Book III he reintroduces the phenomena to support his conclusion. This brings us to the General Scholium at the end of Book III of the Principia. Evidently Newton has found the harmony and coherence of his own argument so conclusive that he is moved to assert: It is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions ••• This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. (p. 544) Indeed, Newton's endeavour has been tight, fluid, and powerful, to say the least, but these attributes have never been the standard of judgment for the truth of the existence of God. Whence, then, this conviction? Newton's reasoning in this regard sounds something like St. Anselm's: God is that which nothing greater than can exist. If we examine Newton's statements closely, we see that his argument for the existence of God is much like a geometrical deduction, for he has based it on the regularity and universality of his final general laws of gravitation and centripetal force. As has been elucidated above, these laws came f r om pr opositions formed using geometry, which in turn arose from the original definitions based on practical mechanics. Here we see the root of the problem: where is the origin of practical mechanics? The trouble is that we cannot answer this question using geometry since it presupposes mechanics. And we cannot understand the forces involved in mechanics without geometry to define objects and relate ideas. Therefore Newton's argument for the existence of God is based on phenomena that he fundamentally cannot explain. Did Newton see this problem and 39 �finding himself in a circular argument simply posit God as a final cause? Did he abstract to the concept of God from his own experience? Or was his God based on a different understanding , which either he did not describe , or I have failed to apprehend? If the case is the first, then God is merely a figment of Newton's imagination inspired by a fit of desperation. It adds nothing to the credibility of his project. If the case is the third, then this essay has been to no purpose. The second seems more likely, and also gives me an opportunity to go on with this endeavor. To assist him in his theologico-philosophical search, Newton presents four rules for reasoning in philosophy. They are as follows: Rule I: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearance. Rule II: Therefore to the same possible, assign the same causes. natural effects we must, as far as Rule III: The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. Rule IV: In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inf erred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made mo ~ e accurate, or liable to exceptions. (pp. 398- 400) Allow me to clarify these using Hume's relations of the mind: Rule I assumes that our mechanics are accurate, that we observe carefully, that we make proper use of the relations of cause and effect, and that we are able either to immediately apprehend or extract the ideas of sufficiency and simplicity from natural things. Rule II assumes that we are able to observe cause and effect, to see resemblances among specific .effects, and from these to generalize regarding causes , and then to reapply these to the specific examples. Rule III assumes that we apply the concept of resemblance to qualities of specific bodies, and that we generalize to all bodies, justified by the consistency of the observation of those qualities. Ru l e I V assumes t hat both our . mech anics and our geometry are perfect l y accurate . He then applies these rules to his concept of God in the General Scholium: Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different objects of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in ·duration, coexistent parts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and everywhere. (p. 545) In this statement he is assuming that the soul's perception of phenomena is accurate and continuous, and he applies the simplicity of Rule I and the resemblance of Rule 40 II to posit the thinking substance of God. For although Newton clearly states that God has no substance, he is abstracting from the existence of the thinking principle of man to the thinking substance of God, and therefore the rules are applicable. God is not the thing itself, but the being of it: He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere , he constitutes duration and space. (p . 545) One can see that these assumptions present problems to those who see Newton's reasoning as circular. But perhaps his understanding of God as an action rather than an obj ect might bypass these problems. This brings us back to the conflict between mechanics and geometry. To illustrate this further, I would like to introduce an example. Lemma I of Book I states: "Quantities and the ratios of quantities, which in any finite time converge continually to equality, and before the end of that time approach nearer to each other than any given difference, become ultimately equal" (p . 29). Lemma I is essentially about motion. It is a substitute for the theory of division that presented so many problems to Zeno. The unending convergence to equality of quantities in a finite time is analogous to the continuous division of a quantity into smaller discrete quantities in a finite time. In the case of division, if we divide our quantities into rational halves, theoretically we will never reach a single point since t here will always be left something to divide. The problem with division is that it is based on an abstraction, on a static geometrical analysis in which each piece of matter is examined and defined individually . When the pieces get too small, however, it becomes impossible for human perception, or mechanics, to dis tinguish one from another. Newton expresses this observation himself in Rule III: Moreover, that the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another, is a matter of observation; and in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to dis tinguish yet lesser parts; as is mathematically demonstrated. But whether the parts so distinguished, and not yet so divided may, by the powers of Nature, be actually divided and separated from one another, we cannot certainly determine . (p . 399) Lemma I would seem to obviat e this problem by appealing directly to mechanics and the phenomena of motion as it is presented to the human mind, being an expression of " ... the person of a man, or his t hinking princip l e ••. " ( taking " th inking principle to mean that which perceives and is capable of the geometrical act of abstraction) . When Newton says that "there are given successive parts in duration, coexistent parts in space .•• ", he is referring to division, to the abstract idea of dividing time into discrete particles. But just as the act of division does not explain how one may arrive at a single point, neither does the dividing of time explain how one is living in only a single present moment that is . passing by so rapidly that it cannot be defined nor distinguished from the moment immediately before it (this being one abstract understanding of time) . The implication of all this is that although man's thinking principle is capable of abstraction, it cannot explain the thinking principle itself by means of abstraction because abstraction is contained within it as an operation of it. Hence this reflection on God on p. 546: We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of 41 �anything is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savors; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivance of things, and final causes ..• by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate •.. for all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind by a certain similitude. It is obvious from the above statement that Newton's concept of God is indeed an abstraction that derives its credibility from the presupposed Rules. This is an assumption on the part of Newton that, although substantiated by much evidence, ·cannot hope to be accepted because of the lack of a criterion of truth. Although we may remain dissatisfied with his proof for the existence of God, perhaps his motivation for presenting such an idea in the context of his mathematics, and hfs· awareness of the limitations of his "experimental philosophy" can be understood in his regard for the geometrical act of abstraction, or generalization, as presented in Rule III as "the foundation of all philosophy". And perhaps this sheds some light on his conclusive statement in the General Scholium: "And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy" (p. 546). Cartesian Equations for Rectilinear Figures Kim Paffenroth In the sophomore mathematics tutorial, we were shown that all our beloved conic sections - the circle, ellipse, hyperbola, and parabola - could be expressed by algebraic equations. We then found out that all these equations had the same general form, a form that came to be known as the general equation of the second degree: Ax. 2 + Bxy + Cy 2 + Dx + Ey + F = 0 Any conic section could be expressed in the form of this equation, and anything in the form of this equation was a conic or a degenerate conic (line, pair of lines, or point), if it was anything at all. The object of this paper is to see if we can find similar equations, which will likewise share the same general form among themselves and which will also represent rectilinear figures roughly equivalent to their conic brethren. Now, let's not jump right to the general equation. Let's start rather with the most basic conic section, the circle, with the simplest equation, x 2 +y 2 =r 2 • This will, of course, be a circle with center at the origin and a radius of r. Looking just at the algebraic equation, forgetting the figure for a moment, what properties suggest themselves as bridges of similarity between conic sections and rectilinear figures? The first property that suggests itself to me is that there are two values of x for each value of y and likewise two values of y for each value of x, except when x or y equals ±r, in which case the other variable must equal zero; these points are, of course, where the circle crosses the axes. The other property is that there are cetain limitations to the values I can assign to x and y, namely, that neither can be less than -r nor greater than +r; this is, of course, because a circle is a closed figure. Now, what rectilinear figure will display these properties of a circle, and what equation can we use that will also display these properties while representing a rectilinear and not a conic section? After some thought, the two answers occur almost simultaneously: a square with its center at the origin and its vertices on the axes, represented by an equation which includes absolute-value signs, as below. (~o) IXl+IYl=F F>O 42 43 �Now we have the rectilinear equivalent of a circle centered at the origin, along with its equation. And i f we just think of how we can change the first simple equation of a circle centered at the origin to represent first other circles, then ultimately all the other conic sections, we will be able to similarly alter our equation of a square to represent other squares and then other rectilinear figures. How does one move the center of a circle to different coordinates? By adding or subtracting a number from the x and / or the y value before squaring it. Similarly, if we wish to move our square, we will add or subtract a number from our x and / or our y value before we take the absolute value of it. And how does one change the size of a circle ? By changing the radius and / or changing the coefficient of x 2 and / or y 2 , as long as the two coefficients remain equal. Similarly, if we wish to change the size of our square, we will change the value of F and / or change the coefficients in front of our absolute- value signs, being sur e to keep the two coefficients equa l to one another. Thus, we have as the most general equation of a square, Now, if we wish to fold our square or rhomboid outward to make a pair of angles opening outward to infinity, we do the same we would have done to make an hyperbola: we make A and C of different signs. Thus--- (D, E.) A\X-Df+CIY-El=F A~D A=:C F>O F>O C<O F>O We have now arrived at an equation that looks very much like an unexpanded form of the general equation of the second degree: A(x-D) 2 + C(y-E) 2 = F (see footnote) This equation represents a circle if A=C and an ellipse if A does not equal C, but they are· of the same sign. Similarly, I saw that if we wanted to turn our square into any sort of rhomboid, we could do the same thing we would have done to turn a circle into an ellipse: make A and C unequal, but keep them of the same sign. The center and vertices of our rhomboid will be at the points shown in the diagram above, since these are general for any square or rhomboid. And finally, to make only one angle opening to' infinity, we observe that a parabola, the equivalent curvilinear figure, has only one squared term in its equation. Thus we remove one pair of absolute-value signs, our rectilinear equivalent of squaring, and our rectilinear equation becomes--- 44 45 �. A 1x-D\+cy=F · I Ax +C. IY .~E I= F OR F>O F>O c<O (f IE) A>O C>O A<O Equivalent degenerate sections can also be made. Setting A or C equal to zero makes a pair of parallel lines, unless F=O, in which case there is only one line. Removing both pairs of absolute-value signs gives us of course the familiar equation of a straight line. And setting F=O will give us either a point, a line, or a pair of crossed lines. Footnote -- This form has almost the same properties as the general form, namely: l)it represents a circle if A=C; 2) it represents an ellipse if A does not equal C, but they are of the same sign; 3) it represents an hyperbola if A and C differ in sign; 4) ~t represents a parabola if one of the terms is not squared. The manual points ' this out on p. 16 (Eq . 12), p. 22 (Eq". 26), · p. 33 (Eq.· 42), ·and p. 19 (5 th Eq . down), but it is easy enough .to · see, for if we go from the expanded to the unexpanded form, or the other way, for that matter, A and C do not change their values or their signs. 46 47 �ers. The Bus Ride Jennifer Mischer ('91) As number 23A turned down Averiue . de 'la Liberte, I stepped into the circular light of the street lamp so that the driver would be sure to see me. I dreaded these late rides home from track practice at the stadium . The little town of Monastir , Tunisia folded up at seven o'clock and didn't reopen until dawn. The large red bus slowed to an unsteady stop in front of me. Stepping up into the nearly empty bus, I missed the security of the sweaty, molten mass of bodies· which had oozed on and off earlier at lunch. I chose to sit on the long cushioned seat, universally known to bus riders, in the front. Across from me sat the bus's only other passenger--a robust woman, completely engulfed by her sari, as these Arab women often were, so that only eyes and nose were visible. Two corners of the large white sheet were crossed and tucked under her powerful ·armpits, while the other corners had been pulled down over her head and were clenched between· 'h.e r brown, crooked teeth. Fat and round, she seemed as if she might roll more easiiy than walk. Hooked on her left elbow was a faded milky-green ·plastic basket filled with treasures from shopping at the open-market souk. A· new lipstick, a bottle of dried garbanzo beans and a roll of mauve lace topped the basket. Her left hand clutched a newspaper cone of jet black sunflower seeds which she skillfully shelled ~ith her right hand and ate without dislodging the corners of her sari. "Bi 'l 'let..;" said the ticket man, swaying in front of me to keep his balance. "Carte," I responded, surprised that he had failed to recognize me in my schoolgirl tab'lier which clearly identified me as a Tunisian student who could ride with a student pass. The bus slowed, pulled right and stopped at the curb. Two teenage boys boarded. Their rowdy talking interrupted the meditative silence of the bus. The broken ceiling lights inside the bus ·flic_ ered on and quickly off as the bus jolted forward. k The boys bought tickets to Sousse and took the front double seat on my side. They obviously recognized me, and I was poignantly reminded of my instant identity as the girl from America . "You like Tunisia?" asked the tall lanky one, in confident English. I sat stony, staring out the window above the woman's head. "Come and sit on my lap," said the second boy in Arabic spoken so fast that I could barely decipher the words. "We can have some fun. All right?" "Oh, she won't talk to us," said the first to the second. "We' re too low for her. Aren't we, pretty miss?" "Will you make love to me? Come on. Let's make love." I studied the window glass, memorizing the dusty patterns and the clear glass streaks of its surface, aware of the images of the familiar dark streets as they passed through its frame. The boys were silent now. I lowered my gaze to the floor. I was surprised that my neck muscles had become stiff. The bus turned left onto the long straight section of the route before reaching Skannes. The white wall guarding Monastir's furniture factory came into view. The carved bold letters in the wall, spelling MONASTIR MEUBLES, could just be seen in the moonlight. The flat land extending beyond the wall seemed empty without its labor- 48 I was anxious for the bus to turn into Skannes, nearer my house. "That's a nice tablier you're wearing," called one boy. "Show us what's under your tablier, lady." My school tablier had always been my camouflage. I pushed my fists into its navy blue pockets. I was frightened. My eyes were fixed on the window. I dared not look away from the window. "Take off your tablier and show us your pretty clothes" taunted the shorter one, who had bad acne. My heart raced. I began to perspire. The long sleeves of the tablier stuck to my damp skin. I managed to swallow. As I turned from the window the piercing eyes of the woman across from me met mine for a moment. The boys moved quickly to sit on either side of me. My mind and body were paralyzed . Only my eyes could cry for help . "Let's make love," cried the tormentor to my right. The woman moved forward. She took the corners of the fabric of her sari from her mouth with her right hand and held them in the air about an inch from her chin. "You boys are disgusting," she hollered in an authoritative voice. "Look at her. She is not a tourist. She wears a tablier. She goes to 'lycee. We see her on the bus. You stop your nasty talk." The boys recoiled to the back of the bus in silence, temporarily shamed by her disapproval. Still paralyzed, breathing very softly and shallowly, I looked directly at my defender. We looked at each other intently, sharing a rare moment of understanding, possible only when there is common respect. The bus turned into Skannes. I stood to get off at the next stop. I did not look back at the woman. I knew she would not be looking at me. I stepped down out of the bus, breathed deeply, and let myself cry. 49 �The Passion The Death of Romeo Ange Mlinko ('91) Erika Wilson ('88 ) Wood softens in this air, my nails leaving carvings of despair upon the table. But I am unseen. The walls swell and the paint peels the floor gives where you walk swallowed moans the outside breeze slakes off water showered to the ground lighted squares across backyards black & drenched , fuming with rose . The moment sticks like windows at wrong angles to the sills, or like people's faces here snagged be t ween a grin and a gag, watching the street from the vantage of their door where, closely pressed, they sense the thing that crowds their antique foyers and nails them to the frame. 50 But, soft! What whisper doth escape thy lips? Nay, 'tis but a dream departed E'en as my heart now faintly trips, Its amorous leapings thwarted By Death's cuckolding embrace. And now I rush to fill his arms, Mine own grown weak that I must brace Myself with stone to behold thy charms One last lingering time. For I feel the cold steal over me, And hear the church bell chime The heartbeats I have left with thee. 0! Mine eyes grow dim, by night caressed, And I bow my head that I might press My bitter lips to thy marble breast. Yet, soft! And warm, that one might guess A living heart to beat within! Beneath my incredulous cheek I feel the wings Of a bird once caged, eager to win Its freedom from the deadly whisperings Of marble tombs and silent stone. 0 my love, my life, I say goodbye For we both shall wake alone. You to grieve and wonder why 'Tis I who lie upon this stony bed Not warm and sweet and welcoming, But cold and still and wrongly dead, Betrayed by love to prick myself with Death's destroying sting. Once more, I vow , while strength is mine , To take from you a lover's right And rob your lips of their sweet wine And feast upo~ the rich delight That lights your eyes with fierce desire. But no, I feel the bony hand of Death, And so with him retire. I leave to you my last faint breath, And with my whisper soft upon your lips I feel you stir and answe r me, Even as my life so very gently slips Into the midnight sea. 51 �Conversations With the Moon Ariadne Ashore Beth Cross ('88) Claudia Probst ('88) I Gravel sand biting into the soles of her small feet, Ariadne shifted from side to side, cast wild blossoms onto the receding waves. And the waves, expelling her offering, flung the sodden flowers, which lay then beyond their reach like frail ruined mollusks on the sand. She stood, one hip hitched up like a crane dancer, revolving slowly on her heels, and, resting a hand on her matted, golden hair she remembered Theseus, who had once cherished her, worked out the knots in her tresses with patient fingers and scented oil . "My lord and love" she cried "why did you forsake me here, on harsh Naxos, when for you I betrayed my father?" But he had gone, and taken with him her only ambition, to die beloved, and her words were lost, in the rhythmic mocking slap, slap of the waves and the the blood was flowing freely down her thigh to her ankle and seeping into the sand, her womb's small life lost while the wind plucked her dress delicately away, unstained. How would she die, she on the island beach, her chapped lip chatter skipping time with the waves? No trees stood near to chop and heave and plane, no boards would appear from under the sand, nor the bleached ribs of an abandoned boat, which, restored and launched into the waves, might yet save her. Home the last night had been a shallow cave that she had scratched out towards evening, and slept in, bloodied hands folded across her chest. She had no fire, and no other person to address would have welcomed a strayed gull's mew, or a feral dog's bark, sounds she would have gathered and nurtured, during the dark hours, within her thin sandpiper breast. 52 Spine White and whittled away tooth sunk into the <lark's heart I too am salted down to my narrow self shouldered against my dreams. We stare at each other in a stalemate without stakes. II III The odd shape that begs the question what is to be done with you-become? Vexed sharpness not quite concave oblong, off balance , what shall I call you?-who are not ready to be named or taken from. Out of my upturned palm, shallowed from footprints, half-formed intent-of these are you the echo or impetus? 53 Like the cutting of wisdom teeth you are not there but the hardness hiding is felt. Like the things about a day I dream instead of remember you bite. In the inside turning of sleep where the wings whir stirs darkness journeys. There, was it there that I saw you? Flying like a wild thing while abscent from on high? For why do I recognize the smile which you wear as you regain the sky? �Reflections on Leibnizian Substance Robert DeMajistre ('88) IV Pearl or seed awash in all else that is salt brine, knot, pit knuckled in around yourself, so sure of your circled shape, your obstinance is full-Predecessor to my heart, white as you are and so cold as to glow blue, you are not hollow. v On a long journey you follow in the clouds their veil across your face mimicking the quarters you race through in a month. The rails count the seconds in which I watch you, You, taunting-"Remember? The time at full? and where were you as I slid to half? and he? What did my shadowed side hold for you? remember? Can you ever be as swift as I? Time carries-and you?" The rails click in syncopation with the swooping telephone lines outside the window. "Will you ride with me tonight? ---out, alone--complete and evanescent in ourselves." 54 Unless great care is taken, the system outlined in Leibniz's "Monadology" may seem unintelligible. He seems to hold the most difficult and contradictory opinions of both the Cartesians and the Schoolmen. He asserts that the universe is composed exclusively of living creatures, yet, on the other hand, that it is meaningless to refer the motion of bodies to the causes proper to the "souls" of .these creatures. Upon reflection, however, one finds that the reconciliation of such seeming contraries as these would be very valuable, for although they oppose one another, the force of the arguments offered by either of these two schools of thought is nearly inescapable. In dealing with these arguments, Leibniz is attempting to navigate through the most treacherous areas of philosophic endeavor. For this reason, his work, whether successful or not, is of the utmost importance. Because of its importance and the extreme care needed to interpret the "Monadology," I have undertaken the following detailed examination of some of the issues raised in this work. Since the "monad," or simple substance, forms the basis of the "Monadology," I believe it most advisable, in seeking to understand the work, to formulate a general explication of substance, as well as of the relations between different substances. As a result, this paper will be divided into four parts: 1) substance in general, 2) God and substance, 3) the interrelation of simple substances, and 4) extension and substance. I. SUBSTANCE IN GENERAL Questions relating to the being and qualities of a class of entities understood to "stand under" things have challenged philosophers for centuries. Such a challenge is no doubt based on the observation that though things are capable of change through time, most changes seem to be gradual and proceed according to a rule. In the smallest perceptible time, a person undergoes a change, yet he rarely changes so much as no longer to resemble himself. If nothing "stands under" such changes, the person's identity is a mere illusion; yet if such a "standing under," i.e., substance, is posited, it must be admitted that a thing is not the same as itself, at least in some respect. Further, once substance is allowed, more questions arise, such as the scope of its permanence and its ability to be affected by other entities. It will be the purpose of this paper to explore Leibniz's answers to this second order of questions, for he clearly asserts the being of substance. First, it will be necessary to give a general description of his concept of substance, his ideas on simple and composite substances, and his "detail of changes." In the first few lines of the "Monadology," Leibniz separates the class of substances into the simple and the composite. Although the idea of composite substance is very important to Leibniz's teaching ( indeed, its meaning will be discussed subsequently ) , our discussion of substance will be directed toward simple substances or "monads." According to Leibniz, these monads are determined by the following limitations: 1) they have no extension, 2) they can be neither created nor destroyed by natural means, and 3) they cannot be naturally altered from without. He also asserts 55 �• that monads are' the "elements of all things" ("Monadology" #3) and that the "souls" of men and animals are examples of simple substances. There are at least two questions to be asked at this point. If monads have no extension, and they are the building blocks of all things, the manner in which extension arises is unclear. This problem will be dealt with in chapter IV of this essay. The second question seeks the possibility of sensation and death in Leibniz's system. Leibniz's response to this question involves the idea of "detail of change." As stated earlier , an explanation of this detail will be given shortly. Before dealing with those difficulties mentioned immediately above, we should enquire into the meaning of composite substance. What can it mean for a substance to be an aggregate of other substances? At this point, it may be helpful to look at a similar division ·of the class of ·substance offered by another philosopher. Aristotle also admits two classes of substance . Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that ·w hich is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject ... But in a secondary sense those things are called substances within which, as species, the prim.3f'y sub stances are included. (Categories Ch. 5, #1) monad to monad, and those simp1e substances that have "feeling," i.e., sense perception, have the most distinct perceptions. Since monads are indestructible, and in order to be, they must be perceiving (for wittiout perception they are indistinguishable and thus identical or non-existent), monads must always have perception. It is clear then, that sleep or death may be explained as a time of indistinct perception. Since distinctiveness is an individuating characteristic of the perceptions of a monad, therefore it must be determined by the detail of changes. Thus, this detail of change in the qualities of a substance may explain seeming alterations in the simple substance such as sensation and death. This, then, shall suffice as an overview of the Leibnizian idea of substance in itself, that is, considered without relation to other substances or entities. This explanation is, however, clearly incomplete. Without an account of the interrelation of these monads, any regularity or common perception in the universe must go without explanation. Further, it would seem impossible to say that a monad has perception of anything, as the monad has no faculty for being altered by any object. Thus, it would be impossible for us, being monads, to classify any parts of our perception as substances. A relational account is therefore more than necessary. The first step toward such an account is an explanation of the role of God in Leibniz's system. II. GOD AND SUBSTANCE These secondary substances are also, though in a different sense, collections of primary substances. A relation between the two concepts of secondary substances yields an important observation. Both thinkers assign the term "substance" to entities which do not have the properties of their respective simple substances, but have similar fun·c tions. The species man is predicated of "this man," though for most other relations, man ·may function as the subject. Similarly for Leibniz, the composite, e.g . , an animal, can have extension, and/or can be altered or destroyed. Yet it forms a whole that is generally subordinate to a single monad and for this reason is reflective of the same dispositions as this monad, though it is not clear as to the manner of this reflection (see Ch . IV) . Thus , the relat i on between simple and composite substances differs from the relation of the individual to the species in that a composite substance receives its unity through relation to a single simple substance; whereas the unity of a species is supplied through the definition of that species. We have now to consider the manner in which alterations such as sense perception or death arise in the monad. First, it is not entirely clear how a unity such as a simple substance may be altered at all. For any gradual change assumes a multiplicity (one part endures while another passes out of being), and any sudden and complete change destroys the substance , as nothing can "stand under" this complete disjunction. Leibniz himself uses this argument ("Monadol." #7) to show that it is impossible for a monad to be moved by another natural entity. He then asserts that monads must have some distinguishing qualities or everything would be indistinguishable. The term "quality" must be taken here in a semi-logical manner, that is, used to signify the contents or the predications of the substance viewed as a subject at a certain time. This interpretation allows for the impossibility of efficient causes affecting the monad (for a quality of a substance could not change a quality in another, because neither has existence outside its respective substance) ("Monadol. " 117), without eliminating the possibility of alter a t ion, as t he s e alterations are "accidental" rather than "substantial." Since nothing can change a simple substance, and alteration occurs, the substance must change itself. Leibniz calls the basis or "desire" for this alteration "appetition" ("Monadol." 1115), and the qualification of appetition that distinguishes one substance from another, the "detail of changes" specific to each monad ("Monadol." 1112). He then calls each state of this change "perception." Such perceptions vary in distinctiveness from As shown above, some necessary connection is needed in order for simple substances to relate to one another in the way in which we commonly believe them to. Leibniz supplies this connection through deducing a transcendental cause of perception for all monads. Once such a cause is found and determined to be a unity, a causal interrelation of monads will have been demonst r ated. This transcendental causality Leibniz attributes to God. Since he deduces God, at least in part, by means of a causal argument, it will be necessary to explore briefly some of the technical aspects of Leibniz's methods of reasoning. The first section of this chapter will be dedicated to such an exploration. We shall then proceed to explicate the two proofs of God given in the "Monadology," the one a posteriori and the other a priori. After these arguments have been given, it will then be necessary to fill out Leibniz's idea of God by a short description of the extent of God's power as required by the proofs . It is commonly observed by students of the physical sciences, such as Leibniz himself, that there are two basic classes of truths: those that are mathematically or logically determinable and those that transcend mathematical or logical determination. That a body which falls with a uniform acceleration describes a parabola is a truth of the first order; that bodies near the surface of the earth move with such an acceleration is second order truth. Leibniz refers to the first order truths as truths of " reason " and those of the second order as truths of " fact " ( "Monadol. " #33). From these two classes can be deduced two principles for discovery of truths: "that of contradiction," and "that of sufficient reason" ("Monadol." #30, 1131). Since the principle of contradiction had been overtly employed several centuries before Leibniz, no more need be said of it here. The principle of sufficient reason, however, is more obscure and merits further study. Though Leibniz is clearly not the first to use this principle, he is the first to place it on a par with the principle of contradiction. Leibniz presents a formulation of this principle in a fragment: " t hat every true proposit i on which is no t known per se , has an a priori proof , or that a reason can be given for every truth" (Wiener, p. 94). Further in the same fragment he writes, "These [same] reasons are founded on the principle of contingency, or of the existence of things, i.e., on what is or 'a ppears the best among several equally possible things." And in another fragment, (Wiener p. 95), the meaning of "the best" is clarified: "nothing ever happens without the possibility that an omniscient mind could give some reason why it should have happened rather than not." 56 57 I " �From this, one can infer that contingent truths must be consistent with some omniscient intelligence. It can also be observed that the principle of sufficient reason , like that of contradiction, is very limited in its ability to produce true propositions by itself, for it seems only to point to the existence of some unknown cause and provides little aid in determining this cause. Let us now, having the necessary tools, proceed to the proofs of God. The first proof is demonstrated almost completely through the principle of sufficient reason. First, Leibniz points out that the determination of the causes of anything "might run into a detail without limits" ("Monadol." 1136). Further, each one of the causes that have been determined must have a cause. Thus, no final determination of cause is possible within the series of contingents. The final reason (required by the principle of sufficient reason) must then have caused the entire infinite series from without ("Monadol." 1137). Leibniz then concludes , "and thus it is that the final reason of things must be found in a necessary substance, in which the detail of changes exists only eminently, as in their source; and this is what we call God." ("Monadol." 1138). As stated above, the application of the principle of suf ficient reason is the critical step in the proof. One of two interpretations of this step may be offered: 1) since the principle of sufficient reason presupposes an omniscient and in order to effect completely its designs - omnipotent intelligence, the argument is circular; 2) this argument is merely an analysis of the principle of sufficient reason, setting out to determine such presuppositions. Because there is no indication as to which interpretation is preferable, for the sake of the argument we shall adopt the second . We do so on the assumption that Leibniz could neither allow, nor be ignorant of such an error in such an important section of the work. Once adopted, this second interpretation itself gives rise to one or two observations: 1) this argument undermines the priority of sufficient reason, for if it were a principle, it should presuppose nothing; 2) since it is impossible to determine whether God is contained in the principle or the principle is contained in God, they may in fact be coincident. That is, this may be either a very improper application of the principle or it may be a very effective application , fo r t he pr oof of t he existence of the cause of the regress suffices to demonstrate the proof. I am in no position to give preference to either of these interpretations. Leibniz calls the above argument an a posteriori proof because it proceeds f r om contingent beings ("Monadol." 1145). He then offers a proof a priori. This proof is almost wholly contained in paragraph 44 of the "Monadology": source of all existence, he must be completely unlimited ("Monadol." 1141, 1145). This follows because there can be nothing that could have cause to limit him. Leibniz ascribes to God absolute "Power", "Knowledge", and "Will" ( "Monadol." 1148) • Power must be interpreted as the ability or necessity to be and corresponds to the "subject" of the created monad, that is, the very "substantiality" of the simple substance. Knowledge, or omniscience, corresponds to the "perceptive faculty" or the "detail of changes" in created monads. Will is similar to the appetitive faculty. Thus, all monads are indeed created in the image of God. This points to a third power of God, for not only is he the architect and the builder, but he is also an infinite prototype of the elements of his creation. No direct argument, however, is given for the unity of these powers. There seems to be no proof of one God as opposed to three. Yet one might argue that Leibniz thought multiple necessary substances to be absurd past mention, for each would limit the other. Since we have found that the details of changes of all monads are caused and supported by a single simple substance, a basis for their relation has been established. We also have found a tool with which to determine the origins of extension. As the final cause of all contains infinite intelligence, and we may apply the principle of sufficient reason, in the course of our explorations we should find nothing unintelligible or lacking a reasonable account. We shall, however, often be unable to account for that which transcends our own intelligence . Indeed, all our reasoning henceforth shall depend on the principle of sufficient reason, for only through this principle have we been able to infer the existence of God. All our reasonings will thus stand or fall by this principle . III. RELATIONS BETWEEN MONADS Understanding of this proof is, at least par t ially , fac i li t ated by ano t her fragmen t (p . 92 Wiener) where Leibni z asserts tha t possible essences "st r ive " fo r exis t ence and can exist only thr ough being "grounde d" in something actual. God is t hen t he abso lute ac t uali t y on which t he exis tenc e of any essence or e t ernal truth is based . This pr oof is bas ed on a s ort of fo r mal causal re gre ss while t he former pr oof was bas e d on an ef fi cient causal regress. This formal regress however need not be infinite. Yet, unless someth i ng i s pos ite d t o pr ovj-de unity t o t he being of t h e s e pos sib les, the regre s s s oon becomes unintelligib le. From t he a bove arguments we have come to understand God as a necessary substance wh ich pr ovi de s the f ina l reas on f or both efficient cause and the existence of essences and truths. Since God stands outside the chain of efficient cause, and is the The above account has furnished us with the principle by which a monad is related to entities external to itself. It is now necessary to determine its specific relations with such entities. We shall begin by examining the "connections" between simple substances. Since these monads cannot be externally affected by anything except God, any relation between monads must be given in terms of a harmony. That is, perceptions in each monad must be synchronized with the perceptions of all others to which it is related. The particular organization of monads will be described in the first part of this chapter. Leibniz also recognizes that it may appear to some that monads are in some way limited by other monads. This appearance arises from the fact that though the appetitive faculty provides desire within the monad, this desire is rarely, if ever, attained, i.e., it does not achieve the perception to which it tends ("Monadol." 1115). This will be explained under the head of activity and passivity in t h e l atter part of t his cha pter . Since the relations of monads depend completely on God, Leibniz finds it necessary to consider the intent of God and then to deduce the order of monads according to this intent. In one of the fragments cited above (Wiener p.91), Leibniz asserts that of all possible series, the one that exists contains the most possibles. This assertion, combined with that in paragraph 54 of the "Monadology," gives us a compre hensive formulation of the necessary state of the universe. This formulation is as follows: the existent universe is composed of the series of possibilities containing the maximum possible capacity of positive reality, that is, the series composed of the greatest number of more perfect things. Obviously, this existence is brought about by the choice of God, for this is the best possible configuration. This argument is based on two assumptions: 1) that the perfection of one possible tends to limit other possibles; 2) that a universe with the most reality is the best. The first assumption seems to be based on a presupposition of a sort of "conservation of perfection," where the lack of boundary of one possible causes boundaries to arise in 58 59 For, if there is a reality in essences, or possibilities, or indeed eternal truths, this reality must be founded in something existing and actual , and consequently in the exis t enc e of the necessary being , in whom essence involves exis t ence , or in whom it is sufficient to be possible in order to be actual. �others. The second assumption seems reasonable, for if a universe of a smaller de gree of perfection were created, this lack of perfection would impose unnecessary bounds on creation, and therefore on God - and a bounded God is never as good as it could be. All objections aside, this proposition of maximum perfection will provide us wi.t h a means to deduce the necessary organization of monads. It must be pointed out here that Leibniz does not seek to account for the entire perfection of the universe merely through the relations of monads. Such a quest would involve a study of the perfections of monads in themselves, while the present task is a description of the organization of monads that is able to contribute the most perfection to the whole. According to Leibniz, this maximum potential for perfection is brought about by allowing each monad to express, more or less distinctly, the perfections of all other monads. This leads him to conclude that a monad is a "perpetual living mirror of the universe" ("Monadol." il56). This relation enables the perfection of each monad to be reproduced to a greater or lesser extent in all the monads that perceive it. Indeed, it seems impossible to conceive of any other possible configuration that admits of a greater possible perfection, (aside from an amplification rather than a simple reflection - though such a model, if not meaningless, depends on the details of changes in individual monads, and therefore is not relevant to the argument). This model yields some rather pleasing consequences, particularly for those engaged in metaphysics or the physical sciences. In perceiving more clearly the perfections in nature and beyond, we increase our own perfection, as well as the perfection of the entire universe. Having described the relation of monads in general, we proceed to the said appearance of activity and passivity. Leibniz asserts that a creature is acting on another as far as it accounts a priori for what takes place in the object of its activity ("Monadol" t/50). This a priori account he attributes to distinctness of perception ("Monadol." t/49). In other words, one creature acts on another insofar as it can account beforehand for a change in the other. In order for the argument to be intelligible, this account must be rooted in the desire or appetitive faculty of the actor. Otherwise, a meteorologist could be said to act on the weather. Since a monad can have no direct effect on another, however, these activities must be indirect or "ideal" ("Monadol. 11 1151), for in all cases, God is the true actor. In the ideal interaction of monads, God judges between the appetites of the monads and determines which, if any, should predominate (presumably according to the principle of the best). Insofar as each appetite attains its desire it is considered active. It must be observed, however, that activity and passivity must be restricted to monads in certain relations. With few exceptions, one member of such a relation must be a composite containing or directly related to extension. Otherwise it would be possible for me to change your mind without mediation. This should be a sufficient explication of activity and passivity. Thus, the relations between monads have been explained through God and the principle of the best. It seems impossible that Leibniz could have discovered any other relation since he himself is a simple substance, some "reflectivity" must be assumed in order for him to have knowledge of other substances. If he were unable to reflect any substance, he could not have deduced this substance and would not have included it in the universe. For one who includes himself in a plenum, this conclusion seems inescapable. In Leibniz's "New System of Nature" (113) he reveals that the idea of monads, or "formal atoms", was originally formulated by him in order to account for insuf ficiencies encountered in mechanical explanations of nature. It is clear from this that monads bear an extremely important relation to matter and extension. Yet the "Monadology" lacks a basic explanation of the principles of this relation. It does, however, proceed as if the reader already has some understanding of them. No doubt Leibniz has assumed that those approaching the "Monadology" have read some of his other essays where the monad has been employed as an explanation of natural phenomena. As a result, reading the "Monadology" without textual perspective may give rise to questions regarding the origins of extension, since monads are said to be the "true atoms of nature" yet are not themselves extended. For this reason, the preliminary explication of the relation between monads and matter will draw on sources other than the "Monadology" more heavily than the previous chapters. We shall begin with an elucidation of the manner in which extension may be explained in monadological terms. The character of some particular relations between monads and matter will be dealt with briefly. Then a description of the general relations will be given. Finally, the problem of the connection of the soul to the body will b e discussed in terms of this general relation. Because the basis for the connection of monads to matter is described by Leibniz in works mainly concerned with the science of dynamics, it will be necessary to approach the problem in a manner different from that previously employed. This tack involves assuming matter and deducing monads. In one essay (Wiener 11100), Leibniz argues, against the Cartesians, that the actions of bodies cannot be described simply through extension and impenetrability. He asserts there that a metaphysical principle, that is, substance, is necessary in order to explain the behavior of bodies. In the "New System" (113) Leibniz argues for the need for simple substance. He asserts that since no atomic unity could be found in a purely material body, i.e., since extended bodies can always be divided, at least in thought, and a continuum is not composed merely of points, something non-material must provide the unity in bodies. He calls this non-material unity a "formal atom," and this simple substance he later calls a monad. From this it follows that Aristotle's "prime matter," that is, presubstantial, would consist of pure, undifferentiated extension. We may conclude, then, that monads are the origins of the unity in, and the characteristics of, bodies. In this way, Leibniz joins multitude (monads) and magnitude (extension) in order to synthesize an intelligible interpretation of nature. Monads are, thus, the true units or "atoms" of nature. We have, then, the basis for the relation of monads and extension. Since the arguments given above have been presupposed by Leibniz, this method of deduction should be permitted. There is a great danger that must be avoided at this point. If we accept the fact that every body in the universe has its own unique form or "soul," each possessing an appetitive faculty, experimental physics is clearly at risk. There may be no necessary consistency between experiments conducted on two similar bodies, or perhaps on the same monad at different times , governed by two distinct mona ds . This ab sence of necessary consistency is particularly dangerous in view of the fact that monads themselves have been deduced, at least partially, from the conclusions of experiments. Leibniz recognizes this danger and takes provisions against it. In "Specimen Dynamicum" (Wiener 11122, 11123)", he distinguishes "primitive force" from "derivative force." The former he defines as the substance in its basic sense, or substance considered by itself. Derivative force, however, is a limitation of primitive force which can be observed only when substances come into relation to one another. This latter type of force is only concerned with local motion, and is wholly quantifiable. The quantifications to which these forces are subject are commonly referred to as the natural laws of motion. This distinction must be based on the fact that though monads cannot affect one another directly, God constrains the perceptions of substances in respect to certain qualities (most notably, the quality related to position). From these limitations arise the laws of nature. In this manner, the basis of natural science is saved, and consequently, that of monadology also. This distinction between primitive and derivative force yields some peculiar 60 61 IV. RELATION OF SUBSTANCE TO MATTER �consequences. There arise from these two principles two separate chains of causality. The realm of cause assigned to primitive force is referred to as "final cause" and that of derivative force as "efficient cause." Since the appetitive faculty of any created monad is unable to cause motion, and, conversely, monads are unchangeable by natural means, the perceptions of any given monad must be "synchronized" with the chain of efficient causes in which it is directly involved. In the "Second Explanation of the System of the Communication of Substances" (Wiener #1 18, #119), Leibniz states that this synchronization must be explained in one of three ways: 1) mutual influence, 2) constant intervention of God, or 3) pre-established harmony contrived by God. The first of these alternatives has already been eliminated. The second choice seems to require a miracle at every point in time. The relation between final and efficient causes, thus, is determined by a pre-established harmony. Though such a harmony seems highly improbable, it could be very valuable to the natural philosopher. Not only are natural events predictable a priori through final causes, such as the deduction of the principle of least time found in t4e "Discourse on Metaphysics"; this harmony is able to shed light on deeper questions, such as the connection of the soul to the body. The question of the soul's relation to the body has puzzled philosophers for centuries. This puzzlement is rooted in the lack of definite connection between these two substances. As a result, many have denied any . connection at all, and in this denial, have required themselves to discard one of the two systems of cause. Those such as Hobbes have affirmed only efficient causes and found themselves facing questions involving the origins of consciousness and unity in animals. Thinkers like Hume, on the other hand, discard efficient cause and must seek some sort of subjective cause for perception. These thinkers find problems in determining the cause. of the consistency of perception or the reality of things outside themselves. Under Leibniz's system, the connection between the soul and the body does not rest in the animal, so no direct connection needs to be sought; the difficulties faced by the other thinkers mentioned here are easily avoided. These problems, however, have been faced and more or less accounted for . before this particular question was asked. It is therefore necessary to study this system carefully and determine its truth or falsity as far as possible. The relation between the monads and matter has been, for our purposes, sufficiently explained. If accepted as Leibniz has explained it, this relationship represents some very important natural and metaphysical advances in philosophy. It allows for an extensi~e stud~ of efficient causes, without direct regard to final causes, while preserving the metaphysical integrity of the system. It also allows for the limited application of final causes in natural science, such as the above-mentioned deduction of Snell's law. Such applications .of final cause yield valuabfe principles such as laws of conservation, e.g., the conservaticm of energy or "vis viva, " without necessarily admitting a "black box" into the system. The advantages .to metaphysics fur.nished by Leibn{z 's system have already been partially demonstrated in the above secti~n on the connection of the soul to the body. Further, this system may conceivably give rise to a new study where metaphysics is conducted through experiments relating to efficient cause. most natural philosophers at the time. He even shows that the curiosity that provides the impetus for the sciences is rooted in a tendency to increase the perfection of both the student and the universe. It must be observed, however, that this system is almost entirely based on the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of the best. For this reason, Leibniz may be assuming much more intelligibilty in the universe than he ought, thereby rendering his conclusions empty. Though the word translated in this passage as substance (ousia) has no direct etymological connection to the thought of "standing under," since it is used by Aristotle to signify a thing that serves only as a subject to modifications, such a meaning may be inferred. For since it is not able to function as a predicate, it is impossible for it to be changed in itself, though its function is to bear attributes that may be altered. 2. Leibniz asserts that absolutely indistinguishable entities are either one and the same thing, or utterly non-existent. He justifies that proposition by arguing that such repetition is not consistent with the perfection of God. 3. CONCLUSION 1. e.g., a body near the surface of the earth falls in a parabolic path because it is uniformly accelerated; it is uniformly accelerated because it is pulled toward the center of the earth over a small distance; why is it pulled thus? If the basic assumptions are al.l owed, the "Monadology" would appear to answer some of the . most .important questions of philosophy. The elegance of the system can do nothing but reflect positively on its plausibility. Leibniz not only makes a clear separtation between physics and metaphysics, eliminating the error resulting in their confusion, but establishes a ground for their relations. Thus the science of dynamics may stand upon firm metaphysical grounds, an accomplishment unparalleled by 62 63 �At Calvert Cliffs The Conversation Gretchen Berg ('75) Adam Eggers ('91) We play below chalk cliffs embossed with fossils, forming a ring in the water with our pants rolled up. The constant flux erodes us: even as we shout, salt cuts and wind culls and we are stuff for eons. Untitled Anne Carpenter ('91) This is a lovely kind of night, that plays with your untucked shirt, wafting. God said to Adam "My son come to me my first, most sorrowful son for we must talk" "Yes, Father" Adam replied And God spoke again "But my son do not come to me If you have any hope for mankind any dreams of love between peoples The belief that one man can make a difference Come speak to me when you know what I have just said is true Come talk with me and we can discuss my most wondrous, tragic experiment, Man" And adam answered, most somberly "I am not ready Yet." Sparkle of the charcoal road and fireflies mingle, like expensive scented powder, and the pebbles dent the flesh of your bare toes. Drink the milk the stars are pouring while bubbles break repeatedly, and sweet divine, sleeping cleopatra, with your frayed edges, remind yourself, of the strands of gold ahead, the pearly glow of patience weaves around your head. This is a lovely kind of night This is a lonely kind of night turn off your eyes of light and bow your henna head. 64 65 �Bridge Tequila Brooks ('91) Flanked by a grandmother and two aunts by the cowboy and his sons she enters with t he pr omise that-we're only going to look- neck in the noose of a skinbiting bit of lasso rope And the salesgirls aches with her eyes at the sight of mounds of brightly colored clothing which surround her in the blurr of the dressing room and she the cowboy's daughters look on with such sympathetic in their eyes that Dizzily, forlornly she stampedes the pulls tighter her tongue strains at the opening of her throat pounding hooves beat the grass-stained dirt chokes whimpers on dry tears beseeches the ceiling paneled sky with pounding sc r eams in the echoless bounds of her mind breaks free desperately eyes wild with fright front hooves nicked by stones and grass and the sting of scorpions in her flight until she tells a lie exits with pillow-tongued - i'll take this one she hurls headlong into a grinding tangle of barbed wire now and then she walks with cowed eyes boring holes in the ground directly behind her . " -/ /~ ~.:A~~ 66 67 �A Discussion of Justice and its Evolution in Aeschylus' Oresteia Trilogy Kenneth Paradis ('90) So much blood is spilled on so many hands of the house. of Atreu~ that o~e shudders to speak of the tragic events of the Oresteia as having kin~hip with J~stice. Yet each pair of bloodied hands fashions for itself an image of Justice to JUStify the~r heinous acts of vengeance. Aeschylus exposes the wretchedness of just~ce based on retribution and offers a resplendent vision of justice based on deliberation through the acts of the bitter house of Atreus. The litany of the Oresteia is the evolution of justice· From "bloodshed :or bloodshed" to "grace for grace" (Eumenides 982, 984), the barbaric pas~ of vindictive retribution concedes to a future of civilized clemency and temperate Judgement. Old justice has a narrow, individualistic scope which only concerns itself with. the ben~­ f its of the avenger and the punishment of the of fender, whereas new JUStice is grounded in a pluralism in which judgements are made for the benefit of the whole. One crucial aspect of justice's triumphant evolution is its transformat~on from personal vengeance to societal reason. Through the course of the Oresteia, Aeschylus demonstrates the dangers of the old violence, in this case through the words of the chorus: Here is anger for anger. Between them who shall judge lightly? The spoiler is robbed; he killed, he has paid. The truth stands ever beside God's throne eternal: he who has wrought shall pay; that is law. Then who shall tear the curse from their blood? The seed is stiffened to ruin. ( Agamemnon 1560-66) If the principle of justice is so limited as to be merely a matter of taking life for life, the danger is not only that the seed ?f the house of Atreus ~~ "stiffened to ruin, 11 but also · that the seed of mankind is doomed to fail. For this justice is "eternal" truth, mankind is doomed to eternal violence. How then does mankind escape this ruin? There are no inviolable standards ~f justice by which to assess the actions of mankind because the role of the gods in justice is in a state of becoming as is the ethic itself. Old justice has the intervention of the gods within its confines, and this does not lend stability to the system. In fact, the gods and mortals are both on trial in the Oresteia, and the gods need an end to the discord and chaos old justice is wreaking as much as the house of Atreus does. The gods are only one manifestation of the opposing forces that clash to forge this new justice, not the controlling element that one might expect. The violence of old justice has wrought similar conditions of social and political upheaval in the world of the gods and in the world of the men. .. ·· The Oresteia frees mankind from the , whimsical wills of .the childish gods_ A .• s~'cond aspect of just. fce 's evolution is th.a t it becomes a system based on the ·authority of the gods, but P,r acticed and maintained by mankind. Ridding mankind of the gods' interventions and t~eir passions for vengeance is a necessary step in expelling the mord1ls' penchant for the same ugliness. As we shall see, both Clytaemestra and Orestes believe their actions are divinely inspired and authorized - Clytaem~str:, through an interpretation of the laws stemming from Zeus, Orestes, through the inte - 68 vention of Apollo who shoulders the will of Zeus. In both cases, atrocities are committed, and the end result is more bloodshed - not resolution. The gods are ineffectual in fostering true justice and are committed to cultivating vendettas and hatred. The marrow of human action lies within the act of decision. Therein lies mankind's power of self-determination. Furthermore, it is by the merits of an individual's decisions that he is judged, that he seizes a preparedness for the future and an understanding of the past. Old justice not only strips mankind of his trait of deliberation, but it also seeks to discard basic emotions like compassion and love. These characters labor under the duress of dilemma because old justice is pitting pristine emotions against each other. Love and justice are irreconcilable. The Oresteia spotlights this struggle. "Justice so moves that those only move who suffer" (~ . 250), says the chorus of old justice. Along with Clytaemestra, Cassandra, Electra, and Orestes, the reader suffers the travesties of vengeful justice. As the reader grapples with the characters' decisions, they become his own; thus he experiences and understands justice's evolution. The clambering and struggle of each individual to fulfill his need for justice's company leads to the ugly atrocities of the old justice. Since its place is such a fundamental one, the struggle for justice can feed the ugliness of man's hatred and anger or nourish the compassionate and beautiful aspects of his nature according to the orientation of its laws. The plight of the house of Atreus is an extreme case, an absurd example, in which the thirst for personal retribution overshadows love between family members and honor toward the people the royal house rules. The plight of the house of Atreus demonstrates the inability of old justice to be a viable ethic and lends credence to the justice of deliberation, moderation, and clemency. The scope of this trilogy is expansive, and the themes are so closely interwoven that all of the aforementioned aspects of the plays must be considered to relate a somewhat comprehensive account of Aeschylus' commentary on justice. Therefore, let us examine this evolution of justice - the role of the gods and mortals and its meaning for mankind - in terms of the decisions of the characters who are guided by the entangled forces of the curse, fate and free will, pride and acquiescence, mortal and immortal will, and love and hate in the context of the trilogy. Much I have said before to serve necessity, but I will take no shame now to unsay it all. How else could I, arming hate against hateful men disguised in seeming tenderness, fence high the nets of ruin beyond overleaping? Thus to me the conflict of ancient bitterness is not a thing new thought upon, but pondered deep in time . I stand now where I struck him down. The thing is done. Thus I have wrought, and I will not deny it now. (~. 1372-80) These are the first haughty Clytaemestra dispatches to the chorus as she stands over the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra in Agamemnon. She flaunts a hatred simmered over a long period of time, and peppered with treacherous tenderness. She proudly admits to the murder and the insidious premeditation that was involved to insure its successful completion. The idea of a curse implies an involuntary affliction which debilitates its victims like a disease. Yet, Clytaemestra claims she "pondered deep in time" on the "ancient" bitterness" of the curse, which leads one to wonder if the act was prideful choice bas ed on more than fated action. Does this passage imply that the curse is a course of action which ~an be voluntarily decided upon and that Clytaemestra embraced her role in perpetuating the curse? Is this curse a mad dog on a leash? At this point, the reader is offered two views on the curse. Cassandra, armed with a seer's wisdom, sees the house of Atreus as a place pervaded by a tangled evil, 69 �a sickness that she and every member of the house is doomed to catch. From Thyestes' one voice, a choir of "vengeful spirits" has raised its voice "drugged to double fury on the wine of men's bloodshed" (~ . 1188-90). Clytaemestra would lead the reader to believe that the curse is not such a disease. Like the fire signals from Troy, it grows stronger as the "watchers" awaken at every flaming post to feed the blaze and "kindle another beacon vaster than commanded" (~ . 301). She sees the curse as hatred kindled by the individual. Clytaemestra arrogantly sees the curse as her weapon. Perhaps both women are correct, in that the members of the house of Atreus display a propensity for violence that could be fate through an inherited character. The members of the house may be like the waiting watchman with his "watchtime measured by years" lying "elbowed upon the Atredae 's roof dogwise" (~ . 3). They cannot control the curse's appearance on the horizon, but they are prepared for it and a r e impelled to build on the hatred and nu r tur e its beacon . Clytaemestra ' s changing justif !cations tend to make the reader wary of adopting her view of the curse and the validity of her choice. Clytaemestra first appeals to the justice of the divine to justify her actions. She states that when Agamemnon was down after having been struck twice with her sword, she "struck him a third blow, in thanks and reverence to Zeus the lord of dead men underneath the ground" (~. 1385-87). With these words, the authority of Zeus and his justice are evoked in the defense of her actions to the chorus and the reader. The reader has no reason to believe that Zeus advocates or demands the death of Agamemnon other than allowing the justice of "anger for anger" to exist among mankind. Aeschylus offers a deluded Clytaemestra in her understanding of divine endorsement. Her pride leads her to believe that she may call upon their gods' laws for justification and that the authority of the gods themselves will be within those laws. She is judged by the gods, and to them she offers her reasons. Clytaemestra does not see a need to explain her actions to the people of Argos, for their judgements are not her concern. Clytaemestra refers to Zeus only to the extent that she envisions the avenging of Iphigenia's death as an act that would be judged righteous in Zeus' eyes and perhaps even necessary for the restoration of justice. Agamemnon deserves his fate in her opinion - carrion crow she sings the crippled song and is proud." (~. 1472-74). The chorus also foresees the end that awaits Clytaemestra: "still fate grinds on yet more stones the blade for more act of terror." The old men of the chorus, having witnessed one of the prophesies of Cassandra reach fruition, anticipate in a cryptic fashion the atrocities of the house to come. Both Clytaemestra and the chorus agree that Clytaemestra committed the murder of h~r own volition. Up to this point, they differ as to the "justice" of the incident and what the results of the action will be, but not as to her responsibility. . "Can you claim that I have done this?" (~ . 1497) asks Clytaemestra of the chorus. She adds that in her shadow stands the "old stark avenger of Atreus" and that "his revel of hatred struck down this man" (!&. 1502). Does this offer a refutation of what she said earlier about committing the crime? Has the pride she displayed over the murder disappeared? Is Clytaemestra claiming that her crime was fated for her and that she was merely an extension of the curse and not responsible for what occurred? Her decision is still valid, and her intention could be to add emphasis to her contention that the murder of Agamemnon is a just act of retribution, a sacrifice for the death of Iphigeneia. She may not be denying her free will in the killing of Agamemnon, but rather making the point that she did so as a willing extension of the "justice" of the curse. On the other hand, she may be completely denying responsibility and contradicting her earlier statements. In either case, Clytaemestra is searching for justification. Clytaemestra might also be readying the reader for the entrance of Aegisthus by uttering in this selfsame passage the ambiguous line, "speak to me nevermore as the wife of Agamemnon" (~. 1498-99). This passage could be construed to mean that Clytaemestra is noting a loss of identity in becoming an avenger of the old avenger of hatred. The passage could also mark a change in identity, in becoming the wife of the newest avenger who seethes with hatred and makes it his trade. At this point, the reader finds himself wondering about the role of Aegisthus in Clytaemestra's decision. Perhaps Aegisthus played on Clytaemestra's sorrow over the death of Iphigeneia and turned it to hatred for her once-beloved Agamemnon. Once Aegisthus had gained enough of Clytaemestra's trust to allow him to share her bed, sharing his hatred was a step easily taken. Were it religion to pour wine above the slain, this man deserved, more than deserved such sacrament. He filled our cup with evil things unspeakable and now himself come home he has drunk it to the dregs. (~ . 1432-34) 0 splendor and exaltation of this day of doom! Now I can say more that the high gods look down on mortal crimes and vindicate the right at last, now that I see this man - sweet sight - before me here sprawled in the tangling nets of fury, to atone the calculated evil of his father's hand. (~. 1577-82) - and his sacrifice is indeed necessary: By my child's Justice driven to fulfillment, by her Wrath and Fury, to whom I sacrificed this man, the hope that walks my chambers is not traced with fear. (~ . 1432-34) Clytaemestra is so firm in her conviction that her actions are just to the gods that she does not fear the judgement of the chorus. She brandishes her o1d justice "rights" with words that are as bitter as the wine of her vengeance. There is not acquiescence to the will of the gods in her words, just prideful seizure of the gods' ugly justice through vengeance. Thus, the reader finds himself back in a "discussion" of fate and free will and their relationship to Clytaemestra' s pride. Whether or not she chooses to do so, Clytaemestra discards the roles of wife, queen, and mother. Does the fate of the curse cause her to shirk these roles and adopt such hatred? She revels in her deed. Clytaemestra is seen by the chorus as unabashedly proud of the act of murder itself. "Standing above the corpse, obscene as some 70 This is a bold and brazen Aegisthus that appears at the end of Agamemnon. He speaks as if the injustice he was subjected to has finally been corrected. He judges that the gods in creating this atonement have restored the justice that existed before his father's rancid feast. Aegisthus may have been the one who told Clytaemestra that retributive justice was the will of Zeus and instilled a pride in her hatred for Agamemnon. He certainly sees himself in a position to judge the gods' actions. Aegisthus used Clytaemestra for his own ends; she was an instrument of his will. This exposes the true nature of the curse in that Clytaemestra was susceptible to being coached into thinking she had chosen to perform the act. Aegis thus is not concerned with justice, not even in the barbaric sense of retribution, but with something even more loathsome. The chorus threatens Aegisthus by stating that the people will not stand for his actions and Clytaemestra's and that they will retaliate with "stones of anger" aimed at his head (vengeance does not seem to be a sickness limited to the house of Atreus). Aegisthus reacts by first berating 71 �the chorus and then stating, "still with money I shall endeavor to control the citizens. The mutinous man shall feel the yoke drag at his neck" (~. 1638-40). Thus, we see that Aegis thus' intentions are insidious and beyond simply avenging his siblings' deaths. He seeks the power of the kingship of Argos and the potential to make of it a vile tyranny. At this point in the play, Aegisthus and the chorus are about to draw their swords to end the heated argument which has arisen over the murder of Agamemnon. The reader is prepared to witness the ends old justice offers, more bloodshed. Aegisthus claims that he is not afraid of death as he puts his hands on the sword hilt, and the chorus states its resolve to test his fears and to "take up the word of fate" (~. 1653). Who is it that speaks to stop more bloodshed and more violence? No, my dearest, dearest of all men, we have done enough no more violence Here is a monstrous harvest in bitter reaping time. There is pain enough already . Let us not be bloody now, honored gentlemen of Argos, go to your homes now and give way to the fate of stress and season. We could not do otherwise than we did . If this is the end of suffering, we can be content broken as we are by the brute heel of destiny. (~ . 1653- 60) The vengeance and anger of Clytaemestra have been replaced with an understanding of the situation and a resignation to claim responsibility for the action taken. She displays a reason that seeks to end the bloodshed. She refuses, at this point, the image of justice she acted upon earlier. Lurking in Clytaemestra's words is the understanding "that the brute heel of destiny" will repay her for her actions. Is she seeking an end to the bloodshed now? Is this sudden wish to end violence motivated by a fear of old justice claiming her life as well? If this curse was ever on a leash, it is absurd for Clytaemestra to think she can constrain i t af t e r she le t it loose . For, as she said earlier, "before this old wound heals, it bleeds again" (~. 1450). Driven by fate, destiny, and the curse, the old system of justice is always hungry for more blood. So where is justice in this stage of its evolution? Justice is primordial . Clytaemestra 's actions do not yield an end to this inward hatred, but its perpet uation. She ends the bloodshed between Aegisthus and the chorus , bu t her husband's blood still flows beneath their feet . Only momentarily, in one instance, does she see the futility of righting violence with more violence , of trying to reclaim a life by seiz i ng anot h er. Cly taeme stra and her j ust ice st ill wear carriage-horse bl inders . Clytaemestra's thirst for personal vengeance leads to more than her love turning to hatred, it convolutes her loyalties and concern for the state of which she is queen . Clytaemestra has not only stained the throne of the king (Zeus' representative), but also allows tyranny to enter the state Argos - which the chorus perceives as worse than death. If the purpose of justice is to restore the proper order of good after a wrong has been committed, her actions were more than fruitless; they were unjust. The imbalance of order that the curse has created becomes more severe as the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are added to the vengeance end of the scales . This justice has a limited vision of individual concern which not only obscures the concerns of society and the wisdom of pluralism in decision making, but also fails most funda mentally in aiding the individual. Old justice momentarily mollifies seething hatred and feelings of betrayal, and then, as the reader witnesses, repays the avenger in the currency of twofold hatred and death. As the reader turns his eyes and 72 · expectations toward the inevitable homecoming of Orestes, the words of Cassandra are remembered: We two must die, yet die not vengeless by the gods. For there shall come on to avenge us also, born to slay his mother, and to wreak death for his father's blood ..• for this is a strong oath and worn by the high gods. (~. 1278-85) The anger of the house in the Libation Bearers now manifests itself by terrorizing the sleep of its inhabitants and most acutely Clytaemestra's. The chorus graphically describes the state of the house of Atreus and the despair of ever resolving the curse. Only new blood-guilt with deeper stains is brought on by Agamemnon's death; at this point, "all the world's waters running in a single drift" cannot wash out the stains. Yet, as the chorus stands before the grave with Electra offering prayers to placate the angry spirit of Agamemnon, the women beseech Electra to ask for more death as a means of attaining a just solution. In the midst of the cacophony of voices filled with the prideful and angry timbre of vengeance, one voice, Electra's, defies the chorus by introducing a crucial distinction . As she asks the old women of the chorus how to appeal to her dishonored father, she entreats Agamemnon's spirit to pay back Clytaemestra for the evils she has committed. Yet, when the chorus tells Electra to ask for a body of men to ensure that her wish is fulfilled, Electra makes a distinction not seen up to this point: "to judge them, or to give them punishment?" (Lib. 120). . In this passage, Electra recognizes that there is a difference between reaching a judgement on a situation and inflicting punishment. She also imagines a judgement rendered by a body of men, not by an individual. The chorus tries to persuade Electra into simply asking for a life to be taken to honor the corpse of Agamemnon, as if she is foolish and deluded to ask such a question and make such a distinction. Electra also asks whether her appeal for more violence would be considered just in the eyes of one panel of judges, the gods. The chorus responds by simply quoting the law that it is obviously "right to strike back when struck first." Amazingly, Electra does not respond as if entranced by a curse that strikes at an inward penchant to do evil . She asks for temperance . Although she asks for the justice of vengeance, she admits that it is an evil prayer. Electra is not blind to moderation in discerning good from evil and is aware of her brother's and deceased father's welfares, not just vengeance. The curse is not an involuntary affliction in Electra's case, for she does not assume the destiny of bloodshed. With this recognition, the hope of justice's evolution resides. And for myself, grant that I be more temperate of heart than my mother; that I act with purer hand such are the prayers for us; but for our enemies, father, I pray that your avenger come, that they who killed you shall be killed in turn, as they deserve be tween my prayer for good and my prayer for good I set this prayer for evil: and I speak against Them. (Lib. 140-46) Enter Orestes. After confirming his identity to Electra and being exalted by her as "hope of the seed of our salvation" (Lib . 269) and the recip i ent of a ll t he love her sister, father, and mother would have received, Orestes explains his situation. The tone of his statements is not fraught with pride and blind conviction, but with doubt and deliberation . He outlines to Electra and the chorus the "big strength of Apollo's oracle" (Lib. 269) with as much intention to convince himself of the power of Apollo's words a5°his audience. Entering into his deliberation is the welfare of others and an understanding of the vengeance that he thinks must also be acted out 73 �to appease Apollo's "justice" and the wrath of his father. Shall I not trust oracles such as this? Or if I do not trust them, here is- work that must be done. Here numerous desires converge to drive me on: the thought that these my citizens, most high renowned of men, who toppled Troy in show of courage, must go subject to this brace of women. (Lib. 297 - 04) Clytaemestra's. At this point, the chorus and Orestes seem to have an inkling of the coming trial . The chorus explains that it thinks Orestes is right in his actions because he was blessed by the gods, and that ceremonies will "wash clean and cast out the furies" ( Lib. 968). They see a time when the remaining members of the house of Atreus will be free from the curse. Unlike his mother, Orestes publicly explains his actions to the people of Argos. He shows concern for them and respect for their opinions by offering this explanation. Orestes asks Zeus to "look on my mother's sacrilegious handiwork and be a witness for me in my day of trial how it was in the right that I achieved this death" (Lib. 986-88 ) . The pride Clytaemestra displayed after the murder of Agamemnon is not present in Orestes' words, but his concern for others' interests is: "I grieve for the thing done, the death and all our race. I have won; but my victory is soiled, and has no pride " (Lib. 1016- 17). The reader then has a second murder which involves an individual who is not fueled with hatred and bloodlust, a man who is compelled by the god Apollo and his father's .curse. He is not proud of his action or under the sway of a lover and is concerned with the welfare of the kingdom as well as his own, unlike Clytaemestra . The reader may venture to say that this is a more "just" murder, considering the circumstances. Justice has evolved in its intentions but not in its ends. The act is still wrong, and as even the chorus realiz~s, is not the answer to the end of bloodshed. Clearly, Orestes is not void of anger, but he is not a vessel of blind rage, overweaning pride, and a thirst for blood. He recognizes the concerns of others and examines his situation. Clytaemestra acted with less of an appeal to reason and without consideration for others. It must be said on behalf of both that the chorus is the only voice singing the thredony of vengeful justice joyfully . Yet , both Electra and Orestes still speak the vernacular and annunciate the laws of old justice. Both still seek revenge and never contradict the enthusiasm of the chorus . Electra, for all her wanting of temperance, still wishes to "smash their heads" (Lib. 395 ) , and Orestes asks to "take her life [Clytamestra's] and die for it" (Lib. 438). But this reader tends to find it easier to sympathize with the words that follow from Orestes and the mitigating circumstances and motives behind his actions than with Clytaemestra . In lines 554 through 585, Orestes relates the plan of treachery that Apollo spelled out for him and asks for that god to guide his actions. Orestes proceeds with the plan and when he tells his mother of his own death through the use of a stranger's tongue, she blames the curse for cutting down her son. Clytaemestra is not relieved that her possible avenger will not have the capability of killing her now. She laments the death of Orestes. After the chorus follows through on Apollo's plan by informing Clissa to tell Aegisthus not to come with bodyguards, it offers a prayer of supplication to Zeus and asks the "gods of sympathy" to "wash out the blood in fair spoken verdict - let the old murder in the house breed no more" (Lib. 802). The chorus sees sympathy in vengeance. The women add that they want the gods to guide Orestes' hand in the "innocent murder." The chorus seems to think that this bloodshed will cause an end to bloodshed. First Orestes kills Aegisthus, and then he confronts Clytaemestra. He still is doubtful of what should be done . He first asks his f riend Pyla des , "wha t shall I do , Pylades? Be shamed to kill my mother?" (Lib . 899) . From this point onward , we see that Orestes is more a victim of fate and destiny than Cly t aemes tra ever claimed to be. We see again in the coming responses that Orestes is not a blind agent of fate . Pylades' response exposes the role of the gods (in this case Apollo) in determining justice . He reminds Orestes that the oracles compel him to take Clytaemestra's life. "Count all men hateful to you rather than the gods" (Lib . 902) , remarks Pylades. Clytaemestra , hearing this , probably realizes t hat compassion has not left Oreste s' heart and reminds him that she is his mother . Orestes' response is simple . He asks how he could ever live with the woman who killed his father . She now changes the position she held after the murder of Agamemnon by saying, "destiny had some part in that my child" (Lib. 909). Orestes responds with, "why then, destiny has wrought that this shall be your death." Clytaemestra then reminds Orestes of the Furies that will haunt him i f he carries out his deed and of the evils of Agamemnon's acts. When that fails, she ret or ts tha t he is re sponsible and that he just wants to kill he r . Ores t e s r e sponds, "no, i t will be you who kill yourself. It will not be I" (Lib. 923) . Clytaemestra again r em:Lnds him of t he Fur ies. Undaunted·, another motivation for having to kill his mother emerges: "how shall I escape my father's curse if I fail here?" (Lib. 925). Orestes then takes her life . One must wonder if he would have taken his mother's life had not this mandate come from Apollo's and Agamemnon's avenging spirits. Personal revenge and pride do not figure in his decision as they did in The voice of old justice in the Libation Bearers whose strong words and frequent quotation of "blood stroke for the stroke of blood" ironically speaks of the futility in regaining peace and saving the royal house through this harsh, barbaric law. Perhaps the reader can find more sympathy for Orestes because of his circumstance, but he killed his mother and that is unjust . The role of the gods and fate in his actions may clear Orestes of responsibility, but an atrocity still has been committ e d. The fact that Orestes appears to have little or no choice in taking his mother 's life incriminates t he divine will that forced him into t hat situation. The gods are not capable of being judges because they are merely criminals who use old justice as an ins trument of t h eir wh i ms . Driven out of the house of Atreus by Clytaemestra' s bloodhounds, the Furies, Or estes seeks refuge in the sanctuary of Apollo's temple at Delphi at the beginning of t he Eumenides. After Apollo acknowledges responsibility for the crime, he sends Orestes to Athens to appeal to the wisdom of Athena in this matter. The sides are formed: one is the ghost of Clytaemestra and the Furies, who seek the perpetuation of vengeance; the other is Orestes and Apollo, who want an end to the bloodshed and the haunting Furies. The two sides represent more than vengeance and clemency. The chorus (the Furies) points out that Apollo is a "young god" who has "ridden down powers grey with age" (Eum. 150) and that his acts spite tradition. Thus, the reader can also sense that the argument of the Furies will be based on the authority of conventional justice and a fear of losing their role in that justice. They think a new distribution of power which includes mortals in justice will not include the Furies. They thus accuse Apollo: "he made man's way cross the place of the ways of god and blighted 74 75 The children were eaten: there was the first affliction, the curse of Thyestes. Next came the royal death, when a man and lord of Achaean armies went down killed in a bath. Third is for the savior. He came. Shall I call it that, or death? Where is the end? Where shall the fury of fate be stilled to sleep, be done with? (Lib. 1068-76) �At the outset of the trial, the Furies show the inconsistency and lack of fore sight that old justice affords. They first connnent on a valid concern, namely, that the precedent that could be set by freeing Orestes of responsibility would lead to a chaos of matricide, claiming the lives of many. The Furies' concern for themselves and for their role as representing the authority of tradition emerges. Because in the following stanza the Furies feel "parents shal} await the deathstroke at the hands of their children" (Eum. 498), they warn that they (the Furies) will "let loose indiscriminate death" in order to punish mankind (Eum. 502). Thus, they do not seem to be sincerely concerned with the welfare of mankind, but with the honor of their office. For if it were a legitimate concern of theirs that this act of acquittal would lead to the chaos of children killing parents, why would they have mankind atone for this wrong by wreaking indiscriminate death? The Furies also must sense the fall of the "house of Justice" in the process of deliberation itself, as well they should. After all, as they argue, the only things that instill respect for the laws are fear and pain. They doubt that fury would have any place in a justice of deliberation and reason. Within the Furies' questioning of Orestes, another fault of old justice is exposed. When Orestes speaks of the dishonor his mother Clytaemestra committed the • chorus retorts, II of this stain death has set her free, but you still live." One ' must pay for his dishonor with death in the old justice. Orestes asks Apollo to help him at this point because he does not have a refutation of the Furies' claims. He does not scramble for contradictory justifications like his mother, but courageously takes responsibility for his actions. Once again his affinity for deliberation comes to the fore. Orestes asks Apollo to answer th; Furies and adds, "but was the bloodshed right or not?" Apollo's response is another appeal to authority in that what was done was connnanded by Zeus. The gift of kin~ship is a gift given by the hand of Zeus and through his own kingship. Apollo claims to act on behalf of a dishonored Zeus. The murder is justified as a correction of this dishonor. In an attempt to prove Zeus a poor character witness, the Furies remind the jurors of how Crones was enslaved by him. The Furies claim this is proof that a stance based on the divine stature of kings as unassailable is one of contradiction for Ze~s. Thus, the reader sees two additional sides being drawn. Apollo responds to this attack by calling the Furies "foul animals" and stating that death, unlike enslavement, is an irreversible end. The Furies do not imagine any effective and fair implementation of justice as being anything other than dealing out rations of death. In such a childish fashion, the proceedings move along. The divine elements in the play concoct bigger and better threats to sway the citizens of Athens. Neither Apollo nor the Furies argue righteousness from any stance other than that of authority. They do not bait one another into serious discussions based on the motivations of Clytaemestra and Orestes, the debacle of Argos, or the ends to which this justice is leading them. The citizens show integrity and thought in that their decision of half advocating acquittal and half not reflects the evidence that there are good reasons to judge in favo r of eit he r the ghos t of Clytaemestra or Orestes within the old justice. They are stalwart in their resolution and unaffected by the threats of the gods. The citizens also do not think the fact that Athena was born without a mother is an important consideration in the case. That · fact has nothing to do with the case before them. Yet, in another display of frivolous, benighted divine judgement, Athena decides to cast her deciding vote for Orestes because she feels she is living proof that the role of the father is necessary to the creation of life and the mother is not. She judges Orestes' life or death on the basis that one kind of murder is less offensive than another, namely that matricide is not as evil as patricide. Orestes wins. Despite the bickering and the childishness of Apollo and the Furies and the limited wisdom of Athena, the bloodshed finally ends. The brooding Furies are placated with a new name and station; they ·become the passion to be treated justly. Thus, Athens is not blighted with a famine and the world has a new resplendent justice. The bloodshed ends. Mankind has a future. Along with Orestes, mankind wins this case because he can now free himself from 76 77 the age-old distribution of power" (Eum. 171 - 72). Armed with their fears, the Furies insist incessantly that they have a right to their justice. They claim that it is an integral aspect of the divine order. Apollo responds by speaking °'f the ugliness of this justice of vengeance and stating, "the gods spit out the manner of that feast that your loves lean to." This, the reader could imagine, is a preparation for the outcome of the trial. Despite what the reader has witnessed of the gods using this justice in the past two plays, Apollo makes it clear that now the gods find such justice repugnant. The Furies have not a chance, for the gods are vindicating themselves, even if through contradiction. Apollo begins by facing the Furies' objections that kindred blood is more sacred than a blood bond within the oath of marriage. This they see as a way of making Orestes' act more foul than Clytaemesta's. Apollo sees the relationship of a married man and woman as guided by "right of nature" (Eum. 218). The two sides represent the sides of blood bonds being the stronger and convenant oath bonds as the stronger. Since the bond between a citizen and a state is one of oath, not blood, the justice which is created to suit a society must be made with this distinction addressed. Apollo seems to be concerned with keeping his oaths and promises to Orestes for fear of the wrath Orestes will exercise if wronged. The reader witnesses the role of the gods changing because mankind has a power which holds even the gods accountable; perhaps it is man's appeal to justice. "But I shall give the supplicant help and rescue, for if I willingly fail him who turns to me for aid, his wrath before gods and men, is a fearful thing" (Eum. 232-34). Yet, both Apollo and the Furies are appealing to a false understanding of their authority, like inept parents. Apollo wants to claim that he "speaks justly" because of his seer's wisdom and favored position with Zeus. The Furies see their "right to office" as license to "conspire to steer men's lives" (Eum. 310-11) with their song of frenzy and fear. But the dangers of justice based7olely on the authority of those involved have already been shown. There is a difference between the two appeals though, in that the Furies see as a right of their office a justice that ignores circumstance. "We hold memory of evil; we are stern nor can men's pleadings bend us" (Eum. 383), say the Furies. Yet Apollo asks Orestes to be cleared on the basis of the reasons for his actions. Amazingly, both parties allow the court the right to judge their case despite their contentions that their station makes their actions right . Therefore, not only will the court of mortals be judging the actions of a man, but they will also be asked to assess the offices of the divinities that are in opposition. No more unconditional smiting, hunting or haunting will be afforded the gods. They are being held accountable - being judged. The gods will no longer thrive on executive privilege. The court is assembled. Twelve honored citizens of Athens shall strive to find truth. All evidences are admissible and deliberation is recognized as essential. The reader readies himself for an exciting stage of evolution. He pushes onward through the pages anticipating a triumph, an end to the madness. Litigants, call you witnesses, have ready your proofs as evidence under bond to keep this case secure. I will pick the finest of my citizens, and come back. They shall swear to make no judgement that is not just, and make clear where in this action the truth lies. (Eum. 485- 89) �the pathetic litigants of this case. The gods' authority is imbued in the court, but they no longer preside as judges. The gods have been escorted out of the ~ourtro~m to adorn the steps outside with their marble images. This one aspect of Justice s evolution reaches ifrluition. t f its evolution is that it moves from individualistic Another cruc a aspec o . h. d d f Argos vengeance to pluralistic reason. The preservation of the kings ip an or ~r ~ t reflects a societal concern. The pluralism of the jury and th.e presence o t e cour will not be obscured with cloudy, subjective thinking. The JUry can offer clemenc~ and com ass ion and can consider circumstances for mankind's benefit. The futu~e o his law: and their interpretation is finally out of the hands of t~e s~lfish, fickle ods Man now has mastery over his fate; he has the power of true JUStice. g ·Mankind's justice now has the capability to reflect and foste~ the beautiful as ects of his nature: compassion and reason. Now hatred and JUStice are not ir~econcilable . The chorus , which throughout the trilogy has been the vo~ce 0 ~ ~~: justice, offers the reader the prayer of man's new justice in the conclusion o Oresteia: This is my prayer: Civil War fattening on men's ruin shall not thunder in our city. Let not the dry dust that drinks the black blood of citizens through passion for revenge and bloodshed for bloodshed be given our state to prey upon. Let them render grace for grace. Let love be their common will; let them hate with single heart. Much wrong in the world thereby is healed. (Eum. 976-87) All textual references are taken from Richmond Lattimore's Oresteia printed by the University of Chicago Press in 1953. 78 translation of the A Letter from an Alumnus The following letter was written by a graduate of St. John's College and addressed to current tutor. The New York Times Book Review article that is referred to in the letter is entitled "What's Left Out of Literature" and was written by Charles Newman. a Summer 1987 Dear Tutor, Here's the article from the NY Times Book Review that I mentioned. He occasion- --- --ally gets carried away with the literary criticism lingo, but most of it seems coherent, and I think he is very accurate with many of his arrows/observations. The musing in the final paragraphs about the "why" of it all relates to, gee, the debate about liberal education--a debate that has perhaps subsided but the conclusions of which, nevertheless, people don't really want to face. I think the "cultural weight lessness" this fellow speaks of is very much at the heart of the contemporary educated person's disposition towards the world. It receives expression not only in the literature, which a lot of people don't like, but also in the music and certainly in films, each of which are, in contrast to the literature, very popular. I think this makes a certain amount of sense in that there is little to distract one from the emptiness of a novel or short story, while there is plenty of distraction to be had in music and at the movies. Recent NY "art films," like Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law and David Byrne's True Stories (which you've seen), and also the summer's Hollywood smash, The Untouchables, are weightless in the extreme, to my eye, and for the most part I do think this was the intention of the filmmaker. I am friends with the assistant editor of Down by Law, and was at the opening of True Stories, where Byrne came out afterwards and fielded questions for an hour. He made it clear that the irony of the movie was intended as detail and comic relief, and that the general expression was one of approbation. It was the judgement of a sophisticated New Yorker that the small town scene in Texas is okay too and that whatever one does and must do to find happiness has to be considered fine-- what basis for criticism exists, after all? We all want to be happy. Byrne then was intending to lecture the sophisticated New Yorkers a bit, in this odd way. I for one wish he had not been so generous. For better or worse, I don't think that "whatever" is "fine." Too many nights listening to conversations of Happy People in a taxi has left me with this sour state of mind. My roommate and I had something of an argument about The Untouchables. She works in video, is a movie person more or less, and, like most of the NY movie people I know, thought it was a great film. I saw it with four movie people, and all they could do was rave about the cinematography, the "sepia tones," the campy (but so what?) performances of de Niro and Connery, and, above all, the director's "quotations" from Hitchcock, and of the famous baby-carriage-on-the-steps scene from the classic Potemkin. On and on. All the while ignoring-- that is, accepting with no qualms-- the comic book treatment of the theme. The theme was law and order, for it's the story of the treasury agent Elliot Ness, who was imported into Chicago to try to nail Al Capone. Every character in the film was a caricature. No attempt was 79 �made to defend with development any of the pertinent cliches. A high- priced NY playwright did the script (David Mamet), and I have to assume he had his reasons fo r restricting himself to the comic book approach. I can even think of a good reason , to wit, to force a pseudo - sophisticated audience to face the cliches and acknowledge their simple truths, for the modern audience has seen everything. There is no surprising or shocking it, and its sole critical activity has become the activity of recognizing and filing away the familiar formulas. In doing so, it assures itself that whatever is being aired has been seen and presumably deconstructed before and requires no direct consideration. I am not saying this very well, but I think its one of the most important things to note about the way contemporary, educated people approach expressions of all sorts, about the way they approach the world. I listen to it all the time in the cab, and this is really one of the main reasons I took to recording taxi conversations; what I would call social considerations seem to ru l e 90% of a ll discussions, re gar dless o f content . I t is most important to have something to say immediately, to say it, to be agreed with, and to pass on the next thing. That is, the aim is to dispense with whatever has been said, and if there's to be any dissecting at all, it's accomplished with stupid cynicism and pseudo-sophistication. Entertainment remains as the only value- - .how entertaining, for whatever reason, was the film/play/book/painting/person, and more importantly, how entertaining is the blithe discussion in which it/he/she is recognized and filed away? For Mamet, then, to write a screenplay about law and order that is no more sophisticated than a Dick Tracy cartoon is to provide the audience with very little entertainment of the latter sort, for the bare cliche is dispensed with the barest amount of entertaining after- theater conversation. The problem with this tack is that people simply ignore the theme altogether. Especially when the movie's director, Brian de Palma, is obsessed with film history and technique, and is notorious for making movies that say nothing. If it was Mamet's intention to try to make people face the simplicity of the cliche truth, it didn't work well, at least not with the sophisticated NY audience, not with the NY movie people. As to whether it matters that the theme gets no better treatment than it does in a comic book- - to ask such a question is to invite embar assed silence. My movie roollllllate finally said, in exasperation, that it's not necessary that the movie say anything important. I replied that, of course, it's not necessary, but for that matter movies period are not necessary. Necessity has nothing to do with it. What one would like to see, rather, is the question. What one likes, finds interesting, worthy of attention, worth the time. In considering this, I said that a multi-million dollar project that says nothing more than a thirty cent comic book seems less than what one should be satisfied with, and that during this summer America has fallen in love with Oliver North and similar people who seem to have less of an unders tand ing of t he complexi t y of t h e l aw and order questions t han one woul d wish in men working in the White House. When I made these admittedly simple and glib sort of suggestions about what I would have pref erred The Untouchables to be, my roommate said "I get very uncomfortable when I feel I'm being lectured," implying that when something makes her uncomfortable she dispenses with it. Her meaning was that a "serious" treatment of the law and order theme was not only unnecessary but was not at all to be desired, would be declasse, something NY movie people, and perhaps sophisticated audiences in other cities too, would not put up with. Further it would be an insult to their intelligence. But these might well be the words of Ollie North, and Poindexter, and who knows who else. In any case, the attitude that an attempt to state a developed position, one in which certain values are seriously de.fended or attacked, is something that should not be made is the serious underlying attitude of the sophisticated audience. I do think it's pseudo-sophistication, and I think the article here is talking well about this sort of thing. In the end, as the fellow suggests, its a sign of an ignorance, "a king of a quiet nervous breakdown," due to 80 the fact that "we don't quite know what has happened to us." To admit to such a state wou ld b e quite paralyzing for people with a conscience. Most of the contemporary music is trash. I've always thought Springsteen an exception, of course, and there are others I consider great poets and great r The two needn't necessarily go hand in hand but they seem to th d p otesters. something from a lecture Albert Camus gave in Paris in 1957 ese abysf. This is born: ' , a year e ore I was On occasion art may be a deceptive luxury ... For about a century we have been living in a society that is not even the society of ~oney (gold can arouse carnal passio~s) but that of the abstract ym~ols of mon:y. The soc~ety of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs Wh ruling class measures its fortunes not by the acre of l~nd ore~h a ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding idealle ~o al~ertain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemn~ tse . to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience •.. There is no reason for being surprised that such society chose as its religion a moral code of formal principle: an~ that it inscribes the words "liberty" and "equality" on its priso~s.as well as on its temples of finance ... Is there anything surprising in the fact that such a society asked art to be not instrument of liberation but an inconsequential exercise and a: m~~e entertainment? Consequently, a fashionable society in which a troubles were money troubles and all worries were sentimental worries was satisfied for decades with its society novelists and with the most futile art in the world, the one about which Oscar Wilde, thinking of himself before he knew prison said that th greatest of all vices was superficiality ' e In this way the manufacturers of ar~ of middle - class Europe b:!~~~ and after 1900, accepted irresponsibility because respon~ si ty presupposed a painful break with society (those who really broke with it are named Rimbaud, Nietzsche Strindberg a~d we know the price they paid). From that peri;d we get th~ ~ eory of art for art's sake, which is merely a voicing of that irresponsibility ... The more art specializes, the more necessar popularis.ation become.s. In this way millions of people will hav~ the feeling of knowing this or that great artist of our time because they have learned from the newspapers that he raises canaries or that he never stays marrie d fo r mo re t han s ix months The greates.t renown today consists in being admired or hated without having been read ... Consequently, there is nothing surprising in the fact that almost everything worthwhile created in the mercantile Europe of the nineteenth ~nd twentieth centuries - - in literature, for instanc:-- was raised up against the society of its time. It may be said that until almost the time of the French Revolution current literature was, in the main, a literature of consent . From t he moment when middle- class society became stabilized, a literature of revolt developed instead •.. There is no need of determining whether art must flee reality or defer to it, but rather what precise dose of reality the work must take on as ballast to keep from floating up among the clouds 0 : from draggi~g along the ground with weighted boots. Each artist solves this problem according to his lights and abilities . 81 �••• The loftiest work will always be, as in the greek tragedies, Melville, Tolstoy, Moliere, the work that maintains an equilibrium between reality and man's rejection of that reality, each forcing the other upward in a ceaseless overflowing, characteristic of life itself at its most joyous and heart-rendering extremes. Then, every once in a while, a new world appears, different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity •.• That's just it and yet that is not it; the world is nothing and the world is everything-- this is the contradictory and tireless cry of every true artist, the cry that keeps him on his feet ••. Much is missing here between the last paragraph and the bulk of what I've typed befo r e it, mostly a discussion of social realism and of romanticism. The debate comes to this ambiguous, uniting conclusion. Whatever its merits, the idea that "weightlessness,'' that a value-neutral literature, a literature of silence, can be reputable, seems something Camus would argue against, and something that itself calls for protest. This hasn't been a very clear transistion from the stuff above about movies, but ••• Here is a Springsteen lyric. It eventually, at the end, touches on out theme. It isn't a poem proper, but is a lyric to a song only a piece of the Piece, but-JUNGLELAND (somewhat quietly, with piano and flute in background) The Rangers had a homecoming In Harlem late last night And the Magic Rat drove his sleek machine Over the Jersey state line Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain The Rat pulls into town rolls up his pants Together they take a stab at romance And disappear down Flamingo Lane Well the maximum Lawmen run down Flamingo Chasing the Rat and barefoot girl And the kids round here look just like shadows Always quiet, holding hands From the churches to the jails Tonight all is silence in the world As we take our stand Dowin Jungleland (crashing rock and roll) The midnight gangs assemble And pick a rendezvous for the night They'll meet 'neath that giant Exxon sign That brings this fair city light There's an opera out on the turnpike There's a ballet being fought out in the alley Until the local cops 82 Cherry tops Rip this holy night The street's alive as secret debts are paid Contacts made, they vanish unseen Kids flash guitars just like switchblades Hustling for the record machine The hungry and the hunted Explode in a rock and roll band Face off against each other in the street Down in Jungleland In the parking lot the visionaries Dressing in the latest rage Inside the backstreet girls are dancing To the records that the DJ plays Lonely-hearted lovers struggle in dark corners Desperate as the night moves on Just one look,, and a whisper, And they're gone (breakdown in beat, turn to a long, jazzy saxophone instrumental that eventually dies down to the long piano, sounding exhausted, lost ) Beneath the city two hearts beat Soul engines running through a night so tender In a bedroom locked in whispers of soft refusal And then surrender In the tunnels uptown The Rat's own dream guns him down The shots echo down them hallways in the night No one watches as the ambulance pulls away Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light ( rising) Outside the street's on fire In a real death waltz Between what ' s flesh and what's fantasy And the poets down here Don't write nothing at all They just stand back and let it all be And in the . quick of the night They reach for their moment And try to make an honest stand But they wind up wounded, not even dead Tonight in Jungleland It's the silence, noted in the first two stanzas and then returned to in the last, that made me think of this right now. The crazy str~ggles take place oddly surrounded by sile~ce, and there's a protest here that some people, perhaps the "kid~ just like shadows b~t clearly the "poet," should say something. They have an obligation to say something. I think there's a reference to the very first important 83 �song written by Paul Simon, back in 1967, entitled The Sounds of Silence. Jungle land seems to me far from a naive or romantic view of several different strains of struggle, by the way. It adopts a cartoon hero form, but then turns on itself: the black hero/dreamer dies ignominiously, in a sense a suicide, indeed; his girl has no choice but to just turn out the light; the worshipping youth are conned into a stupid war, eventually setting their world on fire, uncertain of what is real and what is not, uncertain of the value of reality and fantasy. This is something like the uncertainty that Newman writes about in his last few paragraphs perhaps; Newman begins his piece by complaining about the silence of the poets in the face of all this, whereas Springsteen ends his with the same complaint. But each suggests that the poets are wounded, something quite different than the controlled silence of Minimalist art of the seventies, for instance. I really had no intention of writing all this. I have very little in the way of organized things to say. Concerning my alleged novel , I h ave an i mp oss ible time t r ying to judge it, whether it is silent and empty. Or do I -- I guess I don't worry that it's empty. I do worry that no one will, nevertheless, care enough about such a character to read it. It is written from a depressed view of life, certainly. Today such an attitude is not i n vogue. I had not adopted the attitude; it w.as / is something I have to contend with. The hero is not a cartoon character. He has to be both strong and weak. There have to be reasons for people to care about him, as the narrator does. At the same time, there have to be given the secrets of his failure, which the narrator has only barely come to understand as he begins to wonder if he, the narrator, isn't really the better man. That's something he was always sure wasn't so, having always been sure of his inferiority. But then is he the better man, or merely better suited for life? Is viability the only criterion? If so, the question of what happens to a good man in a bad city never gets aired. For such a scenario to exist there must be other criteria to allow for the unviable organism to be nevertheless deemed good. Without other crit eria the environment is always the measure, cannot be deemed bad. Without other criteria, the bad city is a phantasma, impossible. It is a woman, the dead hero's old girl and the narrator's new love, who suggests to the latter that the hero was no hero , in that he was an unviable organism, suggesting then that no other criterion exists. And, given the new love, the narrator has good reason to agree, to dispense with the rival (dead but still a rival). The post- mortem, then, takes place subjected to all sorts of pressures, and is important in that it is an evaluation of how one evaluates life. Why live, why not die? I hope this isn't so vague it is rubbish for you. I've been feeling better the past two weeks, but am still in the process of recovering. I've had little energy all summer, and this has been, I guess, an attempt to bash through and think about the task of painting this character . I've been writing very litt l e , rea l l y a f ra id of doing it while my mind is slowed by the medical problem. I am feeling better, but it's disturbing to feel less than what I know I am. The boundary between the physiological and the psychological, of course has long been blurred. "Know thyself"--no mean thing. I hope all is well with you. Alla prossima, St. John's Alumnus 84 �Non-Pro BULK U.S. PO St. John's College Annapolis, Maryland 21404 PA PERMIT ANNAPO � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource <em>Energeia</em> Description An account of the resource <em>Energeia</em> is a non-profit, student magazine, which is published once a year and distributed among students, faculty, alumni, and staff of St. John's College, Annapolis.  Staff welcome submissions from all members of the community -- essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, and the like. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context energeia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. ii, 84 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cooper, Laurie (Co-Editor) Datcher, Rhonda (Co-Editor) Title A name given to the resource Energeia, Fall 1987 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Description An account of the resource Issue of the Energeia, published in Fall 1987. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Energeia Fall 1987 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Energeia Student publication