Yea, For Thou Art Breaking the Slumber of My Plague

Women of Trachis (The Trachiniae) is by no means Sophocles' most famous tragedy today (Antigone and the two Oedipus plays, particularly Oedipus Rex, are much more widely read), but it's my favorite for some reason. And not just because Ezra Pound published a, shall we say "creative" translation of it, and I happen to be a Pound fan. It really is an amazing play, full of great lines like the one I used for the title of the post. But at the end of the post I'll get to something I'd never really thought about the play until now. First, a short summary.

The story is pretty simple. Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans) is always out fighting and conquering people, and his wife Deïanira isn't happy about it. One day, while Heracles is still out doing his fighting thing, one of his servants brings home several women as slaves that Heracles had captured in his last conquest. One of the women, Iole, is strikingly beautiful, and is "conspicuous among" the others. Deïanira soon learns that the whole reason Heracles had conquered the women's land was to obtain Iole. This of course makes Deïanira jealous, and she decides to use a love spell that had been given to her by a centaur who had, as she was going to marry Heracles, captured her. Heracles heard her cry when the centaur grabbed her, and killed the centaur with an arrow. The centaur then said:

If thou gatherest with thy hands the blood clotted round my wound, at the place where the Hydra, Lerna's monstrous growth, hath tinged the arrow with black gall,- this shall be to thee a charm for the soul of Heracles, so that he shall never look upon any woman to love her more than thee.

He tells her exactly what she has to do, and so when she finds out about Iole, she makes a robe from the blood, and then sends it to Heracles with the instructions that the robe shouldn't be in sunlight, and only Heracles can wear it.

Soon after sending the robe, Deïanira starts to feel guilty, and throws the remaining centaur blood away, out into the sun, where it immediately begins to boil. She realizes the centaur tricked her, but it's too late, Heracles put the robe on, and was badly burned. Deïanira kills herself out of guilt, and Heracles' suffering is so great that he ends up having himself burned to death. Not a happy ending, but then again, it is a tragedy.

I told you all of that, to tell you this. The last lines of Women of Trachis seems like an ancient Greek version of the "Problem of Evil." Here are the lines (from R.C. Jebb's prose translation, which you can read here, and from which I took the above quote as well; emphasis is mine):

Lift him, followers! And grant me full forgiveness for this; but mark the great cruelty of the gods in the deeds that are being done. They beget children, they are hailed as fathers, and yet they can look upon such sufferings. No man foresees the future; but the present is fraught with mourning for us, and with shame for the powers above, and verily with anguish beyond compare for him who endures this doom.

Maidens, come ye also, nor linger at the house; ye who have lately seen a dread death, with sorrows manifold and strange: and in all this there is nought but Zeus.

Apparently even the Greeks were in need of theodicy.

Walt Whitman Commercials

Levi's is using a Walt Whitman poem in a couple of their jeans commercials. The first uses an actual recording of Whitman reciting the poem "America":



The second uses "Pioneers! O Pioneers!":



This is disturbing. What's next, a Walt Whitman mall? Oh, yeah.

Memory Metaphors: Memories as Pigeons

I am fascinated by memory and its role in our identities, so I am always on the lookout for talk of memory. And one of the things that fascinates me the most about memory is just how difficult to talk about directly. Most talk of memory is couched in figurative language: images, metaphors, similes, analogies. There's even a book on that subject.

I suppose the reason the reasons that memory is so difficult to talk about are twofold. First, any talk of memory requires memory: memory for concepts, memory for the words that refer to concepts, memory for what the concepts represent, and memory of memory itself: the experience of it, examples of remembering, and so on. So the very act of talking about memory is circular and muddled. The second is that we don't seem to have much conscious access to the inner workings, if you will, of memory. It's not just that we don't get to "see" how memories are stored or accessed, but even the act of triggering a memory is opaque. Why is it that seeing a particular shape or object, smelling a particular smell, or hearing a particular song, elicits the particular memories? Nothing about the experience of remembering answers this question. Or if it does, the answer is not obvious in that experience. All of this leaves memory in a cloud of vagueness and confusion. So the best way to talk about memory, at least outside of a scholarly context (and often even in a scholarly context) is to refer it to something more vivid, something more clear.

I told you all of that to tell you this. When I come across interesting metaphors for memory, I write them down in a little notebook. Today, as I was reading a book that is largely about memory, Remainder, by Tom McCarthy. It's the incredibly strange story of a man who, after being struck by a mysterious (to the reader, at least) falling object, and spending some time in a coma, has some memory issues. On several occassions, the man describes his memories coming back to him as scenes, like in a soap opera (his metaphor). That's not an entirely original metaphor, as memory has been referred to as theater for centuries, and as pictures (moving or otherwise) for some time as well. But on page 91-92, I came across a metaphor for memory that I'd never seen before, and I thought I'd share it with you. Here it is (emphasis mine):

After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually...

Memory as startled pigeons. Now that's interesting.

I AM The Superfluous Man!

This could now be a portrait of this blog's author.

When I was 16 or 17, I read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, because I had to, being of a certain political and literary persuasion, and I loved it. I loved it so much that I went out and read every novel I could find by Turgenev, from the wonderful On the Eve to the somewhat dated Virgin Soil, but it wasn't until college that I discovered his short stories, which I immediately decided were perfect, especially First Love. But it was his story The Diary of a Superfluous Man that had the greatest impact on me. Not only did I love it, but I immediately recognized myself in it -- as did, I imagine, pretty much anyone who has spent entirely too much time in academia. It was this story that was my entry into 19th century Russian literature, which has since dominated my fiction-reading life. From there, I went to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and of course the apotheosis of the superfluous man genre, Goncharov's Oblomov. I was in heaven: here a superfluous man, there a superfluous man, everywhere a superfluous man man. In other words, in my less confident moments at least, here a me, there a me, everywhere a me me!

Over the last week, I have been laid up with a wickedly obstinate ear infection which decided to merely laugh at the puny prescription ear drops I first tried throwing at it, and thus required much stronger drops and oral antibiotics. Lying in bed, as I've done pretty much constantly since last Tuesday, I've done nothing but think about all of the new projects I'm going to start when I finally have enough energy and get rid of the pain: I'm going to finally get around to writing that paper I've wanted to write, but have been putting off; I'm going to read all of that literature on that philosophical topic I've wanted to read but haven't gotten around to it; I'm going to finally fix those things around the house that I've been meaning to fix since pretty much forever; I'm going to do this, and that, and the other. In other words, my whole life has become making plans for when I'm not just lying in bed making plans. I have finally become Oblomov. I am the superfluous man! There's no denying it anymore. I don't know if this is a good thing.

It also should be noted that it was during this time of mere planning that I started this blog. Perhaps blogging is the ultimate instantiation of superfluity.

Dostoevsky vs. Rand

This is undoubtedly not a unique insight, but doesn't Crime and Punishment strike you as a preemptive polemic against pretty much everything Ayn Rand ever wrote? If nothing else, placing Rand into the light of Raskolnikov brings into stark relief her (ironic?) Napoleonism.