On prophecy.

I am a rationalist and a naturalist. I do not expect such things as an afterlife (what reason have I to believe that the soul could be separated from the body?) or a messianic era (what evidence suggests that human beings are perfectible? -- anyway the messianic era is, by its nature, perpetually in the future), and I am quite sure that there couldn't be such a God as in the Bible, talking to human beings and listening to them. I don't believe in prayer as request and I don't believe in divine vengeance or punishment. But I believe in holiness, and in a way I might say I believe in prophecy. Some works simply have an insight and a beauty that is beyond human. Not that it does not come from humans -- of course it does; what could a prophet be if not human? Rather that it does not seem to come from that human being alone. It does not seem possible that one person did this, or several working together in the normal way either. It seems to express something beyond what one human being could say by herself.

Yesterday was Yom Kippur. I spent a lot of time with the Prophets: Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Jonah. I could not understand Ezekiel or Joel very well, though I have read them before. I think that I understand Jonah less the more I read it. The story seems shorter every time. But Hosea was wonderful.

Hosea is the story of a man who asks God why God does not abandon Israel since it is constantly straying. God tells him to marry a prostitute and have children with her, and to name them symbolically. Hosea becomes committed to his wife and treats his children as his own without regard to biology. To divorce her would be too painful, nor can he abandon them. The rest of the book is full of prophesies that Israel's sufferings are only temporary, but that God still cares for us. Its final chapter (read as the Haftarah last Shabbat, and giving the Shabbat its name: Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of "Return O Israel") asks us to speak to God with our lips instead of bulls, and we will flower again. That is, it's the story of God teaching a human being to understand what human beings are like, and of the human being learning.

Jonah is meant along the same lines, only Jonah doesn't seem to learn: God has the last word, not Jonah, and even so God is reduced to pleading for the lives of the innocent animals of Nineveh rather than its guilty-but-repentant people. Jonah ends in aporia, in suspension between divine acceptance and human rejection. (I read in one of the prophets yesterday, though already I cannot remember where, God saying: of course I forgive you; I am not a human being, to cherish a grudge. The commentary pointed out that in Numbers 23 [? Bilaam's prophecy, anyway] God says: I am not a human being, to change my mind.)

On September 11th.

My godmother was there. I didn't know for sure until the weekend, when she still hadn't been seen. Aleha hashalom, requiescat in pace.

My father was there the first time. By 2001 he worked in midtown. My mother and sisters were up in the East 70s and 80s.

My cousin was working at the Woolworth Building. She got out of the subway at Park Place or Chambers, saw the crowds flowing away from the surface, and got right back on the train.

My high school best friend hadn't started school yet and was going to Century 21, but she wasn't hurt.

And I was in Connecticut, in class, not understanding, even when a girl whose father worked at the Pentagon got up in the middle of class and walked out. Not understanding, I thought it was a movie at first (yes, just like the Onion says); I couldn't think what it meant. I was ashamed not to be in New York. I was only two weeks gone and going back the next week for Rosh HaShanah. I did go back, by then with extensions on all my papers and a never-taken-up invitation to group therapy. I got so much dust in my lungs over three days in Brooklyn Heights I was sick through Yom Kippur. It was everywhere. You could practically see it on the melted candles and missing persons signs all over the Promenade and all over downtown Manhattan. I walked the Bridge like a pilgrim among pilgrims, some in facemasks for protection as we got closer to the site. Everything was closed. The closest to feeling better I've ever come was walking home over the Bridge (the car side!) during the blackout two years later, when the crowds of strangers -- to each other, too -- were all talking and laughing, inviting each other to spontaneous who-knows-how-long-the-freezer-will-be-out barbecues and corner singalongs with guitar. Then too nobody could reach anybody, but it was all right.

*

Tuesday, September.

Tuesday.
September -- starting school.
I was reading: Plato,
Thucydides, and the
Iliad.
Living in them, really,
since I never wanted
anything but that, but
that one pure and simple
freedom to live in books.

I was thinking: men don't know
what they want, and so they
put up shapes in the sky,
because they've seen the shapes
that are already there,
that the gods, perhaps
that God has put up there,
in the stars.

But men again
perhaps didn't know what
they wanted, perhaps knew
and acted as they did
out of purest malice --
I cannot say, I am
no moral theorist --
and took them right back down --

the shapes --
not understanding
that they were already
back up there in the stars:

the Twins.

(Jan. 14 and 16, 2005)

After.

Newish movies have become old movies,
Instantly dated by catastrophe.
The skylines of their cities look so young -–
Subtly unrecognizable, solid
In a way that suggests nothing so much
As a sublimation. You can't believe
You didn't see it coming, looking now.
They were so ripe for it. Asking for it.

I had forgotten how they used to be
All in one piece like that, all in one place.

Anaxagoras says nothing ever
Comes to be or passes away, but has
Its elements reapportioned. The earth
In them has settled back into the earth,
The water into the river, the air
Has risen through the air we breathe, their fire
Returned unto the everlasting fire.

(November 10, 2005, during the commercial breaks of a movie ("When Harry Met Sally ..." yet) filmed partly in New York between 1970 and 2001)

Still.

Without comprehension
I cry every time I remember
or hear mentioned
even elisions
and mere allusions
to collusions
that bore collisions
into buildings
(decidedly,
suicidally
lily-gilding)
that September.

(January 5, 2006)

On the beauty of Plato's Gorgias.

I have been kidnapped by a sadistic genius. He knows that what I like best is to read. He is licking his lips to look at my sadly overflowing bookshelves.

"Classicist," he begins, finally -- "classicist, you have misunderstood me deeply. You take me for a sadistic psychopath, but in truth I am kind and generous. You'll have Stockholm Syndrome by the time I let you go." I raise my eyebrows. "Here -- " and he releases my hands and lets me spit out my gag. "I am a nice man," he reiterates. "I didn't have to do that."

"But I'm still tied to a chair that is nailed to the floor."

"I never promised you a rose garden. In any event" -- he gives the room one more sweeping glance -- "I am going to do you a favor."

"Thank you."

"I may let you go some time, or I may not. You won't know until I do -- or don't. But in the interim, I'll leave one book within your reach. Any book, whether you have it here already or not. -- No cheating, now: you can't have a compilation, no full Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare: if you want Jeremiah, you can have Jeremiah, if you want Beatrice and Benedick pick them, but you can't have Jeremiah and Genesis, or Beatrice, Benedick, and Hamlet. -- By the way, when my assistant gets here, he's bringing my recently perfected selective amnesia device, and he's going to remove the memory of every other book besides your choice from your nervous system. So." He fixes his gaze on me. "What can I do for you?"

********************

In this circumstance it is hard for me, at this juncture in my life, to imagine picking anything other than Plato's Gorgias. (If I had to pick the edition I'd say E.R. Dodds's Greek text with commentary.)

It breaks my heart to pick; it breaks my heart to imagine a life without the rest. It is cruel of him even to make me think of it. Nevertheless I can say with confidence that I would pick the Gorgias.

I have been writing about courage lately, its awkwardness as a virtue and ways philosophers have found to revise it, to reenvision it as a virtue central to our moral lives. Ultimately I suggest that a late Stoic conception of courage as a sub-species of greatness of soul, "the virtue that puts us above those things that happen to good and bad people alike," can help us out of the problems raised. From this perspective, writing about the problems for courage in Aristotle is easy (though getting my adviser to accept that I've made any good points against Aristotle is a different matter, hard-won and cherished), but writing about the problems for courage in Plato is hard, because the Laches, Protagoras, and Gorgias -- not the Republic, which is again easy to criticize from a Stoic perspective -- all embrace something like what the Stoics mean. The Stoics read Plato closely and responded to him carefully (we know that the two most important early Stoics, Zeno and Chrysippus, both wrote book-length responses to Plato's Republic), and in their account of courage they are building on Laches, Protagoras, and most of all Gorgias.

Gorgias is the dialogue in which Socrates is most ironic and most passionate. Tyrants celebrated as the happiest of men are really in the worst condition, if they are truly tyrannical. Cooking and rhetoric belong to a single art, the art of pleasing others, while medicine and philosophy belong to the opposite art, which is oriented towards truth and goodness. No one willingly does wrong. A life of desire satisfaction is less happy than a life without desires. It is better to be wronged than to do wrong. He insists that he does not know for certain what the truth is about that last thesis, but that he has never heard and can no longer imagine anyone arguing against it without ending by looking ridiculous. He is unskilled at the Athenian style of politics, yet turns out to be the only true teacher of politics in Athens.

What does this all have to do with courage? -- Socrates's last and most interesting interlocutor, Callicles, rejects the Socratic theses of the previous paragraph. Justice and temperance, he says, are for the birds; they are imposed by the many weak men upon the few strong, but the course of nature, which we might even call "natural justice," is for the few strong to rule. These strong men -- what qualities suit them to rule? It is their intelligence and their courage. And from Callicles's embrace of courage, Socrates argues him into accepting all of the other theses.

Callicles has embraced a rhetorical and political model of courage, rather than the standard military paradigm. By the end of the dialogue, we have come to understand that this is the right model, only Callicles has erred as to what constitutes a true rhetoric and a true politics. A proper rhetoric ought to subjugate itself to truth -- that is, it ought to become philosophy, or dialectic. So for all the choppy simplicity of his argumentative style, Socrates turns out to be a better rhetorician than Gorgias of Leontini, one of the most famous and highly-paid speakers of the era.

A similar paradox awaits in courage's other special arena. Socrates is inept at Athenian politics, yet by wise standards he is a true politician; and both of these features put his life in danger. The ending of the Gorgias is haunted by Socrates's eventual conviction and execution on charges of impiety (399 BCE). We know, when he says that he would rather die for acting justly than live having acted unjustly, that he means it. Why should he live humiliated and in bad condition? And why should he fear to die, when he has no special reason to believe that death is an evil? Either it is nothing, as he suggests seems likely in the Apology, or he will be happy in the afterlife if he has lived justly in this life, a thesis he elaborates mythically here and in Republic and Phaedrus (and cf. the Laws' claims at the very end of the Crito).

Socrates is not afraid to die because he is not persuaded that life is a very great good or that death is a very great evil. Something that he can find in himself or make for himself -- justice, wisdom, temperance, courage; virtue, goodness, happiness -- is more important even than life. This is the radical self-sufficiency of Socratic courage, and it is one of his most important bequests to his Stoic heirs.

The language of the Gorgias is beautiful, its structure a fortification to argument and to beauty alike, its thought important and profound, its characters vivid and engaged. To Plato, writing it must have seemed to discharge a sacred obligation.

On correct use of prosody.

Here is "Life and Love" by the Earl of Rochester:


All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.


I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"

Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.

Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)

Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.