Every so often, we'll be trundling down the street, whistling a happy tune, and someone will stop us to ask, "Perfess'r Harris — you know so damn much — why is it that poor people are so screwed?" And we'll stop, scratch our rapidly balding head, and reply, "Well, to answer that we'll have to go all the way back to Homer."
Americas dirty little secret is that most poor people, including those who don't have a place to live, work for a living. They just don't make enough money to stop being poor. Full time work at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour simply does not go very far. Here in the Great State of Washington, a workers paradise if ever there was, the minimum wage is set at a whopping $6.72. At that rate, the lucky worker takes home just over a thousand bucks a month to wisely invest in whatever manner he or she likes.
Should a full-time worker need food stamps, a public subsidy, to feed their family? Our Congress, which voted down the last minimum wage increase proposal, would evidently reply, "yes."
In Homer's time, poor people were just as screwed. The Greek word was thete, which meant to be a serf or a menial or to work for hire. In ancient Greece, to be a lowly wage earner was in some cases worse than being a slave. At least a slave belonged to a community and could not be killed outright. The wage earner had no such protection. There was no Department of Labor and Industries.
The word "thete" occurs just three times in all of Homer. Let's review, shall we?
In the Iliad, Apollo and Poseidon reminisce over the days of their youth, when they were exiled from Olympus by Zeus to go work for King Laomedon. Poseidon built the walls of Troy and Apollo herded his cattle. At the end of the year, when it came time to be paid, the King refused and threatened to cut off their ears or sell them into slavery if they pressed the issue. Years later, they remained bitter. Were Laomedon now living in Wyoming, where the state minimum wage for agricultural workers is just $1.60 an hour, he could easily afford to pay them both and avoid any lingering grudges. But he probably wouldn't. Kings are like that.
The promise of low-wage work is used in the Odyssey by Eurymachos, one of the ill-mannered suitors who plague poor Penelope, to taunt a jobless beggar. When a disguised Odysseus replies by challenging Eurymachos to an old-fashioned grain-reaping contest, the suitor hurls a stool at his head. Later, during the climactic killing spree of Book Twenty-two, we are thrilled when Eurymachos is one of the first to die.
Our own favorite occurrence of the word is when Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld. Our wily hero remarks that Achilles, being the above average sort that he is, must be running the place by now. "Don't get me started," Achilles more or less replies.
Then, by the Fagles translation, poor Achilles says "By God, I'd rather slave on earth for another man, some dirt poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive, than rule down here over all the breathless dead." The absolute worst fate Achilles can think of, outside of being dead, is to be a wage slave in somewhere like Wyoming.
So there we have it. Poor people are screwed because they don't make the rules by which they are forced to live. This is why so many of us, like Achilles, would do almost anything to avoid this fate. Unfortunately, not all of us have the option.
Showing posts with label Achilles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Achilles. Show all posts
Sunday, February 4, 2001
Thursday, May 4, 2000
A Poem of Force
One of the lovely things about life here in Classics Corner is that we can nearly always find some common thread between the disconnected ideas ravaging our pathetic, bewildered brain.
At the moment, for instance, we are attempting to establish a connection between the Independent Review of the 1999 WTO Conference Disruptions in Seattle Washington, which helpfully appeared in our mailbox this afternoon, and Simone Weil’s brilliant World War II essay on the Iliad as a poem of force.
The Independent Review concludes that Seattle’s response to the WTO demonstrations lacked adequate planning and ignored obvious warning signs. To this, we can only yawn, mutter “No shit Sherlock,” and go on with our pedantic little lives.
The report goes on to say that competent law enforcement would have infiltrated the left, established strategic zones of control at the expense of free speech, and made as many pre-emptive arrests as possible, with particular attention to those pesky Anarchist squatters. In short, they say police should have exercised much more force from the start.
The authors of the report see their evaluation as a blueprint of sorts for what may be a new era of civil unrest. Those familiar with recent events in Washington, DC know the lessons of Seattle have already been applied, civil rights be damned.
Simone Weil was also preoccupied with events of her day, and warned that the naked and extreme force of Hitler rested upon innate human tendencies. It is unsafe, she said, to consign the possibility of barbarism to history.
Force, says Weil, is much more useful than class in understanding the essential nature of the world, and the Iliad, once we accept that the poem reveals something about ourselves, is “the purest and loveliest of mirrors.”
Weil memorably describes force as that “which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” Through force, the power of life becomes suspended, or even inert. People become objects.
But force is also somewhat illusory. In the Iliad, no one has the monopoly on violence. Force is “on loan from fate,” and the tables continually turn. This means, says Weil, that “the strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.” In this, we find reason for hope.
Yet, there is an arrogance of power that believes force will always prevail. This, as Hector found while alone outside the Trojan gate, is a mistake. Life is unpredictable.
There is a moment, in the interval between the impulse and the act, says Weil, where justice can exist if we so choose. The destructive momentum of force undermines that moment. Achilles, for example, does not “choose life” when a disarmed enemy spreads his arms wide to beg for mercy. He is drawn to death, and plunges his sword into the supplicant’s neck without reflection.
The logic of force is to dehumanize. Who can forget the image of the teenage kid backing away from the stormtrooper, arms out wide. He is kicked in the balls and shot point blank in the chest with a rubber bullet.
There is no reflection here; just shortsighted arrogance. This is what people do when the precious moment between the impulse and the act no longer exists.
In Seattle, the mentally ill black man skips dangerously down the street and the cop drops him dead with one shot.
Force. It’s so easy. So corrupting. So present.
At the moment, for instance, we are attempting to establish a connection between the Independent Review of the 1999 WTO Conference Disruptions in Seattle Washington, which helpfully appeared in our mailbox this afternoon, and Simone Weil’s brilliant World War II essay on the Iliad as a poem of force.
The Independent Review concludes that Seattle’s response to the WTO demonstrations lacked adequate planning and ignored obvious warning signs. To this, we can only yawn, mutter “No shit Sherlock,” and go on with our pedantic little lives.
The report goes on to say that competent law enforcement would have infiltrated the left, established strategic zones of control at the expense of free speech, and made as many pre-emptive arrests as possible, with particular attention to those pesky Anarchist squatters. In short, they say police should have exercised much more force from the start.
The authors of the report see their evaluation as a blueprint of sorts for what may be a new era of civil unrest. Those familiar with recent events in Washington, DC know the lessons of Seattle have already been applied, civil rights be damned.
Simone Weil was also preoccupied with events of her day, and warned that the naked and extreme force of Hitler rested upon innate human tendencies. It is unsafe, she said, to consign the possibility of barbarism to history.
Force, says Weil, is much more useful than class in understanding the essential nature of the world, and the Iliad, once we accept that the poem reveals something about ourselves, is “the purest and loveliest of mirrors.”
Weil memorably describes force as that “which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” Through force, the power of life becomes suspended, or even inert. People become objects.
But force is also somewhat illusory. In the Iliad, no one has the monopoly on violence. Force is “on loan from fate,” and the tables continually turn. This means, says Weil, that “the strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.” In this, we find reason for hope.
Yet, there is an arrogance of power that believes force will always prevail. This, as Hector found while alone outside the Trojan gate, is a mistake. Life is unpredictable.
There is a moment, in the interval between the impulse and the act, says Weil, where justice can exist if we so choose. The destructive momentum of force undermines that moment. Achilles, for example, does not “choose life” when a disarmed enemy spreads his arms wide to beg for mercy. He is drawn to death, and plunges his sword into the supplicant’s neck without reflection.
The logic of force is to dehumanize. Who can forget the image of the teenage kid backing away from the stormtrooper, arms out wide. He is kicked in the balls and shot point blank in the chest with a rubber bullet.
There is no reflection here; just shortsighted arrogance. This is what people do when the precious moment between the impulse and the act no longer exists.
In Seattle, the mentally ill black man skips dangerously down the street and the cop drops him dead with one shot.
Force. It’s so easy. So corrupting. So present.
Sunday, April 16, 2000
Alcibiades, The Log Cabin Republican
We at Classics Corner were very amused to hear that G.W. Bush recently met with a dozen hand-picked Gay Republicans and emerged, in his words, “a better person” for the ordeal. While they did not agree on issues like gay marriage, common ground was found on upper-income tax breaks and decreased social spending, proving once again that while men loving men harms no one, voting Republican is morally problematic at best.
This happy convergence of naked self-interest and same-sex sexual activity led us to muse about Queers in the ancient world, particularly in Greece, where men were men and women, for the most part, were barefoot and pregnant.
There is evidence that gayness in Greece actually became more prevalent, at least among the elite, as the status of women declined, hitting a low point in the fifth century. This can be seen, for example, in Plato’s Phaedo, when Socrates, about to be executed, has only contempt for his grieving wife and, preferring the company of men, coldly sends her away.
Men in ancient Greece, it seems, didn’t polarize their sexual identity as do we more unambiguous moderns. Their lack of clarity about what, exactly, goes where, has led classicists such as ourselves to ponder such burning issues as whether Achilles and Patroclus, those uber-Greeks of the Iliad, were in fact doing “it,” or were just somewhat over-involved.
Our own opinion is that their Queerness is imagined by those who cannot conceive of intense male friendship under any other circumstances. The evidence that Achilles and Patroclus were straight is overwhelming. Achilles goes nuts over a woman. When Achilles and Patroclus have sex, they do so with women. While Achilles’ grief over his friend’s death is ostentatious, it is also, apparently, chaste.
You don’t hear as much about Dykes in Greece, although they were no doubt in abundant supply. The erotic poetry of Sappho celebrates women, and one gets the idea that Amazonian tolerance for men was limited. While Thucydides refers several times to the “revolting Lesbians” in his History of the Peloponnesian War, his reference to the attempted withdrawal of Lesbos from the Athenian alliance was surely not meant to offend.
When Classics Corner considers what sort of Gay Republican G.W. Bush’s campaign staff might find safe to meet their boss, we immediately think of Alcibiades, the flaming golden boy of fifth century Athens. Alcibiades was, in the manner of Truman Capote, said to have a lisp, leading us to wonder whether there really is a queer gene after all.
The Athenian General was, by all reports, rich, powerful, drop-dead gorgeous, and, like any self-respecting nobility, able to trace his family line to a God. While he and G.W. would have been at odds on the screwing men issue, screwing the poor would be welcome common ground.
Another similarity between G.W. Bush and Alcibiades is, of course, the short-lived nature of their political careers. Alcibiades was driven into exile when his drinking club was accused of breaking the penises off the city’s Hermes, which were a sort of sacred phallic lawn jockey. This oddly homoerotic yet distinctly frat-boyish prank almost got him executed.
But Alcibiades survived to narrowly avoid death several more times due to one advantage G.W. Bush clearly lacks. Alcibiades, while self-serving and untrustworthy, was also known to be brilliant. Here, any resemblance obviously ends.
This happy convergence of naked self-interest and same-sex sexual activity led us to muse about Queers in the ancient world, particularly in Greece, where men were men and women, for the most part, were barefoot and pregnant.
There is evidence that gayness in Greece actually became more prevalent, at least among the elite, as the status of women declined, hitting a low point in the fifth century. This can be seen, for example, in Plato’s Phaedo, when Socrates, about to be executed, has only contempt for his grieving wife and, preferring the company of men, coldly sends her away.
Men in ancient Greece, it seems, didn’t polarize their sexual identity as do we more unambiguous moderns. Their lack of clarity about what, exactly, goes where, has led classicists such as ourselves to ponder such burning issues as whether Achilles and Patroclus, those uber-Greeks of the Iliad, were in fact doing “it,” or were just somewhat over-involved.
Our own opinion is that their Queerness is imagined by those who cannot conceive of intense male friendship under any other circumstances. The evidence that Achilles and Patroclus were straight is overwhelming. Achilles goes nuts over a woman. When Achilles and Patroclus have sex, they do so with women. While Achilles’ grief over his friend’s death is ostentatious, it is also, apparently, chaste.
You don’t hear as much about Dykes in Greece, although they were no doubt in abundant supply. The erotic poetry of Sappho celebrates women, and one gets the idea that Amazonian tolerance for men was limited. While Thucydides refers several times to the “revolting Lesbians” in his History of the Peloponnesian War, his reference to the attempted withdrawal of Lesbos from the Athenian alliance was surely not meant to offend.
When Classics Corner considers what sort of Gay Republican G.W. Bush’s campaign staff might find safe to meet their boss, we immediately think of Alcibiades, the flaming golden boy of fifth century Athens. Alcibiades was, in the manner of Truman Capote, said to have a lisp, leading us to wonder whether there really is a queer gene after all.
The Athenian General was, by all reports, rich, powerful, drop-dead gorgeous, and, like any self-respecting nobility, able to trace his family line to a God. While he and G.W. would have been at odds on the screwing men issue, screwing the poor would be welcome common ground.
Another similarity between G.W. Bush and Alcibiades is, of course, the short-lived nature of their political careers. Alcibiades was driven into exile when his drinking club was accused of breaking the penises off the city’s Hermes, which were a sort of sacred phallic lawn jockey. This oddly homoerotic yet distinctly frat-boyish prank almost got him executed.
But Alcibiades survived to narrowly avoid death several more times due to one advantage G.W. Bush clearly lacks. Alcibiades, while self-serving and untrustworthy, was also known to be brilliant. Here, any resemblance obviously ends.
Sunday, March 12, 2000
Homer Flies Like Bird
To the dismay of some and probable relief of many, we’ve decided to take a short rest from the political diatribe you’ve come to expect from Classics Corner to briefly reflect on the obvious similarities between Homer and bop saxophonist Charlie the Birdman Parker.
Bird, one of the great jazz players of all time, knew thousands of songs and could drop bits of blues, tin pan alley, hillbilly or classical music into any tune at just the right place and time to create something perfectly of the moment. He played games with harmonics and rhythm and pitch to create a completely distinctive style that was either pure genius or pure crap, depending upon one’s taste.
Homer, another improviser of note, had a similar method. He took bits and pieces of a vast repertoire of styles and riffs and created a thing of amazing beauty, versatility and genius.
Centuries of bards had come before him, and their vowelly songs of Achilles and Briseus, Odysseus and Penelope, Helen and Paris were the Top 40 Hit Parade of Greece. They didn’t recite. Their audiences wouldn’t have stood for it. That was dead. They improvised on the spot, using formulas like rosy-fingered dawn and white-armed Hera and strong-greaved Achilles to mesmerize their audiences with perfectly metered poetry that riffed on familiar storylines like Parker blowing White Christmas.
Homer, in all probability, learned his licks within the brotherhood of bards, and, like Bird, transcended. While classicists agree on few things about Homer, most doubt he was a writer in the sense we would think. He was an oral poet, taking the pieces of his culture, and arranging them in ways we still recognize as perfect 2,800 years later.
Snobs that we are, Classics Corner is always amazed by how people can listen to, oh, say, Parker’s Ornithology, and all they hear is a bunch of annoying repetition which they will go great lengths to flee.
Repetition is where improvisation breathes. You hear the small differences. You focus on the rhythms. It’s a break from the intensity of creation where you relax for a moment and drift happily into the familiar.
Homer’s audience got this. When Agamemnon gives the delegation to Achilles his incredible list of gifts, ranging from golden tripods to daughters in marriage, many find it annoying that Odysseus, like some kind of ancient transcription device, repeats the list verbatim only pages later. Yet this was how poet and audience alike got a break from the concentration demanded by spontaneous performance. It was a welcome island of familiarity, like Parker riffing out on a phrase of Jingle bells when he’s off wandering God knows where.
No one really knows when Homer was frozen into the written word, and we’ll never know what it was to hear Homer sing. The bard was replaced by the rhapsodist, who, instead of creating in the moment, recited from memory. Imagine never being able to hear Bird do Ornithology, and the best we could do was to hear Kenny G play the notes. And then the rhapsodist over time became the hack. Imagine a muzak version of Kenny G ripping off Bird.
You can still hear him blow: “Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son …”
That Homer cat must really have been something.
Bird, one of the great jazz players of all time, knew thousands of songs and could drop bits of blues, tin pan alley, hillbilly or classical music into any tune at just the right place and time to create something perfectly of the moment. He played games with harmonics and rhythm and pitch to create a completely distinctive style that was either pure genius or pure crap, depending upon one’s taste.
Homer, another improviser of note, had a similar method. He took bits and pieces of a vast repertoire of styles and riffs and created a thing of amazing beauty, versatility and genius.
Centuries of bards had come before him, and their vowelly songs of Achilles and Briseus, Odysseus and Penelope, Helen and Paris were the Top 40 Hit Parade of Greece. They didn’t recite. Their audiences wouldn’t have stood for it. That was dead. They improvised on the spot, using formulas like rosy-fingered dawn and white-armed Hera and strong-greaved Achilles to mesmerize their audiences with perfectly metered poetry that riffed on familiar storylines like Parker blowing White Christmas.
Homer, in all probability, learned his licks within the brotherhood of bards, and, like Bird, transcended. While classicists agree on few things about Homer, most doubt he was a writer in the sense we would think. He was an oral poet, taking the pieces of his culture, and arranging them in ways we still recognize as perfect 2,800 years later.
Snobs that we are, Classics Corner is always amazed by how people can listen to, oh, say, Parker’s Ornithology, and all they hear is a bunch of annoying repetition which they will go great lengths to flee.
Repetition is where improvisation breathes. You hear the small differences. You focus on the rhythms. It’s a break from the intensity of creation where you relax for a moment and drift happily into the familiar.
Homer’s audience got this. When Agamemnon gives the delegation to Achilles his incredible list of gifts, ranging from golden tripods to daughters in marriage, many find it annoying that Odysseus, like some kind of ancient transcription device, repeats the list verbatim only pages later. Yet this was how poet and audience alike got a break from the concentration demanded by spontaneous performance. It was a welcome island of familiarity, like Parker riffing out on a phrase of Jingle bells when he’s off wandering God knows where.
No one really knows when Homer was frozen into the written word, and we’ll never know what it was to hear Homer sing. The bard was replaced by the rhapsodist, who, instead of creating in the moment, recited from memory. Imagine never being able to hear Bird do Ornithology, and the best we could do was to hear Kenny G play the notes. And then the rhapsodist over time became the hack. Imagine a muzak version of Kenny G ripping off Bird.
You can still hear him blow: “Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son …”
That Homer cat must really have been something.
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