Fire tomorrow
Hello and good afternoon
My name is Gillian Conway. I
Am pleased to welcome you this afternoon to this virtual Commonwealth Club program
The club is now an all virtual organization and you can see all of the clubs great offerings. @ww
Commonwealth org
Today's program is the third in a series of programs
Created by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Commonwealth Club
With a focus on how it katar
Catastrophe has been explored in the arts interestingly. This series was created
but prior to March before the pandemic
Which means our two organizations were thinking?
About these issues before the global pandemic and the recent reckoning in the United States and it's complicated history of systemic racism
Needless to say the series is very well timed
Before we begin one quick housekeeping note if
Viewers have questions for us and we do launch your questions
Please post them on the YouTube chat feature and they'll be forwarded to us
And we'll get to them as many of them as possible
I'll introduce myself
and James
Gilligan Conley professor of English and poet in residence at Sonoma State University
My most recent book is a little more red Sun on the human with night, but books that came out in fall
2019
I'm the author of eight previous collections of poetry and in 2017
we see the showing Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America my
translations of three books by Andre Misha
Thousand times broken appeared with city lines. I
Couldn't be more thrilled to be speaking with James Porter today in conversation
James Porter is the Irving stone professor in literature and
Professor in the department's of rhetoric and classics at UC Berkeley
He's published two books on Nietzsche and classical studies and two books on Greek and Roman aesthetics in
2017
Porter was the recipient of the CJ Goodwin award from the Society for classical studies
Porter is also edited several volumes on classics and theory on the body
Classicism and Lacan and the classics he is
co-editor of the book series and classical reception published by Oxford University
Press
called classical
presences
James Porter gave the 2019 grey lectures at Cambridge University
Thinking through Homer his best recent book on which today's conversation will be based is
Titled Homer the very idea that will appear next year with the University of Chicago Press
So let's jump right in
chance and I have a
first question to pass
We're in the midst of a global pandemic a national catastrophe a plague a
historic moment for racial justice a time that is rife with
Upheaval and violence. Why should we turn to Homer in?
2020 what does Homer have to teach us in these tunnels?
Thank You Gillian and thank every I would like to thank everybody in the audience for making time to attend this event
But also like to thank to further names
Timothy dawn who was the curator of programs and the marin commonwealth?
Club
And Timothy Hampton the director of the Townsend Center at Berkley
This program that we're part of is their brainchild
So I'm very glad to be a part of that
So to address your question about why home now
I'd like to begin with a brief introduction to homer his poetry
Why it's important and then slowly we can inch towards the question of why he's relevant
so to begin I'm going to have to switch over to uh
Some images that I provided which will images and texts
Fortunately to do this, let me go back
To make an adjustment
Sorry as it happens, I can't get back. Let's see
Well while we're having technical difficulties I can
Speak a little bit about
The conversations that Jim and I have been having prior to in preparing for this lecture
Or this presentation I should say
of just why Homer is relevant to
this exact moment regarding
catastrophe
regarding narrative how narrative is a vessel for
can be used as a vessel for the expressions of
With what is happening in catastrophe?
Why
Homer keeps getting returned to over and over again
Why it's relevant to return to hammer to die
um
Can you see the slideshow right now I can't okay then why don't they just jump in and we'll get started, okay
And you've named all the important topics that we're going to discuss
so
That's it is a picture of over on the left. Oh well maybe on the right of your screen and
next to him is a
contemporary slide of an aerial view of the site of Troy and below that is a
reconstruction of
Troy
An artist reconstruction of what Troy would have looked like in its all of its glory and
We have to remember that Homer on the left
Is a fictional portrait and the reconstruction of Troy is also a fictional portrait of a city
and
The difficulty and the fascinating point a juncture between these two
questions Troy Homer and Troy is
their interrelation so Homer
The poet or the poems I should say
Appear sometime around 700 BCE at the end at the beginning of the archaic era
They suddenly appear as if out of the blue
as if by parthenogenesis
Each is fully born each the size of a hefty novel
So there's something miraculous about this and also inexplicable
The two poems are as I'm sure most of you know the Iliad and the Odyssey
The Iliad narrates the
War in the last year of a ten year long campaign that rent was designed to take down Troy
Which and
the Odyssey
Narrates what happens in the aftermath?
another ten-year sequence in which in the final year Odysseus returns back to his home and Ithaca after the war I
Think someone is saying that the first slide is not being is. Mm-hmm. All right, the
So
Troy was each of these is related
Each of these poems is related to the other by means of a middle term Troy
Troy
they capture of Troy now Troy you can see is a city on Asia Minor and
the
Greek forces came out of Greece in the middle of Greece heartland mainland
from the from the Mycenaean
strongholds of Argos Tarrance and Mycenae Mycenae is where
Agamemnon
had his hosted his armies and Sparta is where Menelaus his brother the two Chiefs of the Greeks led their conquest of
Troy Troy was fought for an abducted woman Helen. It was fabled to be the most beautiful woman in the ancient world
she was later said in a counter tradition to be a
phantom a
Cloud that never existed and this
In either case we could say that the war ended with the massive destruction
of a city thousands of dead and
all for nothing
Especially if we listen to the proponents of the Phantom tradition or for glory if you can argue that that's
Something to fight over or not
The puzzle about the two poems is that we don't know how they arose
The Homeric poems didn't just appear full grown in that form
They emerged out of a song culture that reached back into the Bronze Age era
from 1600 to 1200 BC the poems may have evolved sometime after that period from
1750 BC
And
They were carried on through a tradition of oral poetry
That was sung and handed down from one generation to the next and with each generation
We can imagine greater embellishment and the further
elaboration of what the past was
They conveyed the memory of this early
Earliest time
So it looks like there's no slide show showing that's interesting I may try one more time, okay
Because you could see that but apparently
Let me see
Technology
And just run through the pictures as I'm talking as if they were there the time okay
I hope you can I hope I hope someone can see these slides now
Map this is the destruction levels of Troy itself. All right
Now the behind all of this is the mem the mystery of the two
events, we have Homer on the one hand and Troy in the other and
the the
difficult question here is that
We don't know
We don't know as I said how the poems arose we don't even know if Homer ever ate Homer ever existed no slide shows, okay
Apparently the slide shows are not coming up. Not sure why
We don't know if Homer existed and we do not even know if there was such a thing as a Trojan War
Hmm the poems describe the war but there's no historical evidence for it
And this has been a major bone of contention among archaeologists and later readers of Homer
What we do know is that Roy did exist and if there was a troy of sunlight or some sort of Citadel or
fortress on the site of Troy today, which was part of the Hittite Empire in the Bronze Age era and
that is all so somehow connecting the dots between Homer and
Troy is a difficult
thing to do, but also
the
As we'll see in a moment
We can't read
Understand the poems without thinking about Troy as a historical place at least in the imagination and vice versa
So would you say that one of the things that keeps drawing us back
To Homer is the trauma of a kind of cultural memory
that Homer has come to represent is
there a correlation between our cognitive dissonance with our
catastrophe and the catastrophe of
homers time
Okay, so apparently the slides are not going to be working. So I'm sorry about that. Hmm. All right, so the question here
Let's not jump too quickly to the question of trauma but lead up to it
The
The question really is how do we account for the abiding attraction in canonical?
Status of Palmer a poet who by all rights should have nothing to say to us today. We
Could spend hours going over this and we still would not reach the bottom of the question
Why is it that Homer is so important to has been so important in to us in Western culture until now?
There's lots of reasons that have been given
the greatness of his poetry
He just deserves to be one of the greatest books ever not because of the quality of the poetry his originality
He's the first preserved poet in the West therefore he gets points just simply for having existed when he did his
sophistication the primitive necessity
both shows and overcomes
timeless themes like war death Beauty glory here cause
immortality the voyage out a return home
But I think that there's another explanation that's a little bit better than that
because
Elmer happens to be the first person of work of art in the West
He also preserves the record of the first siege in the West at least him
Bones were other illustrations and see just before that
There's another factor to the poem picks up
In the middle of things it picks up in a kind of gap
in action
That's a standoff. It's going nowhere
So look
One of the 24 books begins a 10th year of the word ten years on the Greek still haven't figured out how to capture
Troy and it maintains the suspension of action right through to the very end
Point being the Troy doesn't ever fall in the course of the Iliad
It's simply being besieged
and
Its eventual annihilation however hangs over the entirety of the poem like a kind of ghostly
Aura around it. Troy is going to fall
When we read it or other audiences Homer's own audience that's heard about it. It will already have fallen
It will be reduced to smoke then ashes and then merely at a tail or a fable a muthos
so the Iliad describes the events that lead up and
the Odyssey the PTSD offspring of the Iliad tells us
The biggest emphasis of both of these is in Venice never actually told so we have this extraordinary
destruction that is
Present in its own absence of hunting both palms the capture of Troy something like a doughnut hole
We have to imagine it and now it's interesting. You could say well, why didn't Homer?
Fill in the doughnut and give us the missing piece that we all so interested in the actual climax of the bow
And the sad fact is that those phones that did?
tell of this there were poms in the so called epic cycle from the archaic period
And earlier that told the story of the capture of Troy they did not survive
but the Iliad and Odyssey did so that should tell us something about
this mystique that they have built into
Now we come to the question of the trauma the connections that buying Troy and Homer
Are
As strong as those that connect the two palms and that is this traumatic event of the destruction of Troy
And here we come up with another irony, which is that if you took away Troy
Homer would not be nearly as interesting and probably not as memorable as he is now and if we took away
Homer then Troy would have no one to sing if the destruction of Troy it would just be a preserve a
Discovered in the 19th century and it's been excavated since but there would be no
mystique around it and we wouldn't even know probably anything about it except for the fact that
It preserve it was its memory was preserved
primarily
Through Homer gave the most vivid account as if he were actually there
So so what we have then are these two?
terms each
Anchored in the other but neither anchored in themselves a Homer who may never have existed
He may have simply been
Traditional pots on the one hand and Troy which was the mythical site of a battle that may never have happened
But at least the place exists on earth and so together they anchor each other and create if not a reality than an effective reality
Now finally
Going back to your point gillian about catastrophe
The homer is all about catastrophe and many different levels. And so let's just look at a couple of these
to begin with in book 1
the god apollo visits a plague on the
Homeric on the Greek camp for some some fault that they made with respect to the gods
They betrayed one of the spokespersons of the gods a prophet and for that they were punished by Apollo. Who was the God of Prophecy?
So a plague devastates the camp
secondly we have
The actual killings themselves the poem is one of the most brutally violent
poems from antiquity
Thousands of people died were given just a few hundred of them, but they represent the thousands that actually did at least were given names
Third the city is captured and it's not just captured but it's annihilated in Greek the word for destruction of Troy in
in Homer is not catastrophe but
annihilation and
Often is moss a
complete
disappearance of the city
It's thought to have been in a kind of exaggerated gesture throughout antiquity to advantage completely
And it wasn't recovered and as reestablished until later in fact, it were
Relics of Troy but that we're seeing but but the the myth of Troy was that it just disappeared
um, and then then we have connected with that an
ecological catastrophe which we'll come to
and then
Connected even with the the entire story of Troy as another explanation, which is not simply that the Greeks were
off to retrieve
Helen but that they were sent by the gods in a plan of Zeus his fatal plan, which was
Seems to have been announced in book in book 1 and the fifth line of the on in the Iliad where?
without with a kind of a vague illusion, but the plan was to
Depopulate the earth which was groaning with the weight of too many people and so the Trojan War
Existed as a pretext for ridding any kind of Malthusian way the excess populations from the earth
So these different kinds
Through
Humber and they haunt his poem and if they haunt us we never read it today
So the my suggestion would be that
The reason we're attracted to homer is not just simply because of the grandeur of his poetry
but because of this catastrophic event that they record or that they allude to and
Which is difficult to shake off
Okay
So given that we know so little about Homer and so little about Troy
What we do know is that Homer was an amalgam of a lot of different poets a lot of different bards
you made the point that
Without Homer we would have no troy without troy we would have no homer
okay, is it also possible to think that without the
The tales the songs the verses that
Were discovered that we would have know Homer
Yes, hmm, so that's like absence upon absence upon absence yes, yes
absolutely, and then just
my
Time in with that is why do we credit his poems that are steeped as they are in?
Such brutality and so much violence
Why do we?
hold them at such a venerable place at the
foot of of cultural studies literary studies at
the beginning of Western thought
Okay, so that that's the the that's the biggest question of all
if we look at Homer as a poet of catastrophe and not just simply a poet of
heroic glory
Then the equation changes
We end up
having to ask ourselves questions that
Point to our own interest in our own investment in Homer
And
Looking for a slide which is not appearing to me right now, so
But I'd like to make give to question. This is something this was a question. It was raised in in antiquity itself
yeah, basically what sort of
Implication is there for uh for audiences that take pleasure in the poem as set of poems as violent as both of these
Traditionally the poems don't get read that way. They get read in a kind of quasi idealized
light
But there is a counter tradition of reading poetry. The Homeric poetry has a poem of catastrophe that is
Difficult to difficult for that makes reading difficult for us. So let's take two quotations one is by Theodor Adorno
Who wrote in minimum rally in 1944 to 47?
He who imagines?
disasters desires them
so
There is a great deal of imagination. Wouldn't you agree Gillian in Homer's poetry?
Doesn't the fact that we participate
we collaborate in that imagination because we're basically
filling in gaps that Homer creates for us and
Reimagining what he gives us and just sawing
And picturing it in our own minds isn't there a problem here with?
the fact that
Perhaps we want to see and desire to see these disasters
Let me give one more quotation this one from the famous poet and gillian connolly
Home burnt city which says to feel bruised by redemption. It's just a phrase. But to me, it's a very important one
What is it can we get some value out of Homer
without simply ignoring and sweeping under the carpet the violence that pervades the pond without
Reconciling it through kind of redemptive humanist reading
Which is to say that?
you know the traditional reading is that
Individuals somehow can achieve the immortality that's equivalent to what the gods enjoy throughs
And he knew that that ignores the fact that there's a great deal of death and not just immortality haunting the poem. That's what
Adorno and other writings for describes that's what nature
discusses in his critique of homer and as I call homers contest and this is somehow related to what you Gillian have said about
about
Redemptive Redemption as itself a kind of bruising
What my own reading of homer that
Especially the Iliad is it's one graphic battle scene after another. It's quite gory quite bloody
and
While Homer seems to be
The language of Homer is gorgeous
the the
action the vitality
The sense of human the power of a human being of what we are
Capable of doing our strength our beauty all of that is present in the Iliad
For me as a reader, I I don't I don't see Homer so much as a humanist is asking us
to find
consolation
through the Iliad
But rather to watch ourselves
As we are engaging
You know, we could say we're sitting in the armchair
engaging in
The violence that he's portraying
and that
rather than that saying that is some kind of
Aestheticizing of our glorification of violence that he puts it in front and
We do enjoy it because he has such incredible music in his poetry and
As you mentioned before the language and the imagery and yet it seems that Hummer might be also saying to us look
At you you know, you you and you're enjoying this
What are you you human being?
rather than
You know providing us with oh here's something violent and
Here's how you're going to be redeemed from it
I don't really I don't see any redemption in the Iliad and I and I don't I just personally for myself as a writer
I don't
see consolation either
and that's a very punishing kind of feeling and I'm not saying that we should be
masochist when we read Homer but I do think that there's a problem but reading Homer and
Enjoy taking pleasure in the poetry and somehow erasing what makes the glorification of heroes as possible
Which is precisely the killings that go on in the battlefield. Um
I want to go. I'm hoping that we can move from Homer to
to the
To the fact of question poetry which you know much more about than I do and I just want to bring out one more point
And then move forward and that is that
and I probably should have mentioned it earlier, but that
Homer records an event that is
Larger than the poetry itself larger than the conquest of Troy. I hope you can see on the screen
Now the map of the system's collapse
that took place across the Mediterranean basically an
inexplicable
cash fee that wiped out every major
palace center in the Mediterranean across Greece Asia Minor into the
into the elephant
No one knows exactly what caused this it's possible it was due to natural disasters to earthquakes fires earthquakes storms
fires
Subsequent weakening of ala centres which led to conquest maybe of the sort. We remember who reminded of in Troy
And this cultural event
which may be somewhat it's a kind of global pandemic of
Destruction that could be compared to what we're going through at this very moment. This was the globe for them and yet we have
social media that allows us to connect up and to see that to see what's going on in Italy or
Palestine or China and how they're suffering but at the time we're talking about in the centuries after the
After the after the
With all of this happened around 1200 BCE
suddenly again as suddenly as Homer appeared in on the coattails of this as were 500 years later and
There's no one actually was able to communicate with others about the destruction in some sort of massive way
I've been asked to push play but pushing clay somehow to pause this pause this my
Slide show so I'm going to go back out
So
Okay, let me go back here
I'm unable to play the show as I'd like to but I can show the screen. So that's what we'll do. So this map indicates
leagues
the extent of
the
of the damage of the destruction
and these were called basically her destruction horizons that swept through the the Middle East and
the Mediterranean from 1200 on
All right now
let's go to the ethics and the poetics of
Singing about war
But perhaps
Let's see, okay. So look very quickly
The the first two words of the Iliad are sing wrath or breath sing main and Aida
The poem begins in this way
Sing goddess
Seeing of P Lisa sign Achilles and it's devastation which put pains thousand fold upon the Achaeans
And here's the line about the will of Zeus was accomplished referring to the the plan of Zeus, which was to depopulate
The world after the around 1200 BC perhaps and the claim we could make is at home or somehow records that major
System systems collapse in his poetry but he does it through this odd
conjunction of
celebrating the past through
music and the question is how do we how do we
How do these to comport with each other?
what is it to to sing wrath the first word of the Iliad by the way was the most
Hated word in antiquity. It was the most embarrassing word for all readers of color because they asked repeatedly
Why does horror start off with the word wrath?
Wrath is such a powerful angry term and it seems to pollute the poetry that comes afterwards just as achilles own wrath pollutes
That it is the cause of the destruction of his own
warriors his own team because he refuses to go out and do battle because he's angry with like with
Agamemnon for having
Slided him in some public forum
So wrath is there and the question is that we should put is um,
How do we understand wrath without the music that sings it and
The the first two words of the Iliad in those two words
homer addresses Homer the poet the bart addresses the
Muses and says seeing the wrath of Achilles
But he didn't need the word sing because the first word is already in self sung. It's done in a meter
Hexameter meter dactylic hexameter and it's sung to a musical
Melody so the closest analogy that I could find
to this today is
Maybe a contemporary interrogation of the same problem how we understand violence and song together. Hopefully on some art
And it's by William Kentridge
that's a clip one minute long from Xena writing which was later incorporated into an
exhibit called smoke fire Nash's in Bruges Belgium
In 2017
This is footage from World War one
You know watch what happens to the dissolve the final frame
Smoke fire ashes you couldn't think of a better way of characterizing
What happens in Homer but there's something else intriguing in this in this?
sequence this
It's these are stills from the sequence smoke ashes and fable. Were they all now?
perhaps they no longer even fable and we see these strange marks above the words and
eventually
a
Superior with is MUX and the mark seem to be
At this point, what are they exactly? That's the kind of a pictur picture graphic riddle
they seem to be
javelins that are sticking in the ground like weapons
In fact what they are they are measures of the dactylic hexameter
The that Homer and Virgil used in their poems of war and
what what and
Country has done is essentially
Weaponized these measure these marks which we use to
Distinguish the lengths of syllables to Long's and long and short short
that's a dactylic hexameter and then the bars then disintegrate like bombs and land on the ground and
in collapse
This is one of the most beautiful things in Kent Rich's
Work a piece here for me is is that watching the duck Tillich?
hexameter
Essentially
Dissolve and break through and fall apart
and so you have the sense of
That's the meter. That's the song through which the Iliad is sewn and to have that crash
Down into shards, which is essentially what happens
To the Homeric verses and songs and tales until they're gathered up again
it's just a really strong visual representation of
Of what happened? And there's something parallel to that going on in homers own poetry all the time. That is his
Language is turning into actual weapons after all
there's nothing nothing strikes a warrior but a word that leaders and kills him and
we are constantly being confronted with this question of how do we
Assemble the meters and rhythms of Homer's poetry when they're constantly blowing up in our hands. Mm-hmm
No question about that when in my reading I read that
While listening to the Homeric verses a lot people listening would have staffs that they would be to the dick talaq
hexameter so there's a sense right there of a kind of
you know almost a
Sort of violence and listening to the tales and in participating in them quite actively in that life
And certainly there's a kind of insistence the banging in the phantom produce measure
Unless you create noise and create kind of clash of
Matter on matter and we never forget that in all and if we were to look at the actual Greek
It would even come out more strongly, but since we don't have actual Greek
But we do have actual English. We can look at upon the he wrote
But I find extremely
Relevant to what? We're discussing and fortunately to read some
Every epoch I should probably say at this point right after
9/11 and
That's what I was thinking up
Every epic dreams it has been destroyed by
catastrophe
amass
You properly exists in earthquakes and catastrophes
Amass ego is a music the one song
everyone loves
But the violence one has to incorporate is great
The joy is mighty the one song everyone loves loved
Every Arabic dreams time is a water garden in a weedy churchyard
No hell in your draft. There are other terrors I sleep you sleep
He she it sleeps you sleep they sleep we sleep
The incomparable moon chapter over my enemy
Trying to get to the rest of the form. I've got it right here as I can
Don't tell me you were memorizing
That wrong later does is off in horizons dank corridor calm nights along
sensorium z--
riverbank
objects freed of their utility completely unmoored an epic james and one follows any
adversary on land
Any adversary in the bottom of the brain an enemy sitting across from a lover
Calmly editing a lover
Her salad of mirage a real world could come back to us as an epic
similar to a short while and a further example
ecstatic child leaning over a pickle barrel
time breads on a pickle barrel a few masterpieces derp and
epic dreams in the ruinous there of
every epic dreams and one follows
Every epic dreams one follows as a figment in one setting beyond this earth
even
Thank you, that's the end of that point and the the first line
Every epic dreams. It has been destroyed from catastrophe comes from
A door not a door. No and the correspondence between the door note and Walter Benjamin and
Then the mean is writing a door know about this and he
He gets the quote from Jules Michelet who
Said every every epic dreams of its successor and so that's a
My line, which I credit all these sources in them
Comes from all of those the layers of the other deep thinking about Catan -
Very good, so what strikes me?
What's frightening about this poem is that it
Makes catastrophe is a kind of ongoing
recycled event
mmm-hmm cycle sooo very much, the imaginations of cultures and just repeats itself as a reality again and again
So maybe one last question to you and then are there questions that came in from the audience that we might look at? I?
Am NOT singing on my tax
Haven't seen any either so
Then maybe there will be some questions that come through
so there
so then again
if you compare the contemporary catastrophe that we're going through at the moment and the one that we're not just
Well
Dreaming that we're being destroyed by but we are actually are being destroyed by
and so many different levels and
Going all the way back to home or
What does what sort of lessons do we learn about I guess
How we how we tell stories about the catastrophes that we run through as we as we live?
I
Have a couple of thoughts about that one is in
Preparing for this conversation and then getting to revisit hammer and
Talk with you as much as I've been able to do which has been a really enriching
experience
It started to occur to me that Hummer is something that returns to us
Again, and again and again and again when I first started diving back into it
I seemed sort of obsessed with the with the notion of a fixed
You know, I wanted a fixed text. When was the first time that?
all of these tales get fixed and I
Eventually gave up on that and started to realize that what we really have with Homer is the sense of return
over and over and over again and every time someone translates it it returns to us again, and so it
It's a both claims that Elliot and the Odyssey or the nature of them is to not be fixed
But but to keep returning to us and then I tied that
nation with a
Really wonderful book by Maurice Blanchot
Writing the disaster
in which he makes the claim that
The disaster returned that it returns again again again and that that ultimately
Disaster is returned. That's what that is. That is if we were to have a verb linked with the noun
Disaster it would be returned
So
There is grim as that is
That is something that is conceivably
Some I know I hesitate to use the word
consolation, but that's that's why it might be important to go back to Homer and to look at
catastrophe in that way and realize
That within our on catastrophe
this is a
return
And the civilizations die
They're born
They're died Bank, they and inform and that's there's a sort of pattern there and there's a pattern and the poetry
the pattern that like in the
In the Kentridge image though
However, keeps blowing up in our hands as soon as bits
so we have to return in order to piece together a
Loss fragment of the past and I think he would what is driving the reception of Homer over and over again?
It's a kind of way of trying to make sense of the present by fitting it into
or somehow
Not fitting homer in to fitting the present moment into Homeric frame
But somehow making sense of how the past made sense of catastrophe there's something unifying about that
so there was a question that came up about asking about politics and
I'm going to just read a text. So in in fact about similes and
Homer uses similes and
This is often in contrast to the effects of
War on the field there are comparisons
So someone dies the way
You hear woodchoppers in the background and chomping trees down, that's the sound of what Ajax's
Blows on the Trojans was making or something of that sort
So question would be I suppose
There is simile there is beauty in Homer
How do we understand that does the putting it back in the terms of we set out with those does simile redeem?
Does poetry it has simile as pure poetry somehow redeem?
Or does it divert us from it or does it just create a contrast with?
With the surroundings, that's a really good question
Just the just the action of making a simile is to draw away from the actual
object so
If however say, you know, he's he has this horrific
Wound going on with a soldier for example, and as assembly is pulled into it
then we were drawn away from the
the
Ugliness the violence of it and that would be the simile would be a
you know aestheticizing of violence and that why I was that it reminds me of a
Gosh that what what the what the poetry I'm thinking of right now the lines read the blood of children
I'm paraphrasing here because I can't remember the the the the blood of children flowed down the street like the blood of children
and that is a sum away that
You know doesn't look away and doesn't pull you away
And in fact points at the problem with you know, how with poeta sizing making something
Beautiful that should not be beautiful
But just looked at I noticed that you didn't actually use any similes in your poem. I may be wrong and
I wonder if that was deliberate and while you're thinking about that
I'm going to read a few lines from a place and where a place it in Homer. Where a
warriors are beaten the son of Zeus is
Is killed by the by the Greeks
He's a Trojan and a simile is used at that very moment. And it does the opposite of palasa way. It pulls us back in
It runs like this. Ok, no longer could a man even a knowing man?
I want have made out the godlike Sarpedon since he was piled from head to ends of feet under a massive
weapons the blood and the dust while others about him kept forever swarming over his
Body as flies through a sheep full of thunder about pales
Over spilling milk in the season of the spring when the milk splashes in the buckets
So they swarmed over the dead man. I
Don't see any way to like hear the simile does not distract us
The ugliness of the scene in fact
reminds us that
In fact there
the warrior is unrecognizable and there's no worse fate than
To be recognized that's what the theme is all about this body like swarming love
Work and there's there's also the nation' that that the death is senseless
you know, he dies and and
The milk is flowing. The flies are coming the world goes on. So there's no
There's no there's no waiting to
Acknowledge the death to mourn the death anything like that the world just keeps going on so that that
example that you just showed is that is a
Does highlight actually the the tear of the other down and of the violence?
Inside the tear is very nice way to put it
The other point about the similes and then we'll move on to another question
Is it the similar world Assemblies is taken out of the present of the poet's audience
the
notion of these were familiar scenes
George ACK scenes the farming
Cultivation of land are also fruitful milking Cocozza cetera and they clash with they clash in a temple way
This is the present moment that's clashing with the epic past
does have sheep and milking and
That's sort of thing, but they're not these are invent
these are inherited images that make no sense in the present of all, so there's also this kind of not just a tack a
Tearing of time if you like between the top of the present the natural world that's familiar to us in this
Epic past and here they're being crushed together and some strong, huh torn apart
the next question seems to be
Does the poem suggest that only through catastrophe the world can be unified
Does the crime suggest that oh my god, that's a really
That's a big question. That's a dangerous question because
Of nationís, you know
I
Kind of cleansing, you know this heart that's sort of horrifying to think about and is that what it takes?
to bring
for unification to happen, but then
I have to think about I immediately think about the
The black lives matter movement and the horrible imagery of George Floyd and
had that image that
I'm is horrible to call it an image had that had not not that reality that
Actuality not been shown to us
in the way that it was
It created a lot of
Reaction this incredible
Optimistic
movement for racial justice was born
So
That's an example of catastrophe of a catastrophic event
Creating unity
It's it's it's a it doesn't speak well for Humanity that that's what it tanks
And we're not even sure that it
Actually does take that at all. Does it actually produce unity? There's no guarantee that unity will follow from catastrophe
no, that's exactly the way that archaic mindset worked was that the world had actually declined away from
earlier Golden Age and
so there was no sense that there was a purification of any kind if anything there was a kind of thrusting of
populations into misery work hardship
The present was a not a very pleasant place and in many ways movie the epics were kind of escapist
Although strange ticket of wars and we do that today movies, but also even behind that was a golden age in which
the world was once in the perfect shape, but there were none that the humans were no longer were not quite human it just
intimidating and
And catastrophe seem to go hand in hand. It's constraint
You you said something and one of our earlier?
conversations about
The Stoics and catastrophe and I think you were quoting Marcus Aurelius
I
Recommend Marcus Aurelius to anybody that would like to know more about Roman philosophy, but no so very quickly
Yes, so the the cyclical return you were talking
Or currents which is what I mean probably got this notion of that although it existed in
Heraclitus as well was a was a way of understanding the world in cosmic terms that it was constantly
Falling into what's called a nectar osis or a conflagration
at the end of a long cycle of time or that every bit of matter would burn up and
Nothing was left but fire and then the world we regenerate again, but regenerate in exactly the same form as the previous form
Comforting thing but
What they lived in to borrow a phrase in the shadow the Roman stocks and other stocks lived in the shadow catastrophe
What does that mean? I think we can learn from that
Their idea was that you can only test yourself
through catastrophe or through this extreme circumstance in order to find out what your mettle is and how you can
live your life forward
and produce virtue so you the idea that you could
Become a virtuous person without having suffered a single scratch is nonsense
They don't recommending that we go out and scratch ourselves up on purpose
But you don't need to because the world itself is kind of scratch
And they didn't do it through poetry they did it through a kind of philosophical imagination
And another in other forms like writing
not self-help books, but in not constellations, but
manuals that they wrote to each other or just dialogues where they cheered each other on to achieve a kind of
stance in the world
and and one of the central ideas concerning
Catastrophe was the way to do with catastrophe was to stare it in the thanks
Yes, right
That's the nation' that yeah. Thank you
There was no redemption there was no console you stare at catastrophe no
Thanks the way when you look at catastrophe look at some sort of
dangerous
Existential threat to yourself as a Stoke. Did you reminded of what it is to be human?
Super human not to be a god not to live forever. But just simply who you are what you are
In your form and that is a kind of non oscillatory non. It doesn't provide solace
Seneca says the only solace there is against death is the fact of mortality itself
Another way of staring in the face
The dangers to our lives or our existence and not simply to stare I suppose but also to take measures that would
the Stokes are extremely interested in helping others and
Learning that you're a human a person
Immortal means that you live in a mortal world shared by others
Reach out to them informed communities. Mmm-hmm
And so it's not just simply an individual fight against fate, but actually a kind of common
Project project. It's also fascinating that in our own systems collapse. We're also seeing a
The promise of a breakdown in systemic racism, so
That is another yes possible outcome of the catastrophe that we ran
Back to Homer then would use we have time for maybe one more question
If anyone would like to ask there's one question about the Bronze Age, which maybe takes us off track a bit
But the answer to that was can you tell us how the Iliad echoes the broader Bronze Age catastrophe?
I would just say read book 12 lines 3 to 35 and you'll see
Foreshadowings of the what I call the what Homer calls the often is mass
Or the annihilation of the Trojan plane where it gets flooded by nine rivers
three gods
earthquakes
fire
And this is to me a kind of emblem of that Bronze Age system collapse
So going back to the value of Homer today
Does Homer teach us that another way of staring?
Catastrophe in the face not backing down from it not fleeing from it. You see Gillian any ways in which
We can inhabit that bruise of time they were talking about
Even through poetry I
Think that ven Homer does especially when we come to the end of the Iliad
when some people are talking about the end of the Iliad they'll they'll focus on this moment when
Priam comes to visit Achilles in his tent and it kills his killed Hector and
Hector's like oh my God, he's come to my tent. It's surprising damn because you know, I killed his son and
Priam what Priam wants is Hector's body and he puts Hector's he puts premium puts his hand on
Achilles Homer describes him as Achilles
man-slaying hands
is interesting because it implies not only did he kill Hector but he kills lots of other people too and
Long story short
Achilles agrees he gives him he lets them have characters bonding
But that's not where the Elliot ends. It ends with that happening. But then
Someone another soldier or someone comes up to Achilles and says you realize that you're going to die next you will be killed next
You know, there must be vengeance for Hector's death. And that's the end of the
Iliad so there's a sense of the violence will only continue it's not there's not you know
the happy Hollywood ending
Yet so many readers like to read the ending book 24 of the Iliad is precisely a lesson
Pity and humanity incoming breaking bread with your enemy etc
But as as achilles says goodbye to prime and sends him off with the body of hector that he's now treated for
so many days
he says you will have a truce for the next 10 days, but after that we're gonna sack your city and
No, there's no end, there's no happy ending in Elmer either there's one last question
Which will just mention and then I think we're going to have to close off the program
In what way someone asks is the destruction of Troy a metaphor for the 500 year long catastrophe?
I assume that means the 500 years intervening from 1200
the system's collapse the fall of the Mediterranean in general to
700 when Homer Homer's poems seem to crystallize in their summer recognizable form as we know them today
It's an excellent question. I think the answer has to be yes and
But the more disturbing point is that it's a
Metaphor for us or but I don't think it's just a metaphor
I think it's a kind of disturbing sensation that was felt but not understood at the time and
and we have to take it in that spirit as
Not a knowing metaphor because I don't think anyone actually could say in Ionia or were on the coast of Asia Minor
That there was a systems collapse. That's our turn. That's our knowledge. Uh-huh. We have to recapture as a kind of dim
sense of an event that was so overwhelming that can't even be imagined and
and
Homer it may be actually alluding to that by saying it's an event that can only be imagined
but can't actually be witnessed and the fact that Homer himself was blind may be another way of
Adjusting me like a cultural a deep cultural memory that cannot be brought forth
Exactly, and it's that which a kind of also
cultural blindness the blind the blindness that can feel in a way that seeing cannot and
That's the sense that Homer seems to convey in many ways, but that's just a particular reading. Um
I think we are supposed to I think we are supposed to and
I would like to again. Thank the Commonwealth
and encourage viewers to join the Commonwealth Club to stay tuned to the website to see
upcoming
lectures
Presentations such as days and to thank Jim so much for turning me into a homer fine
Darryl joy
and thank you together Gillian for introducing me to your wonderful poetry which
Resonates so well with Homer and with what's going on at the moment
So with that, I guess we are done this this meeting of the Commonwealth Court is adjourned. Thank you
You
