Category: Greeks

Helen in the Iliad and Alcinous in the Odyssey both say the same thing: it was the desire of the gods to grant material for a song that led to the terror of the Trojan wars. Helen first of all (she is speaking of Paris, also, knowing that they were the cause of the war to come): ‘On us two Zeus has set a doom of misery, so that in time to come we can be themes of song for men of future generations.’ Alcinous claims the gods destroyed Troy and the Acheans ‘that there might be a song in the ears of men yet unborn’.

The singer, of course, was Homer. But did he compose it? Poets, then, were singers; nothing was written; each performance of epic verse was unique. Accompanied by a lyre, the poet, the singer, would be permitted to improvise, to recast events. But at the outset of the performance, it was necessary to call upon divine assistance: the Muses were invoked.

What did Homer suppose himself to be doing when he sang? According to an interesting book by Finkelkraut, which I paraphrase here, he takes himself to be reporting the truth. No, Homer did not see what happened – he was not present at Troy, and many even say he was blind, but the Muses saw everything; they were eyewitnesses to the events. Even though Homer knows what occurred in broad outline, he calls upon the Muses to help him when his expertise fails. There is a point when he sings:

Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus–you are gods, and attend all things and know all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge–tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers.

True enough, the Muses supply him with details he had no means of knowing.

The Muses were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Some asked how, if this were the case, the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus. Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, darkness, the forgotten.

The gods set the Trojan wars in motion to await the poet who would call upon the Muses to retell the events. But why did the gods, who saw everything, want to hear them told again? And what of the Muses, gods among the gods – why, if they were the ones who would give the poet the gift of song would they want to bring about the wars? Divine caprice? Or was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events happening anew in the song?

I think it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy and, with Hesiod’s Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves. Homer and Hesiod give way to a generation of philosophers who agree that the epic poets have already made the gods all too human. In place of the manifold gods of Hesiod and the Olympus of Homer, there is the burning logos of Heraclitus, the divine law, which he refuses to call Zeus.

Who is the hero? He does not belong to the most ancient times – to a time populated by dwarves, ogres and witches, the time of magic and cave paintings, in which the community paints the beasts it will hunt (and rarer and stranger beasts too – think of the extraordinary creatures of Lascaux …) There is as yet a common horizon, this is a horizontal world, a world that has no sundered itself from the natural immensity, from the immanence of the natural realm. The hero appears by shattering this horizon – he is the transgressor, the one who tears up immanence.

To fight, to conquer – the hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. It is possible to begin, to find a firmness from which to leap into the world, to accomplish deeds. But this presumes that another experience of the world, revealed in the most ancient tales, has disappeared. No more dwarfs and witches – now is the time for light, for a revelation which admits of no division. Essence and appearance are joined in the act; the name of the hero suffices only to name the most brilliant of heroic deeds.

But the hero’s name depends upon the song in which he is celebrated. After the feast, the bard comes forward to sing; in the song, the hero lives. Didn’t the heroes of the Wars of Homer’s poem know their fate? Hector says that before he dies he will accomplish something great ‘whereof even men yet to be born shall hear’. Agamemnon says ‘even men yet to be born shall hear’ of the shame of the Achaeans’ retreat from Troy. The heroes know their reward lies in posterity; their names will resound after they die. Thus, the hero owes his existence to the telling, the song, to the language in which his deeds are repeated. True, the hero is unique – he has a name, and a unique glory as the bearer of this name that is sung in the great hall. A uniqueness born of the splendour of an act that his name substantialises, and this is the miracle, the surprise of heroism: a name can attach itself to such great deeds.

A human being can be marvellous: this is what the epic rhapsody celebrates as it repeats the name of the hero, begining the tale again, over and again, embellishing it, transforming it even as it is yet the same tale. Sing of the Pandavas in the forest again! Sing the story of the Rama one more time! Tell us of Krishna’s deeds! It is true, Rama, Krishina, and the Pandava brothers name avatars, or men who can claim divine descent. Perhaps one should think of Heracles and Archilles instead – of Roland and Cid….

Still, the epic is a tale without beginning or end. An epic which must end as history begins (‘and then darkness fell over India …). The hero does not belong to history. His time is passed – who now is capable of a deed which flashes out through heaven and earth? Who can lend his acts to the memory of the epic? Yet the hero exists in the tale and this is the condition of his existence: he is alive in the retelling of the tale – alive in the presence he has for the listener in the great hall.

Some say the Trojan and Theban wars were caused by Zeus in order to end the Heroic Age. In the Odyssey, it already seems the Trojan wars already belong to another era. All, even Ulysses, are keen to hear songs of Troy. And isn’t it knowledge of Troy that the Sirens promise to bestow? It is already, with the Odyssey, a time for song. Soon, the hero’s name will be eclipsed by the name of the singer. The bard steps out of obscurity and anonymity to lay claim to Achilles.

Now the act belongs to the bard (the author). Literature begins. Does the singer become a hero in turn? Is it necessary, now, to write rather than act – or to act and then write, recording one’s exploits? Must one create one’s own legend? Eventually, the hero is replaced by the adventurer, the novel is on the horizon. It is a question, once again, of the horizontal, of the common horizon …

Inspiration: there is a puzzle from the first. Why did the Muses, who, as gods, were witness to everything, want to hear stories of the world told to them again? Was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events as they happened anew in the song? Perhaps it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive, through the song, something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy from Homer’s Iliad and, with Hesiod’s Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves.

There is a revealing anxiety in the recasting of the theogony of the Muses. Initially, they were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. But how, if this were the case, could the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus? Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, only darkness, the forgotten, the hidden origin.

This strange regression of the origin marks the enigma of inspiration, which is never a matter of simple receptivity. Inspiration involves a kind of receptiveness, but also an answering desire to suspend reason or wilful deliberation: a willingness to admit an empowering spirit into the work, to render it productive. The artist must embrace dispossession, acknowledging the authority of a possessing voice, but it also necessary to assume responsibility for the work, to shape and realise what has been received such that it might inspire others in turn.

The scene of inspiration can be found long before the poem had been separated from other forms of making, when the poet was a singer [aidos] and not a poet [poietes]. For the Greeks, enthusiasmos named the way in which the individual voice was possessed by a higher authority. Language is, as it were, received: but the locus of this reception is not the poet alone with a quill. Reception occurs in what Russo and Simon call ‘a kind of common “field” in which poet, audience and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three’.

It is thus a gathering or assembling that, for the Greeks, marked the recitative event; the separation between text and reader that will lead to an interruptive unraveling of the self-presence of the recitation, the sundering of poet and audience, is as yet unmarked. With the birth of poetry, of literature, the Muse, the figure of inspiration, is given over to the disseminative effects of history. When literature becomes a delimitable body of writings, the scene of inspiration shifts; it is no longer the Muse who would allow human beings to reveal and receive the truth through the song, nor the God of whom the author would be the scriptor. Is it, then, the authorial authority, the creator-genius, who would to be able to secure the origin of inspiration?

This would seem to be the path Feuerbach clears when he argues that the idea of God springs from the human being alienated its powers and capacities. The human being receives the power to overcome this alienation and to begin to write, to speak in the name of humanity, delimiting a place from which it would be possible to call a halt to the infinite regress of the origin. Thus it is possible to speak of the era of humanism, whose faith lies in the power of the human being to work and transform the world, and in the faith that the regress of the origin can be mastered by the power which belongs to us as human beings.

This allows inspiration to be understood as part of a battery of artistic techniques, allowing the writer, for example, to draw upon a deeper level of self-expression, an enhanced fluency. God is now revealed as a pseudonym of the human being; the way is cleared for the Promethean artist and the total artwork (Wagner). But a profound transformation has occurred, for this is to isolate the power to create as the most important trait of God. It is not that the human being wants to supplant God, but that the human being can only understand God as a great producer, as a source of power. Feuerbach is wrong to argue that God was merely the product of the alienation of the human being; it is the human being who is born from an alienation which occurs at the heart of God. Art, now, is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of a delimited God. At one stroke the human being is lost to itself and God is lost to the sacred. And art? What of art?

Humanism is present not only in the creator-God like Wagner for whom Feuerbach seems to prepare, but in the most basic experience of the novelist. Listen to a novelist recounting the vicissitudes of composition: ‘I wanted to say something about …’; ‘I write to express myself’: this innocuous statement reflects the hubris of supposing that it would be possible to lay hold of the regress of the origin. Would Beckett or Sarraute ever speak of themselves in this way? Did Blanchot or Duras ever lay claim to that regress in their own name?

This is the age of a humanism: the piece in the Sunday paper about Beckett or Sarraute reveals only a hysterical desire to have done with desire, a fear of fear. Is this what one finds in the works of those writers devoted to representing the world, flashing it back to itself and obscuring, in this redoubling of daylight, the obscure paths which others authors are compelled to take? Or in the profiles, interviews and biographies where the power of the novelist is celebrated? Or in the fat book in which the biographer can display a masterful virtuosity over a life? It is a question, in each case, of a reactive desire to bind creative inspiration to the will of the human being. But perhaps what we call the human is only an adjective and one which is always at the service of a certain determination of culture. Perhaps there is another way of thinking the humanitas of the human being which might pass by way of a reflection on art, on literature. Perhaps this is part of a larger reflection neither on human beings or gods, literature or art, but on the way in which the origin retreats from us.

We know today the successful author is a brandname. Publicity surrounds the work as it surrounds everything. The ‘public’ it reaches is a phantasm of the publicity industry itself – a kind of dream or hallucination of a ‘target audience’, an audience constituted around certain demographics, ‘markers’ which indicate the kind of taste they ‘ought’ to have. This phantasmal public, the marketeer’s dream, are the ones who are already familiar with everything written. They are both insatiable and satisfied; nothing will surprise them and they will always want more. Beyond the ‘public’ of the great machines of publicity, there are readers the demographers cannot reach, the ones whose strange tastes deform the predictions of the market researchers. The secret reader each of us is or could be – each of us, any of us is already more than a denumerable consumer whose purchases would make up the great lists of bestsellers printed in the Sunday papers. True, publicity calls to the ‘public’ and this ‘public’ to publicity, but somewhere, still, there are encounters with works of art.

What are they these works? What do they become when they are unbound from culture, from the forces of culture. Broken from the museum and the Sunday supplement. Turning their face away from the great machines of publicity. But to what do they turn their faces? To the readers who might still be gathered by the experience of the origin. To an experience which no longer falls within the measure of the human. Reviving that old word, inspiration, may seem to lead us back to the vocabulary of the divine or the sacred. But this is only a way of safeguarding an experience with no determinable source.

Wasn’t the chance of this experience there from the first? The Delphic oracle, placed at the centre of Hellas, and perhaps at the centre of the inhabited world, is formed at the lips of a cave which reached into the depths of the earth. Who spoke through these lips? The gods? Or the priestess whom the gods appointed so they could hear the peculiar song whose gift belonged to human beings alone? Or was it the depths themselves, reverberating in the songs of those who would sing in the competitions held at Delphi?

The depths themselves: before the gods there was the rumbling of the earth, the resonance of a song that still resounds in Heraclitus and Xenophanes. A song of the earth, of an inhuman origin: is this the sacred from which the gods and born are born and into which they must return? The sacred, the origin: it is the whirlwind which refuses all names.

First violence: language, which distances beings in their being only to reclaim them in an idealised form. Then this question: could the gods speak? Was Olympus silent? The Delphic oracle, placed at the centre of Hellas, and perhaps at the centre of the inhabited world, is like the lips of a cave which reached into the depths of the earth.

Who spoke through these lips? The gods? Or the priestess whom the gods appointed so they could hear the peculiar violence of naming belongs to human beings alone? Or was it the depths themselves, reverberating in the songs of those who would sing in the competitions held at Delphi? Already in the song there was a violence beyond that which would separate human beings from the world. Already there was a language beyond language which spoke of a horror from a time before humans and gods.

Of the translations I have read, I fancy Jaeger’s might capture the gnomic, terseness of Heraclitus’s Greek. ‘Character-man’s demon’ , ‘Dry flash–wisest and best soul’, ‘Way up and way down–one and the same’ , ‘Invisible harmony–better than visible’ , ‘One man–to me ten thousand, if he be the best’. Jaeger links this terseness of expression to Hesiod’s Works and Days and to the collection of Theognis of Megara – ‘Here again we meet long rows of apophthegms strung loosely together’. But they are strung together by one who loved wisdom (there was as yet no word for philosophy …); like Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides, Heraclitus brings a tone to philosophy different to the Ionians who were content to dispassionately report their observations and research.

Heraclitus, separate and proud, having removed himself from the common run, presents himself as a man who has awoken. He addresses us, the sleepers. Do not heed what he says, heed what resounds through what he says. Heed the logos and wake up! His discourse is a war machine. It must be; it is in harmony with what he teaches.

War, he says – the clash of forces, with its associations of carnage and horror – is ‘father of all and king of all’. This is shocking, but Heraclitus is insistent: the division of the world into gods and mortals, slaves and the free is premised upon war, which is to say, the struggle of opposing forces and their interchange. Contra Homer, who laments the strife in the world of men and gods, and against Hesiod, who does not understand why the day is also the night, Heraclitus presents strife as the hidden principle behind everything. This is what one should hear in the logos.

This is illustrated through examples, each of which has to be grasped intuitively. Tension – the lyre – a joining together or harmony that allows opposing forces to work in unison. Thus the lyre can make music through a redoubled tension and the bow, whose name is life (a pun on bios, which means life and a bow), can accomplish its work of death. Take this fragment: ‘They do not understand how that which draws apart agrees with itself: a fitting-together with counter-tension, as of the bow and the lyre’. Harmonia, Jaeger argues, is the third term which arises out of ‘the dynamics of two opposing forces stretched together so that they work in unison’.

Harmony? This word, which suggests peace and reconciliation, cannot translate harmonia. In another fragment we find ‘Invisible harmony–better than visible’; hidden, all we have are symbols which can point us towards making the right intuition. But the logos is common even if it calls each of us to separate ourselves from the others. Heed the play of the logos in the war-like language of Heraclitus. Heed the common-uncommon logos which attends to the countertension to what appears peaceful and calm in the visible world.

I very much appreciate Finkelberg’s observation on the changing role of poetry in Plato. As she claims, the earlier dialogues which present link poetry to divine inspiration, the Apology, the Ion and the Meno, give way, with the discovery of the pseudo-crafts in the Gorgias, to a developed theory of mimesis in the Phaedrus and the Republic. This allows Plato to make the following observations in his account of divine madness in the Phaedrus:

There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone (techne) will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

Technique is not sufficient; one has to be inspired in order to be a good poetry. Enthusiasmos, inspiration, is required; when present, the poet belongs alongside the philosopher. And when it is absent? The poet is an imitator, concerned with mimesis alone. One finds the same distinction between inspired and non-inspired poetry in The Republic. In book 3, Plato distinguishes mimetic poetry, which works through impersonation, taking on roles (dramatic poetry) and non-mimetic poetry or ‘plain discourse’ which ‘the report of the poet himself’ and is exemplified by lyric poetry, in the dithyramb. There is a third category – mixed poetry, which contains elements from the previous two categories. Epic poetry is a good example of this. Mimetic poets of all kinds – tragedians, comedians, and even epic poets like Homer – are to be expelled from the city. Lyric poetry may remain, but only on the condition that it is purified; henceforward, it will concern only the gods and good men, performed in a standardized rhythm and mode.

Aristotle, of course, presents a very different view of poetry, considering poetic mimesis admirable since it allows the poem to present something truly universal, purged of the accidental qualities of empirical reality. Aristotle does not celebrate Homer’s plain discourse, condemning his deviations into imitation, like Plato, but celebrates him for those same deviations; likewise, tragedy, far from being the lowest of the arts, is, for Aristotle, the highest. What is interesting, as Finkelberg points out, is the fact that Aristotle’s emphasis on mimesis leaves no place for Plato’s ideal of a non-mimetic poetry nor indeed an idea of divine possession, of mantic inspiration (since the two, in Plato, go together). Inspiration is relegated to the status of a ‘natural sympathy’ which enables the poet to realize characters more vividly; it is not the wild enthusiasmos of Plato’s inspired poet. There is no special place for lyric poetry, for Aristotle. The Aristotelian poet employs a techne, a technique, an art.

The distinction between these poetics is a fascinating one. Does something like it lie behind Plutarch’s comments on the poor quality of the oracles delivered at Delphi (inspired, enthusiastic) when compared to the sublime work of Sappho (polished, artful)? Finkelberg suggests just this, and proceeds to quote a favourite passage of mine:

‘Do you not see’, he [Sarapion] continued, ‘what grace the songs of Sappho have, charming and bewitching all who listen to them? But the Sibyl "with frenzied lips", as Heraclitus has it, "uttering words mirthless, unembellished, unperfumed, reaches to a thousand years with her voice through the god."’

The quotation from Heraclitus is marvellous, reminding me of another fragment, ‘The Lord at Delphi does not speak but gives a sign’. Marvellous, too, to be reminded of an unexpected relationship between Plato and Heraclitus. For how should one understand the broken fragments of Heraclitus? As remnants of a book, as Aristotle claims? As a cluster of aphorisms nearly sufficient unto themselves, resonating with one another in theme, and hanging together in a fragmentary array? The divine law, the logos, for Heraclitus, can only be heeded by those who, he says, are awake. How might we awaken? The fragments are his answer. Listen.

A few lines written in the margins of Jill Marsden’s remarkable After Nietzsche and Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation. This is really only a reading note, an attempt to open up something new for myself.

After Nietzsche, 24:

There are certain philosophical ideas that can be accessed only through self-abandon. For Nietzsche, the insight of Heraclitus into the ‘eternal wavebeat and rhythm of things’ is the product of a raw and restive meditation that has come to ebb and flow with this dark, inhuman pulse. It is one thin.g to declare: ‘it is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you believe you see firm land somewhere in the ocean of becoming and passing away’: quite another, as Heraclitus attests, to actually ‘see nothing other than becoming’ .

What does Heraclitus see beyond the particular forms of things? Impermanence and unloosening. But how can he write about this if language cannot help but suggest permanency, if it always binds things – particular perturbations of chaos – to themselves, carving up the multiplicity of the world up into subjects and objects, and subordinating the multiple under the concept? By refusing to disambiguate his pronouncements, casting them in fragmentary and paradoxical form. Heraclitus suspends the thetic function of language allowing the ocean to rise up through this suspension. But how is this possible? Neither being (thesis) nor nothingness (antithesis) – nor the synthesis of the two -, Heraclitus, in the aphorism, affirms a thought that hovers between these contraries. Suspension, hovering between – are these the right words? It is equipoise, but a strife, a tension, a redoubled irreciprocity.

At some point, according to Blanchot, Bacchylides writes that because human beings are finite they must harbour two thoughts at once. Is this true? Yes, if thought is linked to an experience of the unconditioned, which no longer answers to the ‘I’ that would represent the world to itself through reflection. Two thoughts at once? The thought of the unconditioned and of the conditioned; the thought, that is, which answers to the world of determinate subjects and objects as they appear and disappear from the general economy of the indeterminable and chaotic. No longer does the known condition the unknown; it is the unknown and the unknowable that generates and dissolves the plane upon which subject and objects can appear. But this means the thinker, too, is caught in the flux of becoming; to think is also to endure an experience in which nothing exists in my place. What am I? Who am I? An open ecstasis, an ocean, in which the ‘I’ is only a wavebeat, a rhythm, which is done and undone, which appears and disappears.

Heraclitus is able to think two thoughts at once: he endures the experience of his own dissolution – some ‘one’, no one in particular, is wakeful and vigilant in thinking; a trace is left and marked in his writing. Two thoughts at once? Perhaps one could say he thinks thinking by sustaining a difference which will not close up into a unity – a vacillating movement which does not come to rest in one or other term. Neither one nor the other – why does Bacchylides claim that it is because we are finite that are thought is redoubled? I remember the famous lines from Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics?’, roughly paraphrased: we are so finite we cannot bring ourselves into the nothing through an act of will. It reaches us; it touches us, disclosing a difference between being and beings (two thoughts?) And so too must Heraclitus have been claimed by an experience to which he was able to bear witness. But how was this possible? It is as if, before it began – before it even found its name – philosophy, in the West (Heraclitus gave us the word philosopher, I think – or have I got it the wrong way round?) – was turned from itself.