Euripides: Suppliant Women.

ADRASTUS: Oh, the stupidity of man! You shoot your arrows beyond the target and, when, as you deserve, troubles crowd around your heads, it is only events that can teach you a lesson, not friends' advice. And you cities who have it in your power to end your sufferings by debate, you reach a conclusion by bloodshed, not parley.

....

CHORUS: O sons, a painful word for your loving mothers to use in their lament, I call to you who are dead.
ADRASTUS: Oh, I lament my woes!
CHORUS: Yes, and I mine.
ADRASTUS: We have suffered, oh...
CHORUS: ...woes outrageous in their pain.
ADRASTUS: Fellow-citizens of Argos, do you not see the doom that is mine?
CHORUS: They see me also in my wretchedness, bereft of my children.
ADRASTUS [Antistrophe]: Bring them to me, bring their blood-stained bodies, ill-fated men slain unworthily by unworthy hands in whose number the struggle was continued to its appointed end.
CHORUS: Give me my sons, that I may clasp them in my arms and fold them to my bosom.
[Adrastus gives the mothers access to their sons.]
ADRASTUS: There you are, there you are; they are yours now.
CHORUS: What is mine is a sufficient burden of woes.
ADRASTUS: Ah, me!
CHORUS: What of us, the mothers, have you nothing to say to us?
ADRASTUS: You hear me.
CHORUS: The suffering you lament is theirs and ours as well.
ADRASTUS: If only the Theban ranks had slain me in the dust!
CHORUS: If only I had never known the embrace of a husband in the marital bed!
ADRASTUS [Epode]: Look upon an ocean of anguish, you mothers of sons, wedded to sorrow.
CHORUS: Our nails have furrowed our cheeks and with dust we have covered our heads.
ADRASTUS: Oh the pain, the pain I feel! May the earth swallow me up, may a storm-blast sweep me off, or Zeus' fiery thunderbolt fall upon my head!

...

ADRASTUS [turning away]: O wretched mankind, why do you equip yourselves with spears and spill each other's blood? Make an end of this! Cease your struggles and live at peace in your cities as tolerant neighbours. Life in such a brief moment; we should pass through it as easily as we can, avoiding pain.
CHORUS [Strophe]: No more am I blessed in children, no more blessed in sons, no share in happiness have I now with the women of Argos who have brought forth sons! No words of favour can the childless now expect from Artemis who assists in childbirth. My life is now no life, and, like a roving cloud, I am driven to and fro by heartless winds.


Tragedy has always been concerned with suffering. Euripides' Suppliant Women is full of it. The direction of Euripides' inquiry, however, is toward the rational. Whereas the characters of Sophocles experience suffering, those of Euripides seem to do little but discuss it.

The innovation of Euripides, it seems, is his investigation of the way in which suffering engenders further suffering still. Evadne, lamenting the loss of her husband as his dead body burns upon the funeral pyre, decides to perform a perverted act of marriage. Unable to live side by side, she instead opts to be wed in death:

EVADNE: Never shall I betray you as you lie beneath the earth by continuing to live. Kindle the wedding torch, begin my nuptials! May posterity in Argos look upon this marriage as worthy and blessed, when ashes of wedded husband unite in the breeze with those of noble wife, a guileless spirit.

But the suffering does not end here. Evadne's father Iphis arrives just in time to see his daughter throw herself into the flames in which her husband's body burns.

IPHIS: Oh, what sorrow! Why is it not possible for men to have a second youth and then be old again? In our homes if any errors are made we can have second thoughts and rectify them, but not so in our lives. If we could be young again and subsequently old again, we would put matters right in our second lives. When I saw other men becoming fathers, I began to desire offspring of my own, and this longing was wasting me away. But if I had reached this state and learned from experience what it is like for a father to lose his child, never would I have plumbed such depths of misery such as this! ....
Oh, take me away at once, take me to my home and there consign me to darkness, where I may waste away and starve to death this old body of mine! What good will it do to wait until I have collected my child's bones?
Old age, you are a wrestler hard to throw! How I hate your grip and how I hate all those who seek to prolong life by using magic foods and potions to channel its course away from death! What they should do, once they have become a burden on earth, is die and be done with it, leaving room for younger men.

Suffering within Euripides indeed appears to take a different status from Aeschylus and Sophocles, as Nietzsche is keen to point out. Euripides identifies the pervasiveness of suffering, ever-present at the fringes of war and conflict. Suffering is inevitable and can no longer be bared. Gone is the double-power of the scapegoat, whose suffering is at once both wretched and holy. Oedipus, stumbling and shuffling along the road to Athens, no longer harbours within him fertility and fortune. Instead, the Euripidean scapegoat no longer holds fascination with suffering - suffering breeds violence, in turn breeding further suffering. Faced with the suffering of life, the best thing is to die: to waste away, starving in darkness.

The Genius of Nostrils

"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous - a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite....

Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me. It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia. - I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies - smelling them out. - My genius is in my nostrils."

-- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 'Why I am a Destiny, S1.

A Love Supreme

But what is prayer?
To hold all that is human against a vast horizon that melts, dances, shimmers. To look beyond to an idea of a God, barely visible. Distorted.

The prayer-beyond (oh Lord, help me to be) becomes a prayer-to-oneself (oh my good! oh my beautiful! ... I do not falter!). Praying to a beyond, a horizon that shall never fully form but only glitter and move with every step forward. A weeping promise of perfection, deliverance, forgiveness that despite our many-tongued begging of a God initiates from the deepest humanity. God as a perfection that does not exist. The human as a struggle towards a perfection through discipline, through dedication, through a passion that could not be comprehended by any deity.

Coltrane's brilliance as an expression of this - each syllable, each phrase a prayer. But not the prayer we conceive as prostration before a blinding light - instead, the whispered promise to oneself. Staring toward all horizons, we do not see any beyond, but a merging of futures. And the figure we think we perceive striding across the plains, inhabiting the space between the earth and the sky, is not a God but ourselves. The prayer, finding no being who could answer as God, returns to us as a promise.

Six Thinking Hats

So once again I'm reading more books than I can handle at once. I'm currently reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf, who I would have to say is up there in my few most favourite authors. I started reading it last year some time, but for whatever reason (probably essays and uni work) I abandoned it not far in. Woolf's writing is the most aesthetically beautiful I have come across - her novels are constructed to fit a whole, with much attention paid to form. To The Lighthouse is another of her novels where her attention to the detail of the whole novel (for it to form an 'H' shape) is executed perfectly. The Waves demonstrates Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style pushed to an extreme that is breathtaking to read. I'll write more about it when I finish it, I guess.

I'm also reading Six Easy Pieces by the venerable physicist Richard Feynman. It is basically a collection of some of his lectures that serve as an introduction to physics. These were lectures that he gave as a freshman course to prepare students for the physics to come in later years, and they serve as an experiment and example in how to teach, if anything else. Feynman's teaching style was famous - he rarely had much in the way of a lecture plan, and would turn up and simply start talking about whatever took his attention at the time. Such was his popularity that whenever he guest-lectured they would have to keep his appearance a secret otherwise there would be no seats left for course students. His way of explanation certainly is illuminating, and has been emulated by the writers of popular science books ever since. Feynman manages to convey the complexity of physics with the simple wonder that things that appear so complex can usually be reduced to simple explanations.
I'm addicted to popular science books, and I feel very passionate about them. They are the perfect opportunity for the scientific community to engage with the mainstream population, and it has been shown repeatedly that people actually want to know more about science. As so much science these days is less demonstrative - consider the science of the human genome project compared with the science of the space race - it is less visible and open to the casual observer. I myself did not take as much science in school as I should have because, with the exception of biology, none of the teachers communicated the wonder to me (or perhaps it is more likely that I just wasn't listening.) Ever since rediscovering my old passion for science (through philosophy, and a critical thinking course) I've read popular science books as fast as I can buy them. Feynman's is an example of how it should be done, despite its now old-age.

I'm also reading Six Thinking Hats by Edward DeBono. I started browsing through a copy of his book Think! Before it's too Late and came across a description of his thinking-hat method of lateral thinking and was hugely intrigued by the idea of attentional or 'guided' thinking. When we are left to simply 'think' by ourselves, our minds are quite inefficient. By directing our attention towards aspects of a problem, we can increase productivity and ensure that we come up with a working solution.
I looked everywhere for a decent copy of Six Thinking Hats, and could not find one. I vaguely remembered seeing it in one of the Penguin Classics editions, but could not find that either. Eventually, straying into a less-common bookstore, I happened across it. Ten bucks. Thankyou very much.
It's a very interesting read, and I think it also has some implications for Western philosophy, focused as it is on argumentative thinking. I intend to post more on the topic a bit later.

I would like to again emphasize how good the Penguin Classics editions are. Every single book in the series so far (well, less in the second series they released) has been a book I've wanted to read, or have heard good things about. The best thing about the series is the mish-mash of popular genre, high-brow literature, popular science and philosophy. If a person were to buy every single book in this series, she would have a very well-filled and interesting bookshelf. As an example of this let me consider a few - Six Easy Pieces By Feynman, Six Thinking Hats by DeBono, Lolita by Nabokov and The Consolations of Philosophy by DeBotton.
Four diverse books that can only expand a person's mind. Four books that will involve them with the world and do everything that good books are meant to do. And here's the best bit, which I will repeat again and again: these four books for just under $40. That's amazing value.

Books can change the world, and they have the best chance of doing this when they are cheap and smartly produced. Again, and I don't think I will tire of saying this: congratulations, Penguin.

The Gift

"For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter gift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long term deferral or difference. This is all too obvious if the other, the donee, gives me back immediately the same thing...
For there to be a gift it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract and that he never have contracted a debt... The donee owes it to himself even not to give back, he ought not to owe, and the donor ought not count on restitution. Is it thus necessary, at the limit, that he not recognize the gift as gift? If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift. Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent." -- Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, p. 12-13

Farewell My Lovely

I just finished reading Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, which is the second novel in his series based on the famous fictional detective Philip Marlowe. I read the first novel in this series, The Big Sleep just a while ago, and both are available in the amazing Classic Penguin series for just under ten dollars each.

While I'm not a crime fiction addict I've read my fair share of detective fiction, and since doing a crime fiction course at uni I've been fascinated with the ideas expressed in the genre - ideas about society, the individual, the law, concepts of self, responsibility and more. Perhaps the most interesting thing about detective or crime fiction is its evolution over time, with each new take on the genre representing and depicting the concerns and paranoia of the time. This proceeds from the birth of the detective figure in Edgar Allan Poe's Dupan character, through Victorian sensationalist fiction, Sherlock Holmes, hardboiled detective fiction, the police detective, psychological thriller and the good old ever-franchised forensic detective fiction. Through all of these styles there are repeated and reflected chiche's that are expressed in new or conventional ways. Anyone wanting an example of this only has to watch Friday Night Crime on ABC1 for a plethora of BBC detective and crime shows. The situations might be different, but the general ideas are always the same.

My interest in detective fiction made me quite look forward to Raymond Chandler, particularly because of my general love for all things noir, and also because, like Holmes, Marlowe has come to represent a whole genre in popular imagination. He is the archetypal hardboiled detective, an image continually referred to, even if it is only in passing. But more than that, Marolowe represents a shift in the idea of crime, society and the individual. More on that later.

The Big Sleep.
I read the big sleep with a lot of expectation for the hardboiled, wisecracking detective, and was let down to a certain extent. The Philip Marlowe in his first incarnation certainly fits the description, and the plot is engaging and twisting - yes, there is a femme fatale - but there was something lacking. Marlowe's wisecracks seemed a little forced and his swagger a little constructed. But the key aspects of his character did develop through the novel, aspects which really do become interesting when figured into the tropes of detective fiction.

Farewell, My Lovely

The second novel in the Marlowe series blew me away. There was more depth, more grit, more pain, more alcohol. For crime fiction, the novel is very well written, with the wisecracks and the language becoming shimmeringly poetical in places. The plot is confusing and twisting, the narrative jarring and disjointing, the characters mean and ugly and confronting. And it is all quite deliciously readable.

The main difference I found from The Big Sleep is the increase of paranoia. Nearly every dialogue Marlowe has with another character is in some way combative and distrustful. Every character harbours some sort of malice or potential malice towards him, and it is rare to encounter a character he considers to be equal. Twists and double-crossings happen so quickly it is sometimes hard to keep up. Characters appear midway through paragraphs only to disappear again - many times I found myself having to re-read passages, or completely lost in dialogue that somehow conveys more meaning than the reader is aware of. It seems as if everybody has it in for Marlowe, as he careens from one fist to another.

The middle of the novel a particularly good example of the paranoia and noir feel that really makes Farewell My Lovely stand out. Marlowe visits a strange psychic who appears central to the plot and is buried deep in the seething criminal underbelly of the city. The events unfold in a barely-conscious way, with strange and mysterious exoticism and malice. The narration slowly descends into a surreal dream-like state, and we realise that Marlowe has been drugged and set-up.

Many chapters begin with Marlowe regaining consciousness, and I think that this is a central motif of the novel and of Marlowe's crime-fighting in general. Throughout the novel drugs are used, and I'm hardly exaggerating when I make the observation that I think about a sixth of the novel's word count is dedicated entirely to the description of the act of drinking and pouring glasses of whiskey. In Farewell My Lovely, crime is the norm, not the exception.

Crime And The Detective In Farewell

The most interesting aspect of crime fiction is the insight it gives into various ideas of the nature of crime itself - ideas that are generally shaped by the time and context of the fiction itself. Early crime fiction is generally shaped like a puzzle, fashioned around the locked-room scenario: a crime (originally a theft, but then tending towards murder) happens in a locked room to which only a select few had access. What ensues is a process of investigating any clues, tracking down the likely suspects who end up being red-herrings, only to find that the solution to the crime is the very person we never suspected, say the mild-mannered and gentile butler.

This formula is repeated again and again, with new elements added. Sensationalist crime fiction takes this and mixes in elements of household and domestic drama and scandal: there are secret affairs, spying and manipulating servants, blackmail and murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories all involve seemingly 'unsolvable mysteries' to which Holmes directs his superior intellect and wit, solving the crime and therefore restoring order. The key aspect here is the role of the detective as an 'agent of stabilization.' Crime is an asymmetry, something that violates the norm and therefore results in stress, pain and suffering. The solution of the crime - and only the solution - will return the original normality and bring justice to victims and perpetrators alike. The detective in his/her role as hero, must work against the grain, usually creating more tension and unease in order to bring forth the denouement.

In traditional crime fiction, crime is an aberration but, crucially, a scaffold of normality is provided from which to solve the crime. The detective interviews the guests and servants of the house, one by one, to compare eyewitness accounts. Paint-scrapings are found on door-frames, footprints beneath windows, mysterious cigarette ash identified. The detective provides direction and logical understanding to the chaos of crime, and incomprehensible events are 'read' to provide explanation.

But Philip Marlowe inhabits a different world to the English country manor. Crime, for Marlowe, is the norm and there is an overwhelming sense of festering corruption and menace throughout the novel. The world is a big bad place and it will never be any other way. Crime is not a discernible evil that can be solved like a puzzle and forgotten about, but a chaotic miasma involving everyone, to some extent. Cops are crooked, bad guy gangsters turn out to actually be more honourable than the mayors they pay to get elected. Take this dialogue between Marlowe and one of the crooked cops:

"'Listen, pally,' said the big man seriously. 'You got me on a string, but it could break. Cops don't go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They got me caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing them seeds makes him smell like violets, only it don't - he ain't giving the orders either. You get me?'
'What kind of man is the mayor?'
'What kind of man is the mayor anywhere? A politician.You think he gives the orders? Nuts. You know what's the matter with this country, baby?'
'Too much frozen capital, I heard.'
'A guy can't stay honest if he wants to,' Hemingway said. 'That's what's the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don't eat. A lot of bastards think that all we need is ninety thousand F.B.I men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again. Now take Moral Rearmament. There you've got something. M.R.A There you've got something, baby.' "

Marlowe does not 'fight' crime. He investigates it. His involvement with the cases he solves is by means of employment, and will return the money if he feels he has not done his job properly. This is his means of survival.

He drinks to escape reality, and I think that this is the most haunting theme of Farewell's noir feel. Narrative is poised in a world between consciousness and sleep. Marlowe looses consciousness more times than I could count: many chapters begin with him regaining consciousness after being hit over the head. Events happen quickly, so quickly it seems that time distorts. What I took to be four or five days of novel-time ended up being two days. For Marlowe, pursuing crime is akin to stumbling through a surreal dream-land. It is a means of survival as much as it is a means of escape from the everyday mundane brutality and the realisation that crime is not a tangible, discernible thing, but is dispersed throughout every aspect of life.

The only solution is to keep on sleeping.

Rimbaud

Delirium II. Alchemy of the Word

My Go. One of my insanities: an audit.
I had long boasted how the key to every conceivable scene was in my hands. I found the big names in modern painting and poetry quite laughable.
I liked idiotic paintings, motifs over doorways, stage sets, mummers' backdrops, inn-signs, popular colour prints...
I dreamed of crusades, voyages of discovery that were never recorded, republics with no history, suppressed wars of religion, revolutions in manners, a ferment of races and continents: I believed in each and every form of magic.
I invented colours for the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. - I presided over the form and movement of every consonant and, making use of instinctive rhythms, I imagined that I might invent a poetic language that would one day be accessible to all the senses. I would be the sole translator.
To begin with, I carried out a study. I committed silences and darknesses to paper, I recorded the inexpressible. I took the measure of vertigo.

*

Far from the birds and cattle, the village girls,
What was I drinking, as I knelt in that heather
Ringed by copses of budding hazel,
In the warm, green mist of afternoon?

What could I be drinking from that young Oise,
- Voiceless elms, flowerless grass, grey sky! -
From those yellow gourds, far from the lair
I loved? A golden brew that bathes you in sweat.

I had the air of a dubious inn-sign.
- A storm came on and swept out the sky. By evening
The woodland water had spent itself in virgin sand,
The wind of God flung ice into the ponds;

Through my tears I saw gold - and could not drink.

*

Four in the morning, summertime
And love still dozing.
In the groves the smell
Of last night's revels fades away.

Down in the vast construction yards
Under the Hersperidean sun,
The Carpenters are already working,
In their shirtsleeves.

At ease in their Deserts of moss,
They trim the priceless panels
Which the city
Will paint with artificial skies.

O Venus, leave the Lovers
And their souls in garlands, spare
A moment for these workers,
Charming subjects of a Babylonian king.

O Queen of the Shepherds,
Fetch these labourers eau-de-vie
To pacify their strength
Until they bathe at midday in the sea.

-- Rimbaud, A Season in Hell.