disaster redux

Autumn descends on us, with the mornings turning chilly and damp. Roofers have been at work on our building over the past two weeks, and in the past three days have been right over our unit, ripping and thumping, making the wooden structure tremble. Down here in my office I'm as far from that action as I can get, but I do have young guys passing to and fro by my office window, carrying sheets of plywood and answering calls to their cell-phones.

Kimmie is still undergoing the long tail of this headcold (mine is pretty much completely gone). Her voice is still wispy and her ears are plugged. Another way of marking the change of season.

In the wider world we have the ructions of the financial and stock markets. We're overdue for an economic depression, so I'm expecting one--and expecting it to be long and severe. I believe that when historians look back on this era, they will shake their heads at how so many government policies and private practices could have been undertaken that were so wrongheaded and that led so surely to disaster--much as historians now look at the policies and practices that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ben Bernanke, the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is a scholar of the Great Depression. But policymakers, like generals, are always refighting the last war rather than addressing the situation before them.

I've mentioned before how events have the look of the three-stage unfolding of an ancient Greek tragedy: koros, hubris, and ate (surfeit, outrageous behavior, and disaster). By the time of the great tragedians of Athens, ate had come to mean objective, external disaster--retribution for one's ill-starred actions. But as E. R. Dodds observes in his book The Greeks and the Irrational, the term ate in earlier, Homeric times had a different meaning:

Always, or practically always, ate is a state of mind--a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity...

But what is insanity? Literally, it means mental unhealthiness or unwholesomeness. A disconnect from reality.

That sounds like what starts the tragic cycle. For koros is "surfeit" according to Arnold J. Toynbee--doing too much of something. But doing too much of something is itself a sign of lack of realism: you have too high a regard for your own powers to control things, to make things go as you wish. You lack humility, and so are led on to hubris, "outrageous action"--doing things that reflect your unrealistic self-assessment. You make big mistakes. And the locomotive of big mistakes pulls a train of painful consequences--ate.

So I suppose ate, the painful consequences, can be viewed from either the external angle (disaster) or from the internal angle ("insanity"). For external disaster in itself is neutral, you might say; it is our response to it, our feelings about it, that constitute its pain and suffering. Ate then seems to be both the disasters caused by our foolish actions, and the suffering that results.

One dark note of the "insanity" model is that it doesn't suggest learning. The crazy person, after an "episode", gradually becomes quiescent again. Peace returns--and further opportunities for surfeit...

I think it was Voltaire who said:

History never repeats itself;
Man always does.

What can I say? Here we go again.

epic musings

Just as the truth about the future would be attained only if man were in touch with a knowledge wiser than his own, so the truth about the past could be preserved only on a like condition. Its human repositories, the poets, had (like the seers) their technical resources, their professional training; but vision of the past, like insight into the future, remained a mysterious faculty, only partially under its owner’s control, and dependent in the last resort on divine grace.

Thus E. R. Dodds in his excellent 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, which I'm still reading.

This extract is from chapter 3, "The Blessings of Madness", in which Dodds discusses the different kinds of madness as understood by the ancient Greeks. Some types of madness were known to be ordinary and pathological--disease in the same sense that the body can be diseased. But others were regarded as divine, and conferred special superhuman powers on those visited by these states.

Two of these forms of divine madness were conferred by Apollo and Dionysus. But a third was regarded as bestowed by the Muses; this form of "madness" was poetic inspiration. In contact with a Muse, the poet received special knowledge not available to anyone else, and was able to express this in his verse.

As Dodds points out, the epic poets, when they supplicated the Muse for inspiration, were looking not for the technical ability to express themselves, but for hidden factual knowledge of the past. In an era without recorded media, the all-seeing, all-remembering Muse was the repository of the truth about the past, and it was this precious truth that the epic poet needed above all in order to fulfill his task.

I find this idea fascinating and, yes, inspiring. At this stage in my own epic work, I feel that I understand exactly what my great forebears were asking for, and why.

The past is a great unknown, as is the future. We have memories of our own lives, but as psychology has shown, memories change. What we remember, if we remember, and if that memory has any relationship with fact at all, is colored and shaped by our need to account for the present as we understand it. Our personal memories are mainly a kind of personal mythology that explains and supports our current attitudes and actions. Very broadly, we remember what we want to remember--the way we want to remember it.

And when we look back to times before our personal memories, we move even further onto mythological ground. Textbooks of national history are notorious for showing an edited, self-serving view of the past. Their aim is to create generations of patriots.

The epic poet, then, prays to the Muse for the truth about the past. What he gets is what he gets--whatever she decides to give him, if anything.

Now we have a long tradition of recorded history, as well as an actual science of the past in archaeology. Does this mean the Muse is obsolete, retired?

I think not. For the poet--and here I mean poet in its broad literal sense of "maker"--is still a limited being, who has only so much time and energy in his mortal frame. Confronted with a sea of recorded information, how is he to find what he needs?

You can call it chance, or method, or association--but I think that a research process that relies only on these things will come up empty. Speaking for myself, I have a certain feeling of being guided. Not all the time--in fact, not usually. But nonetheless. And after all, it takes me time to collect and read through the material to which I'm guided. I just need to be nudged and steered a little from time to time. I do get these nudges, and they must come from somewhere.

The "unconscious" would be the usual explanation. But what is the unconscious? By definition it is the great unknown, what is outside the field of consciousness. Because we claim not to believe in gods, we take it to refer to essentially mental processes happening below the threshold of awareness. But the entire notion of an unconscious mental process is quite mysterious, if you think about it. And to the extent that it exhibits purpose and knowledge, well, then, it's all the more mysterious.

I say: the Muse is as the Muse does. The gift of Calliope, the Muse of epic, is not poetic prowess but knowledge. The epic poet knows things that other people don't--and then he tells them.

O Muse, thanks for your help thus far. Please don't abandon me now.