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 Chanukah taught
Catastrophe has been explored in the arts interestingly. This series was created
prior to March before the pandemic
Which means our two organizations were thinking?
About these issues before the global pandemic in 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
I'm Gillian Connelly 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 and fall
2019
I'm the author eight previous collections of poetry and in
2017 we see the showing Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of
Amerika 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 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 Berkeley
This program that we're part of is their brainchild
So very glad to be a part of that
So to address your question about why over 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
It does a picture of our 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's 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 at 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 of it 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. Um,
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 10-year sequence in which in the final year Odysseus returns back to his home and if the gun after the war
So
Troy was each of these is related
Each of these ponds 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 terrence 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 thought 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 reach back into the Bronze Age era
from 1600 to 1200 BC the poems may have lost some time after that periods from
1700 you see
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 embellishments and the further
elaboration of what the past was
They conveyed the memory of this early
Earliest time
we don't know 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 the Troy did exist and there was a troy of some site 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 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 the
The question really is and 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 twisting 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 poets 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 was
Immortality' the voyage out a return home
But I think that there's another explanation that's a little bit better than that
because
Hunger happens to be the first version of work of art in the West
He also preserves the record of the first siege in the West at least in
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 that's going nowhere
So look
One of the 24 books begins and the 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 and ashes and then merely at a tail or a fable a muthos
So we have this extraordinary
destruction that is
Present in its own absence while hunting both poems 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 battle and
The sad fact is that those phones that did
tell of this there were poems 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 he took away
Homer then Troy would have no one to sing if the destruction of Troy it would just be a
Preservation herb site that was 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 it's memory was preserved
primarily
Through Homer gave the most vivid account as if he were actually there
So so what we have then or these two?
terms
Each anchor to the other but neither anchored in themselves a homer who may never have existed
He may have simply been
Tradition puts 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. So let's just look at a couple of days
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 is 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 vile
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
um often is moss a
complete
disappearance of the city that's
Thought to have been in a kind of exaggerated gesture throughout antiquity to avange completely
And it wasn't recovered and was 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 one 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 in a kind of Malthusian way the excess populations from the earth
So these different kinds
Through
Homer 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 hammer 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 no Homer
Yes, hmm, so that's like absence upon absence upon absence yes, yes
absolutely, and then just go ahead my
Time in with that is why do we credit his points 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 at all. This was a question was raised in in antiquity itself
basically what sort of
Implication is there for 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
But there is a counter tradition of reading poetry the poetry has a poem of catastrophe that is
Difficult too difficult for that makes reading difficult for us. So let's take two quotations one is by Theodor Adorno
Who wrote in minimum Oralia?
1944 to 47 he who imagines disasters desires them
so
There is a great deal of imagination when you agree Gillian in Homer's poetry
Yeah, 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 in 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 a famous poet in gillian connolly
Home burn 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 poem 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 through
Me 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 contests and this is somehow related to what you Gillian have said about
about
redemptive Redemption as itself a kind of bruising 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 this systems 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 that was due to natural disasters - earthquakes fires earthquakes storms
fires
subsequent weakening of ala centres which led to conquest maybe of the sort that we all remember who reminded of and 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
We'll all of this happened around 1200 BCE
Suddenly again as suddenly as homer appeared in in the condo coattails of this as were 500 years later
There's no one actually was able to communicate with others about the destruction in some sort of massive way this map indicates
the
the extent of
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, um
let's go to the ethics and the poetics of
Singing about war the first two words of the Iliad are sing wrath or breath sing main and Aida
The poem begins in this way
Sing god a seeing of Pelias assign Achilles in its devastation which put pains thousandfold 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 bard 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 a
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 Oh Bronson 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 and ashes in bruges
belguim in 2017 to 18
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 in Fable where 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
Kendrick 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 that watching the duck Tillich?
hexameter
Essentially
Dissolve and break through and fall apart
and so you have the sense of
That's the mater. That's the song through which the Iliad is sown 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 metres and rhythms of Homer's poetry when they're constantly blowing up in our hands. Mm-hmm
So no question about that when in my meaning 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 and
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 you wrote
But I find extremely
Relevant to what? We're discussing. Would you like 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 epic 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 poem. 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 droop 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 james 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
Ben Amin 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
book
comes from all of those the layers of the that deep thinking about
katastrophe
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 sue permit the imaginations of cultures
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
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
in 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 through it started to occur to me that hunger 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 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 a 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 coins that Elliott in the
say the nature of them is to not be fixed 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 as grim as that is
That is something that is conceivably
Some ein I hesitate to use the word
consolation, but it 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 and unborn 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
Nothing 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 into 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 it 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 is assemblies and
This is often in contrast to the effects of
War on the field there are comparisons
So someone died is the way
You hear woodchoppers in the background chopping 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 similarly 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 so I'll 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 vote the blood of children flowed down the street like the blood of children
and that is a simile that
You know doesn't look a line and doesn't pull you away
And in fact points at the problem with you know, poet with poeta sizing making sense
Beautiful that should not be beautiful but just look down 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 we're a places 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. Okay, 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 a feed under a mass of
weapons the blood in the dust while others about him kept forever swarming over his
Body as flies through a sheep full of thunder about pails
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 from
the ugliness of the scene in fact, it reminds us that
in fact
the warrior is unrecognizable and there's no worse fate than
To be recognized that's what things all about like swarming
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, you know, 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
Does highlight actually the the tear of the other down and other violence?
Inside the tears, very nice way to put it. Um
The other point about the similes and then we'll move on to another question
Is it the simple world assemblies is taken out of the presence of the poet's audience
the
notion of these were familiar scenes
Or Jack scenes the farming
Cultivation of land are also fruitful milking casa cetera and they clash with a clash in a temporal way
This is the present moment this clashing with the epic past
does have sheep and milk and 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 two of the presents the natural world that's familiar to us in this
Epoch pass and here they're being crushed together in some strength 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 if
kinds of fashions of
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 break 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
But 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 to picket of wars but 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 with humans were no longer were not quite human in
Systematic and in catastrophe seem to go hand in hand. It's constrained
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, certainly the cyclical return you were talking
For currents, which is what he 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 an egg porosus or a conflagration
at the end of a long cycle of time where every bit of matter would burn up and
Nothing was left but fire and then the world we generate again, but you generate 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 Stoics and other Stokes 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're not 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 and not constellations, but
manuals that they wrote to each other or just dialogues where they appeared 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 banks
Yes, right
That's the nash on that. Yeah. Thank you
There was no redemption
There was no console you stare at catastrophe and methanks the way when you look at catastrophe or look at some sort of
dangerous
Existential threat to yourself as a stoic did you reminded of what it is to be human?
Superhuman 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
Consulate or enon it doesn't provide solace
Sanika 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 person
Immortal means that you live in a mortal world shared by others
Reach out to them inform 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 where I'm
Going back to Homer then would use
We have time for maybe one more question if anyone would like to answer is 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 twelve lines three to thirty five and you'll see
foreshadowings of the what I call the what Homer calls The Avenues Moss
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?
Katastrophe 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 that you're 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 kilise 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 killed 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 the Kelly's 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 day 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 was 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 and 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 somewhat 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 term. That's our knowledge. Uh-huh. We have to recapture. Is that kind of dim?
sense of an event that was so overwhelming that can't even be imagined and
and
Homer maybe 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 describing
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
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 Club and
courage 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
General 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 common mouth Court is adjourned. Thank you
You
