The Beauty of the Ruins

I remember taking a German literature course in college and reading the Hildebrandslied. I actually don't remember the poem at all; all I know is that it is an incomplete, unfinished, cliff-handing fragment. Professor Harrison asked us to theorize why the author left it in this state. Did he die? Had he lost his inspiration? Perhaps, as our teacher suggested, he liked the way it looked as an incomplete masterpiece. The German Romantics of the 18th Century idealized the unfinished work. The abandoned, half-finished castle one finds in the Black Forest, slowly swallowed up by the surrounding flora.

I have fallen in love with two unfinished masterpieces in the past couple weeks: The Thief and the Cobbler by Richard Williams and Jordorowsky's Dune. The former was a 30 year animation project, best described by one of my new favorite podcasts by Studio360 producer Eric Molinsky, entitled Imaginary Worlds. This episode is aptly called "The Greatest Cartoon Almost Made." It's remarkable how close Richard Williams came to finishing this project, but once he completed the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he could not face tampering with the perfection of his baby as it appeared in his head. To elaborate further on the stultification of expectations would be to regurgitate the insights of Molinsky, which are profound and worth your time. 

The second project is a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's sprawling space epic Dune by the cult filmaker Alejandro Jordorowsky, years before Star Wars and a decade before David Lynch's flop. The story of this ill-fated movie adaptation is recounted beautifully in Frank Pavich's documentary. A disclaimer: I love the novel and therefore disapprove of the great liberties Jordorowsky took with the plot (Duke Leto is a eunuch who impregnates Lady Jessica with a drop of blood? Paul is executed and transforms into the the consciousness of the Fremen, of the planet Arrakis? Are you kidding me?) But I see that Jordorowsky had a vision for this film and a vocation to make it. This film could have been a success. It could have transformed pop culture. It could have been the religious experience Jordorowsky envisioned it would be. These possibilities raise the question: What if we lived in a universe where Dune replaces Star Wars in the public imagination? 

Like the Romantics, I love these projects just as they are, unfinished and fragmentary. Perhaps this is to my detriment. I am seduced in my empty hours by the "what-might-have-been" over the"what-is." And the "what-might-have-been" is a beguiling mistress. But I love her regardless. 

Day In, Day Out

Learning Greek is, very often, a labor of love. I know I must be present, and yet I also know that I have to spend the time working through the exercises and memorizing the forms. Real rewards, the kind that makes one excited, are often few and far between. So I wake up early in the morning, write down over and over again the declension of a new noun or the conjugation of a new verb, I write down again and again the new vocabulary, and I slowly make my way through fifteen translations. But I love it.

Words Falling Like Rain

"He who clings to his work

will create nothing that endures.

"If you want to accord with the Tao,

just do your job, then let go" (Tao Te Ching ch. 24, trans. Mitchell).

I get lost thinking about what I want to build with this blog, how I far I wish to go with this Greek. But the simple maxim from the East pulls me back. Be present. Perhaps this has become a cliche, but there is no other duty in the world. This morning I studied noun declensions, memorizing a few forms by writing them over again and again. Such a simple task may seem mundane, and my thirst for constant intellectual input has in the past made me impatient with the process. I want to read Plato now! I used to think. Such an inclination always stands ready at me shoulder, tempting me away from my duty, my attention to the present moment. But to such a call I feel Greek to be a powerful antidote. I enjoy the endless repetition of forms, the alien script, the iota subscripts and the circumflex accent marks. Every word, every form, every meaning, washes over me softly and I am calmed. It is enough. I am grateful to finally be able to say that, after half a dozen years of frustration with Latin and German. Today I am whole. There is not a piece missing.

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos

Namaste. Logos. Gravitas. We use ancient words sometimes because they indicate better than any word in English the ideas we are trying to communicate. But there is something more to it than that, I think. It would not be that difficult for a lay linguist such as myself to find very suitable translations of the above words in Modern English that convey the same ideas with similar nuance and depth. (Greetings. Word. Dignity.) No, I believe that we turn to these old words primarily because they are old. There is something noble, sanctifying, in the utterance, the movement of the lips and the tongue. I look over the first line of The Iliad and I silently mouth the words.

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos

I hardly know how these words relate to each other; I speak them and they register to my brain like it was baby talk. Meaningless. But they do register to me, somewhere beyond words, in my heart. These words come to me already sanctified by the reading of millions before me. I join them when I say these words. This is my Arabic, my Koran. It gives me the chills.

Greek Nobility

There are lots of ways to begin the study of Greek, but by far the most popular in schools is to start with Attic Greek, or the Greek of Athens in the 5th and 4th Centuries B.C.E. This is because Attic Greek represents so many of the cultural achievements of the Ancient Greek world, from the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle. The mastery of this particular form of Greek was my aim at the Berkeley Summer Workshop. I have purchased a book, however, which begins instead with Homeric Greek, the language of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Apparently, the move from Homer to Hesiod is relatively seamless, but otherwise there are no other authors or works for which this book adequately prepares the reader. So the obvious question is: why limit yourself to Homer? In the introduction to this handy little book, author Clyde Pharr argues that Homer is at least as good as Xenephon, the traditional primer, in preparing students for Attic Greek. His reasons are well argued, but they are not mine.

I choose Homer because his works represent, more than any other book the beginning of Western Civilization. He began the conversation, so to speak.

I chose Homer because I am an American. The father of the American Ideal, Thomas Jefferson in so many ways prescribed Homer to the rest of us. He placed it as a central feature of the University of Virginia curriculum, in letters to various proteges he gave it as their first reading, imploring them to learn to read it in the original Greek, and he even speculated that American farmers pick up tips on wheel building from their reading of the Iliad. An even greater endorsement comes, though, from Jefferson's most direct intellectual inheritor, Henry David Thoreau. The Iliad was one of the few books he took with him to Walden Pond. He says of his reading there:

"The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."

Thoreau was a radical individualist and, like Emerson and Nietzsche before him, deplored the use of books as a substitute for experiencing life itself. Too many they thought stake a lifelong claim on the ground another had trod previously. Emerson called this man a satellite in another's system. But Homer is an exception to this rule. He is worthy to devote one's lifelong study. Why? Because the study of Homer was, to these woodsmen, synonymous with the study of Nature herself. It is as if Homer has sprung from the ground like a tree, without the decay of time. He offers a view into a more barbaric and noble time, when men dealt with each other without the hypocrisy of humility.

It will not be until Lesson 13 that I will encounter the actual text of The Iliad, and I am just beginning Lesson 5. But I wish to apply the same line by line, word by word analysis Thoreau describes.

I intend to learn Homeric Greek in 2010

My love affair with the Greek language began I suppose in 2002, my sophomore year in college. I say love affair, but that word denotes a two-way relationship, in which I love Greek and she loves me back. No. Not like that at all. I have loved and admired those funny-looking letters and the great poetry and philosophy they embody from afar, like a Medieval knight looking up from his charger at the indifferent maiden loitering at her bedroom window. In a Political Theory class we read some Greek Tragedy by Aeschylus and I was immediately hooked. I moved on to the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, read the epic poetry of Homer, and even read a little comedy by Aristophanes. To my parents most of these names I brought up at dinner conversations and on walks to the park only registered as exotic and further proof of my burgeoning intellect. To my young wife, they symbolized my slackening grip on reality.

After I graduated from college, I went to Berkeley to study at their Intensive Greek Workshop for ten weeks. The model fit exactly my personality. Why trudge through years and years of Beginning Greek, without any real intellectual rewards, when you can toss aside all balance and proportion from your life for a short season and jump ahead of the game. To anyone who is interested in an Intensive Summer Workshop, be it at Berkeley or some other college, there are a few things you should know. Although this is advertised as a beginner program, most the people who enroll are taking it as a refresher course. By about day two when I realized the class was moving at a far faster pace then I was able, I realized that the bright pupils sitting in the front of the class answering all of the teacher's questions were talking in the halls about how hard their first two summer workshops were, but now on the third they were finally getting the hang of it. Of the actual beginners to Greek, those that thrive are, in my humble opinion, linguistic geniuses. Either that or I am a remedially slow learner. I took German in college, and would safely place myself squarely in the middle of the bell curve in regards to language acquisition. I knew only one student in my state college German classes who I believe could have survived the Berkeley program. Sitting around me were top students from Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Yale. These special few, who came to beginners and left two and a half months later able to read Greek were simply smarter than I. I admit this now with pain, five years later, because at that time I had always believed that my natural talents in just about anything were equal to anyone else's. Yes, as I wrung my hands day in and day out, utterly bewildered by the translations seemingly everyone around me could immediately intuit, I began to loathe my classmates. I hated them because I hated my own inadequacy. On the first day the Workshop director told me privately that over half of the students would drop out. He said this with a smile of superiority looking out through his designer glasses at an imaginary classroom full of losers who couldn't learn Greek. I observed this sense of superiority and found it rather matched my own, and I smiled with him at those masses of simpletons who did not belong in the same classroom as he and I. Within a week my vision was shattered. As I moved closer and closer to the back of the classroom, and the Greek language moved farther and farther out of my grasp, I soon had to confront my status as a Greek loser and I left for Arizona a little more than halfway through the program. I was left so emotionally scared by the experience I have not opened a Greek book until only the last year.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned, though, was that I paid over two thousand dollars to study Greek on my own. This is the case with just about all of college. You pay thousands of dollars for an institution to set deadlines for you, which, if you had a little bit of self discipline, you could set for yourself.

And so, in the spirit of self-discipline, I embark upon my Greek Odyssey, having learned a few things and I hope with a greater chance of success.

What to do?

I have reached a sort of existential crisis, in which I am at a loss as to what to make of my life. I don't want to teach High School English forever, but I don't know hos to replace that income. I lack the self-will to pick a course of action and stick with it. I don't know what to do for work this summer, whether to be a personal trainer at the gym, work for the Forest Service fighting wild fires, or apply for grants to study the humanities far away. Long term, I don't know if I want to be a novelist, short story author, journalist, audio producer (NPR-type stuff), or a director of documentaries. (That last one I just kind of threw in. I don't see myself behind a camera.) I am at the same crossroad I have been standing at for the last nine years. Am I too afraid to take a step? Perhaps I am waiting for a sign from heaven, a voice from above to tell me what to do. Maybe this is a time of preparation.