Book Review: Poetic Philosophy / Philosophical Poetry

A review of Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy, by Jennifer Lobo Meeks

By Moristotle

From her opening pages, Professor Meeks, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Perimeter College of Georgia State University, manifests writing mastery and loving expertise on the technicalities and history of her subject. I recognized a book I wanted to savor; anyone interested in the roots of philosophy in Homeric and Hesiodic myths would.

Moristotelians All

Aristotle: marble copy of bronze bust
by Lysippus, Louvre Museum

To think we were here the whole time!

By Moristotle

I had a Goines moment a few days ago, when it hit me for the very first time that the term “Aristotelian” that accompanies the name Aristotle naturally gives us “Moristotelian” to accompany Aristotle’s spiritual descendant Moristotle. I so surprised and excited myself that I ran the term by the staff, asking them:

Fiction: Sunlight in a Cave (a graphic short story)

Author in filmgrain

A “captioning” of the Mike Magliano story

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: A text version of this story appeared here on May 15. Bob had intended for some images to be included, but a series of editorial snafus intervened, and they weren’t. Today’s publication is Bob & Moristotle’s collaborative attempt to save the situation “creatively,” not just by adding Bob’s original images, but also by adding many more images and making them primary by arranging the text entirely as captions under them. Let’s see how well – or whether – it worked.]

Fiction: Sunlight in a Cave (a short story)

Author’s portrait painted
by Jane B. Mudd

A new telling of the Mike Magliano story

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story appeared here on March 20, under the title, “How the Wild Came to Rest.” Bob Boldt wrote it for a fiction-writing workshop, for which he promised there would be another version. When he submitted the new version, he alerted me that the story had taken “a quite divergent and surprising turn” – a turn that called for the completely different title.
    I asked Bob what happened during the rewrite? Did it surprise him? I think it only fair to share his response, which you might like to read before you read “Sunlight in a Cave.”

Killer instinct

Yesterday was the morning after. The night before, I had watched Part 2 of the 2008 French film pair, Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, starring Vincent Cassel as the "most famous criminal in modern French history" (Wikipedia). Cassel was in last year's Black Swan, opposite Natalie Portman, who, interestingly in the current connection, debuted in the 1994 French film, Leon: The Professional [assassin].
    My wife stopped watching about half-way through, a little after I'd almost stopped myself. But even after she went to bed, I remained to watch, to the bitter end. Why did I do that? I "officially" rated Part 1 (which we had watched the night before) F[air] and Part 2 P[oor], but I'm not sure they are that bad (although Part 1 is a better-made film than Part 2, which was shoddily edited and tediously repetitious—my wife later commented that the additional depictions of Mesrine's bank robberies, prison escapes, and kidnappings provided "no new information").

I might have downgraded both ratings because of a recent challenge from a friend, who doesn't find anything positive in movies about such people, who he thinks should be exterminated rather than glorified in film. He said that films like Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and TV programs like The Sopranos desensitize us toward evil. He hasn't seen either of these, and he wondered why I watched them (The Godfather and its two sequels at least twice each).
    I plead a fascination with story, and I'm especially fascinated by a true one.

Bonnie & Clyde in March 1933;
photo found at their hideout

    Because of his caution about the corrupting influence of depictions of evil people, I did watch the Mesrine films a good deal more thoughtfully than usual: I more closely watched myself watching. I was glad to find myself clear on the point that Jacques Mesrine—even with all his (or was it Cassel's?) charm and evident intelligence—was no one to imitate (the French likened him and one of his female associates to Clyde Barrow & Bonnie Parker).

I should disclose that I didn't know that Mesrine (pronounced may-reen) was a real person until I looked the movies up on the Internet Movie Database. I think I would have been less inclined to stop watching Part 2 if I already knew that, just to see how it actually (as opposed to fictionally) turned out.
    Yes, it was a true story and, as my friend recommended, after Mesrine's several incarcerations in MSPs (maximum security prisons), from all of which he had escaped, the French police decided they had no choice but to exterminate Mesrine. The photo at the top is the final shot of Cassel as Mesrine slumped over thoroughly dead behind the wheel of his car, having been shot by several officers firing down on his windshield with rifles from a truck that had managed to position itself immediately in front of Mesrine at a stop light.
    Not knowing beforehand that Mesrine was real sharpens the question: Why was I watching? Such stories are the stuff (when well produced) of strong dramatic cinema (or TV), same as Oedipus Rex, with its patricide and oedipal sex and self-mutilation, was strong dramatic theater to the Athenians, or Macbeth, with all its carnage, to the Elizabethans. I plead a fascination with story, not any glorification or worship of characters portrayed.

Plato (424/423-348/347 BC)

Movies & TV dramas present the irony that even though people usually identify with certain of their characters and enter into the story in their imagination, they usually don't map the world of a story to the reality of their own lives. Or at least I don't. I tend to objectify story worlds and analyze them in terms of plot, theme, dramatic arc, etc., as well as of writing, acting, directing, editing. I watch as an amateur film connoisseur.
    My sense of the Mesrine films is that their producers had not set out to glorify or worship the bad guys depicted. But does that matter? Might not people who cut other people up with a chainsaw have gotten the idea from Brian De Palma's 1983 gangster film, Scarface? What if we knew that that's precisely where one such person got the idea? Should Scarface therefore not have been made? In Book X of Plato's Republic, poets are banished in order to protect the populous from indulging base emotions, if vicariously, and transferring them to their own lives, where the emotions can transform them into the characters they saw on stage.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

     Plato's student Aristotle looked at differently. Stories about bad guys permit us to examine and deal with our own "dark side." Aristotle held that achieving catharsis was a healthy reason to go out to the theater; it cleanses your emotions.
    But, again, it matters who "your" is. Myself, I don't ordinarily think I need an emotional purging; I don't think The Godfather—and certainly not the Mesrine films—helped me get in touch with my dark side. I know clearly where I stand.
    But I suppose some people, who actually lean toward doing evil and being bad guys (whether they're aware of it or not), can be schooled in evil by such portrayals, perhaps even be taught behaviors to emulate. Most people who have seen Scarface (including me) haven't attacked (and will not attack) other people with a chainsaw. Isn't it okay for those people to watch such films? Just not okay for the few people who do get evil ideas (and are likely to act on them)?
    So, who's going to enforce who watches what, or what films and TV programs are produced (or what books are written or published)?

Only I myself "enforce" what I will watch. My friend's challenge to me is that I be more mindful whether there's a better way for me to spend my time. A better movie to watch, a better TV program? A better activity altogether than watching—Reading? Going for a long walk? Writing a letter?
    My friend was questioning whether it's morally justifiable to watch a movie (and especially a movie about bad guys) because doing so is our habit or our custom or our tradition. I agree that habit/custom/tradition is not a moral justification—for anything. And it's often just the opposite, tradition granting permission to continue to indulge in questionable behavior.

Mamma Mia!

I felt sick yesterday morning, having spent some time during the night in agitation. Nu's latest email had posed two or three problems for me, not the least of which was that it stirred memories of old religious woundings—some very old, some not so old. As I said on Sunday (quoting one of my emails from the Friday interchange), "in my earlier days [in my youth, I] spent many hours praying"—for what I can't quite remember, but possibly for reassurance that I believed sufficiently to be "saved." Not fun to revisit all that. Children don't deserve to have religion foisted on them in that way. Santa Claus is bad enough, but parents admit that hoax eventually. Childhood woundings. The more recent woundings were suffered during my ill-fated attempt to form a friendship with a jehovah (Tom S), whose talking points and Bible quotations were, if anything, even more rehearsed than Nu's. I exited that interchange to preserve my sanity.
    Nu and I have been friendly and have referred to each other as friends. We discovered early that we shared some basic values, especially the sense that "everything is holy" (if anything is, as I qualified it). Ironically, Nu seems to have inferred from that that I must "believe in God" and "be a Christian," after all and in spite of my denial. Nu won't allow that morality has evolved, that evolved consciousness shapes spirituality. In my view, of course, the "revelations" of the Bible grew out of that evolved consciousness; they were not imposed from outside by "God."
    The tone (and the "love" words) of Nu's latest message suggest a parent-child thing, with me the child to her mother:

Morris, This will be my final reply to you on this subject.
    I am sad to see your response. I think that over the last several years I have communicated to you in a very loving way....

She had sent me at least two previous notes of talking points and Bible quotations, and I reminded her most recently—about a year ago—that I don't respond well to being "preached at."

The motives behind my words have been very transparent. I would think that ultimately they are the same for every true Bible-believing Christian who shares their beliefs with any who do not believe. It is a desire for all men to know God and to believe on His Name. A desire that all men would give Honor and Respect to the Creator of the Universe. In all genuineness and sincerity. It is NOT to win a debate, ever....

No one "knows God"; it's all words and ritual, same as is "believing on His Name"—as though mouthing formulas to win something could make any sense. The Bible isn't all bunk, but John 3:16 certainly is.
    And we know virtually nothing about the creation of the universe. To say that "God created it" adds nothing to our understanding; it is a nullity. It's frankly hard even to see what wish it could fulfill, except perhaps in a primitive brain incapable of judging the inappropriateness to cosmology of the parent-child schema.
    Nu has nothing to sell; why is she trying so hard to sell it?

In closing, I will just add that the Bible was written so men might receive its message. The "evil" that you speak of is put there for a reason, that we may all realize that there is none good, not one, and that left to ourselves we are all capable of the most heinous of crimes against God and against our fellow man. This is patent throughout the entire Old Testament.

I might nominate this "explanation" of evil as "put there for a reason" for lamest half-gainer performed from the theological diving board. Pure twaddle.¹

The Good News of the New Testament is that although the heart of mankind was continually disobedient and rebellious to God, He did not leave us in that lost and hopeless estate, he sent a redeemer who was the only one qualified to satisfy God's holy requirements...He was conceived by the power of the holy ghost in the womb of the virgin Mary and born of her yet without sin.

Here, child, have another dose of this redeeming elixir!

The bible was written over a period of more than 1,500 years, by over forty different writers from every walk of life including kings, peasants, and fishermen in three different languages, and this message has been preserved and the integrity of the message has not changed. This is a miracle that could not be concocted or staged.

The books of the Old and New Testaments were variously selected by whoever wielded the power to decide; the dominant figures in the early church rejected dozens of other accounts of what people believed had happened. Whatever "integrity" the Bible has was an editorial decision, and "God" was not the editor.

In closing [yet again]: Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and Mohamed and all other great men inspired other men surely, but they died and are still decaying in their graves, but the One who claimed to be God and to breathe out the words of scripture Himself through His Holy Spirit (inspired) is not in His grave. He has risen, and is coming again to judge the world.

Says Nu, who obviously believes this without question and is impervious to any rational or skeptical challenge. Bible scholars disagree as to whether Jesus "claimed to be God." And the only use of the Bible's claim to be divinely inspired is to impress the gullible².

Dear Morris, that is all any of us care for you to know. We are not debaters or arrogant or any of the other things that you might be thinking. We are sincere and wish only God's richest blessings on you.

As if she cannot see that I am richly blessed, and certainly no less blessed than anyone in our email group.

This requires no response, please.

That "please," the unkindest cut of all!

And yet, that "Dear Morris"—heartfelt? Though not sure, one has to doubt it: the tone is too like that of a mother trying to manipulate a child. This has hurt me more than it has hurt you.
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1. Nomination subsequently ruled out of order.
2. From Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary:

   gull vt to take advantage of (one who is foolish or unwary)

A little ancient history of atheism and evolution

A friend of mind (on the right, the taller one; yes, he purports to be a llama, albeit one that blogs) holds the view that it wasn't possible to be an atheist before Darwin discovered how species evolved by natural selection of the fittest. His reason seems to be simply that before Darwin the only explanation for the apparently designed creatures constituting nature was that a god had designed and created them. Humans had to account for that design and the only way to do it before the discovery of the law of evolution was to suppose a designer god. Quod erat demonstrandum. ("Designer god," by the way, is apt, seeing as how we've got the Yahweh brand, the Jehovah brand, the God brand, the Allah brand....)

However, there were some known atheists more than two thousand years before Darwin, and very likely others unknown, the survival rate of written documentation from those times being what it is. And of course there were those "fools" referred to at least once in the Bible and many, many times ad nauseum in the Qur'an. You know, the ones who said, "There is no god." Unfortunately, since they were fools and therefore of no account, the Bible writers and The Prophet Muhummad didn't provide their names. Mentioning them at all seemed to serve the purpose of putting the stick about to warn people away from immitating them.

Anyway, to get back to some known atheists, one, according to Bertrand Russell, in A History of Western Philosophy, was the Greek Anaxagoras [circa 500-428 BCE]:

Whenever he can, he gives a mechanical explanation. He rejected necessity and chance as giving the origins of things; nevertheless, there was no "Providence" in his cosmology. He does not seem to have thought much about ethics or religion; probably he was an atheist, as his prosecutors maintained. [p. 63]

I acknowledge the "probably."

Another possibility is Socrates [469-399], although I myself doubt it:

The indictment [Socrates was, remember, tried for impiety, convicted, and executed] had said that Socrates not only denied the gods of the State, but introduced other gods of his own; Meletus, however, says that Socrates is a complete atheist, and adds: "He says that the sun is stone and the moon earth." Socrates replies that Meletus seems to think he is prosecuting Anaxagoras, whose views may be heard in the theatre for one drachma (presumably in the plays of Euripides). Socrates of course points out that this new accusation of complete atheism contradicts the indictment, and then passes on to more general considerations. [p. 87]

Whether or not Socrates "believed in god," he didn't (from my readings of Plato's depiction of him in his dialogues) do so as an explanation of apparently designed nature.

Another is Diagoras, a Greek poet and Sophist "active in Athens in the last decades of the 5th century BCE" (that is, his life somewhat overlapped those of Anaxagoras and Socrates). (I found the photo of "The statue of Diagoras in Rhodes in the sunset light" on the web.) To quote the nearest source to hand (Wikipedia), "He became an atheist after an incident that happened against him went unpunished by the gods." What a refreshingly common, down-to-earth reason! So many people have doubts and some eventually lose their faith altogether out of considerations of all the injustice and cruelty in the world allegedly "created by god." Diagoras's story (at least as told by Wikipedia) is pretty interesting:

He once threw a wooden image of a god into a fire, remarking that the deity should perform another miracle and save itself....[Note the pronoun "it."]

The Roman philosopher Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, tells of how a friend of Diagoras tried to convince him of the existence of the gods, by pointing out how many votive pictures tell about people being saved from storms at sea by "dint of vows to the gods," to which Diagoras replied that "there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and drowned at sea." And Cicero goes on to give another example, where Diagoras was on a ship in hard weather, and the crew thought that they had brought it on themselves by taking this ungodly man onboard. He then wondered if the other boats out in the same storm also had a Diagoras onboard.

Like Socrates, "Diagoras was condemned to death at Athens and a price was put on his head." Unlike Socrates, however, "He fled to Corinth...."

....with reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there was no God at all. [emphasis mine]

Though the evidence is sparse, it doesn't appear that either Anaxagoras or Diagoras had discovered the law of evolution. Perhaps they'd read or heard about the Greek astronomer and philosopher Anaximander of Miletus [circa 611 to circa 547]. Russell again:

[Anaximander taught that] there was an eternal motion, in the course of which was brought about the origin of the worlds. The worlds were not created, as in Jewish or Christian theology, but evolved. There was evolution also in the animal kingdom. Living creatures arose from the moist element as it evaporated by the sun. Man, like every other animal, was descended from fishes. He must be derived from animals of a different sort, because, owing to his long infancy, he could not have survived, originally, as he is now. [p. 27²]

So, my friend might be right!
______________________

1. Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1996
2. Russell also says that "Anaximander was full of scientific curiosity. He is said to have been the first man who made a map...."

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Yesterday I revised my blog profile and adjusted my masthead accordingly. Today, newly affirmed in my status as a nobody, I find myself in one of those moods of "not wanting to die just yet." I want to lounge and luxuriate for a while in the idyll of nobodiness. I want to start again and this time finish reading James Joyce's Ulysses (I've already begun) and re-read Hugh Kenner's books about Joyce and other American, Irish, and English modernists. Already, time seems to have slowed down for the enjoyment of these activities and for savoring, too, the most trivial acts of daily routine.

I happily discovered the other day that my sense that events in my life were now repeating themselves with accelerating speed was but a foolish illusion (and one that I'd have done better to reject than to accept and pay lip-service to—"Time is passing so fast!"). I discovered this upon examining how often it seemed to be that we were once again running the automatic dish washer. It had come to seem that the time between one running and the next was getting shorter and shorter. But I discovered that this impression was quite false and had been formed because I was focusing on the days when we ran the dish washer and ignoring the days we didn't run it. And there were more days we didn't run it than there were when we did. It was as though I had been ignoring the spaces between the notes of a melody. Ignoring the silences.

As I was warming up my computer moments ago, I opened Kenner's own book titled Ulysses and, reading its thematic quotation (from Plato's Republic), felt a tremor:

And it was a sight worth seeing to behold the several souls choose their lives. And a piteous and a laughable and amazing sight it was also. The choice was mostly governed by what they had been accustomed to in their former life...
      It so happened that the soul of Odysseus came forward to choose the very last of all. He remembered his former labours and had ceased from his ambition and so he spent a long time going round looking for the life of a private and obscure man. At last he found it lying about, ignored by every one else; and when he saw it he took it gladly, and said that he would have made the same choice if the lot had fallen to him first.
            – Plato, The Republic, X-620, trans. A. D. Lindsay

What to make of this "synchronicity"? How did it happen that the first words that fell under my eye should be so perfectly apt? Mere chance? No, I don't think so. Angelic intervention, then? Again, no, I don't think so...unless the angels that intervene in our lives are the wraiths that emanate from our own psyches and hover around us continually. The haunting mists we saw shrouding the Vermont hills two weekends ago come to mind. There weren't any the day I took the photo below; alas, I had been too agog of the mists the days before to think then of photographing them.

I'll be glad to think of my psychic wraiths as "angels," for I am well-disposed toward angels and it's comforting to think that I can have them in my life still, even though I seem at last to have succeeded in cleansing my belief of "God."

For I had read this book by Kenner a few years ago, including of course the thematic quote. In fact, I had read Plato's Republic many years ago (Edith Hamilton's translation), and it is conceivable (if improbable) that the passage struck a chord with me even then—even though I don't think that the young man I was then was looking forward to becoming nobody:

And it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice, and, from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition, went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded by the others, and upon seeing it said that it would have done the same had it drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly.

I'm glad today, and determined to be glad tomorrow, for the silences in my life....

Socrates drank hemlock

As a teenager I had great faith in reason, and whatever faith I may have been born with was no doubt strengthened by my youthful reading of Plato's dialogues. I believed that if a person presented a logical argument for something, then everyone who could understand it was bound to accept it. I eventually realized, however, that such rationality failed many more times than it succeeded. People just wouldn't be bound by logic. And in time I remembered that Socrates ended up drinking hemlock.

But now it seems to me consistent with the paradox of freedom tucked inside the Seminal Nut of Being that logic doesn't rule the affairs of the universe any more than it rules the affairs of humankind. Miracles (expressions of God's freedom?) demonstrate its misrule in the one, and human freedom its misrule in the other.

We're heard of the possibility that if humans are utterly free to act (that is, without correction from God) then everything is permitted. But even more fundamental, now, it seems that everything is required: not only the svelte grace of the gazelle, but also the gazelle's glazed eye as the lion takes it down for dinner; not only the perfectly born baby, but also the still birth; not only the hero's recognition in public adulation and fable, but also the innocent man's execution for another man's crime; and on and on, world without end.

In the droll English film I watched last night ("Keeping Mum"¹), the Reverend Walter Goodfellow, Vicar of the Parish of Little Wollop, sums it up in his opening address at an Anglican convention:

Isaiah, Chapter 55, Verse 8:

My ways are not your ways.

And I think what He basically means by that is:

I'm mysterious, folks. Live with it!

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1. Released in 2005, directed by Niall Johnson, with Rowan Atkinson as Rev. Goodfellow, Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, Maggie Smith as Grace Hawkins, and Patrick Swayze as Lance.