Today in-depth discussion on the Symposium began. The sticky-point that virtually everyone in the modern discussion of this work comes upon was touched on immediately. This would of course be the fact that the love discussed is not only homosexual, but operates on the understanding of a relationship between a man(the erastes or lover) and an adolescent boy(the eromenos, or beloved). This largely just comes down to accepting it for what it is, it seems to me.
However, it was pointed out that ultimately the highest form of love in the Symposium is philosophia, the love of wisdom--this Socrates is taught by an old woman named Diotima--. But how intriguing it is that erotic love is so closely connected with this love of wisdom(like that interesting play on words Mr. Sexson pointed out between "rhetoric" and "erotic").
Is it at all possible then that when eros is felt, that at least an element of it is aiming to get closer up the ladder to philasophia? That when you fall in love with someone there is(whether one is concious of it or not) the desire to know* something higher through and with them? And perhaps this desire for higher knowledge, which is gained through loving someone, goes hand in hand with a desire for wholeness, like Aristophanes thought.
I believe that. This isn't really worth much, and I very well could just be full of crap, but it is a truthful observation.
I also think I'll check out Raymond Carver's Everything we talk about when we talk about love, nonwithstanding my prejudice against short stories. A modern updating of the Symposium by an author who was one of the originators of film noir sounds greatly interesting.
And I'm off to the races...

*We are perfectly aware of the double meaning "know" has in this instance--"know" as in wanting to know something new and "know" in the sense of "Adam knew his wife Eve".

I've wondered before about what the word reconteur meant; I now know that it is french for "storyteller".
And speaking of storytellers, Mr. Sexson told us today about Schaherazaade(sp)of the Airways, which was greatly provocative as only real incidents can be(which begs the question of what is real in the first place, but nevermind). Not only did this incident fit in with discussion of Plato's Symposium(a story within a story within a series of stories)but this woman also touched upon the boundary between what is "truth" and what is fiction, or --to badly paraphrase Aristotle's categorization of history and poetry--truth with a small "t" and truth with a capital "T". This woman's actions actaully seem vaguely apocalyptic(in the Biblical sense), since revealing something that was hidden was what she did. This action she took seems to me like that of a vaguely capricious, yet ultimately honest deity seeking to bestow something on mortals. Or something like that.

Since today was the day of the test and nothing new was discussed and because procrastination on my part is no longer excusable, I think the blog today will be a rumination on one the key conflicts in Antigone, which I have decided will be that between the living and the dead.

The dead belong to a realm which none of us here in this world really know anything about(those of us that say they do in all probablity are bullshiting). This observation glaringly, though perhaps necessarily, leaves out the question of religous belief and/or truth. But the dead, even in this state that they are in(whatever it could be described as--heaven, hell, both or neither, or nothingness--) invariably have a hold upon the living. I think almost immediately of the South, where Confederate flags are still everywhere and a great many people regard the North as the land of the enemy one-hundered and some years after the Civil War came to it's conclusion. Or in family blood-feuds ala Hatfields and McCoys( you killed my brother/father, now I have to kill yours for the sake of vengenance!). A less bloody example that comes to mind from literature is James Joyce's The Dead , where the protagonist comes to the realization that his wife doesn't really care for him, because she never recovered from the death of a boy she loved when she was young.
What does all this mean? And where does it all originate from or resolve itself? I of course do not know the answers to these or any other questions, but I also somehow wonder if the stock-reply "Put the past behind you" is not a good enoughe. I suppose that its often said because you can't really think of anything that is at all beneficial(sp?) but it still seems superficial and unsatisfying, somehow.
Not unlike this blog. Well, it may be superficial and unsatisfying, but it is something; a ramble or ruimanation or what have you.

I found the concept that drama is seperate from mythos intriguing. If that's the case, then drama simply takes the imaginative elements that seem most pertinent and utilize them in whatever way that can be grasped sensourally(sp?is that even a word; it totally should be). Maybe mythos at its deepest essence contains an imagination so vast that it only can be confined through expression. Or something like that.
I also know a word now to describe something I have encountered on a few occaisons in my life: senex which Mr. Sexson defined as stupid old men, and I'd also take it ones that argue/bullshit with each other--hey they aren't called "bull sessions" for nothing--. And of course this is what "senate" is derived from. What else?
And when the point about the messangers was brought up in class today(about how they never bring good news, and how you often want to slap them and/or the Chorus for their sheer insensitivity), I was reminded of a moment near the end of an anime film called Grave of the Fireflies(most devestatingly sad movie ever, incidentally) where the teenage protagonist is purchasing materials to cremate the body of his little sister, and the salesman says, in a very chipper way, "It certainly is a beautiful day isn't it?" Get off the screen!
And the ramble ends here...

Today in class a blog-error of mine was corrected. The hetaera were the courtesans in ancient Greece; and they were often very independant and influntial and well-educated, which is very interesting as many of them were ex-slaves. Interesting.

We also touched upon the subject of love, and it's mythic personifcation Aphrodite/Venus. She is referred to in early mythology alternately as Aphrodite-urania, and Aphrodite-pandemos. The former is to describe the state of "pure" love(what we would probably call Platonic love) and the latter to describe physical love(latter to be picked up with the name of Aprodite's son Eros/Cupid).
My talk on one of the five major themes of Steiner has yet to come due to sloth; and I have also changed my mind. Instead of the individual and society, it will deal with the living and the dead.

Today an interesting impromptu poll was conducted, about who knew who. Only a few low single digits recognized the names of Manon, Violetta and Odette, while every single person in the room recognized the name Anna Nicole Smith. What does this signify(apart from the warped values of the national media)? Perhaps that Ms. Smith, conciously or not, was acting out the role of the courtesan, tragic and often stricken with consumption?(examples are multidinous: Dumas fils Camille, Zola's Nana, La Traviatta--which is basically an opera remake of Camille--. One if my very favorite films, Baz Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge takes inspiration from these) And if so, that the status of the courtesan is fallen in modern times? I'd personally submit that the reason for the latter is because, in the ancient world, the courtesans were typically the only females with some semblance of education and liberty. (eg. the heterae(sp?) in Classical Greece) Moving on...
It was brought up in class that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is modeled on Antigone. Yet another book I haven't read and need to.
Elizabeth's blog play The Pinchy-Scorner was hysterically funny, and disturbingly accurate.
In today's etiology: Genius is derived from a Greek phrase meaning a tutelorary spirit that everybody everywhere has(similar to another Greek word daemon). So everyone's a genuis!
I'm going now. The knot is intrinsicate and probably always will be.

For the sake of economy, I'm slightly blending the two specific blog assingments(the one dissecting a page of Stiener and the one dealing with one of the five central conflicts in Antigone)for this one.

It is page 248 in Antigones:

"Translation cannot render nor commentary cirumscribe the network of discriminations and contiguities which comprises the Greek terms[insert three untranslated Greek words here]. The rough ad ready equation with 'right', 'justice', and 'law' not only misses the shifting lives of meaning in each of these fundamental Greek words, but fails altogether to translate the interplay in both[word for 'right'] and [word for 'justice'] of pragmatic or abstractly legalistic connotations on the one hand, and of archaic but active agencies of the supernatural on the other."
So Steiner has some reservations on the full import of the words when translated. Which is a totally valid consideration, since translation can have such a great impact on the text(the Bible and its various translations is a case in point). But I think there may end up being some possible distinctions to be drawn between 'right' and 'justice' even in english--especially if you take 'justice' in a strictly legal sense--.

"Lingusitically, [word for 'right'] may be the moat ancient and originally localized. In Homer and Hesiod, the 'goddess in this word' enunciates, is the highest advocate for, the traditional, inherited order of things. She seems to represent a primary comeliness in heaven and on earth...But it is [word for justice] whom the epic poets fabulists, and dramatists habitually designate as the 'child of Time'...Symbolically and iconographically, the links of this configuration to the Antigone theme are direct. [word for 'justice'] appears quite often on funerary urns in the guise of a virginal young woman of grave, indeed fierce, mien."
So of 'right' and 'justice', Justice is more often appealed to by the ancient Greeks as having a god-like representation, despite 'right' being older. And how striking it is that she often appears in the guise Steiner describes. Sounds a bit like 'Tig to me. And if that is the case, she is alinged with Justice? Curious indeed.

OK, forget this being a dual blog along with one-of-five-themes. I'll do that(individual and the state) later.

I learned a few things today, or rather was reminded if I already knew. Among them, Kirkegaard(sp?)was an existentialist Dane, author of such sunny titles as Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, Charles Dickens was obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood in much the same way that Hegel was obsessed with Antigone(Hegel and a whole bunch of others), and that tremendous self-conciousness will result if one applies knowledge that for some reason or another was already held to the task of relating George Steiner.

I also thought it was intriguing to consider that Antigone probably might be very young(13-14, though of course it never really talks about this in the text). Intriguing comparisons could be done with her and Shakespeare's Juliet, another tremendously bright very young woman who ended up being entombed alive and then committing suicide. And both ending up clashing with their fathers(or father figures) and end up dying for love, albiet of two different kinds(philia for Antigone, and eros for Juliet). Or I could just be out of my gourd.

The disected page from George Steiner will come eventually.

Today's class opened with the long statement of an Abyssinian tribal woman in response to "what is a woman?". She says, in short, that a woman can never know what it is to be a man, nor a man a woman, and that a woman will always be a mother, once she has become one. Contemplation of things like this(that end up touching to some extent or another on innate gender differences/realities)usually results in making me feel oddly uneasy; however, I do rather agree with Mr. Sexson's observation that imagination is the foundation of compassion. Shakespeare wasn't a female, and yet in his work we often find fascinating, witty, deep female conciousnesses(sp?). Hayao Miyazaki is a man, yet he makes films that revolve around the journeys of a female hero. Such a litany could go on for some time, yet it does remain that imagination does act as a spur to empathy, gender, racial or otherwise.
In terms of words, two were introduced today. Sparagmos, which refers to the tearing or rending of living flesh(yuck), and metapsychosis, which is the transmigration of the soul from one body to another, which goes along the lines of nothing ever really dies, it only changes. And barbarian, which means roughly "a person who does not speak my language."
We were also introduced to the history of the herms, which were blocks/statues at crossroads in Greece dedicated to Hermes--as the name suggests--with large erections attached to them. When religous reform came to Greece, they went around and broke all of the erections off. Wonder if it was the same "they" who burnt down the library in Alexandria. Leave it to the pernicous, understood They.

I did know of this movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, staring David Bowie and directed by Nicolas Roeg(of Don't Look Now and The Witches fame), but I never knew that it was a version of a Gnostic myth. Hhm.
I also did not know that February 2 was the Aztec New year, the day of Purification of the Virgin, and the birthday of James Joyce. Mr. Joyce who demonstrated with a boring day(June 16, 1904) that mythic undertones abound in everyday life. This is of course Uyllseus(sp?), which I have not gotten around to reading, but probably will at some point in time. Just like with a million other things.
I also learned today that drama comes from the Greek word dromenon, meaning "something that is done". With what scope or magnitude to which something is done is variable, but something is done and hence is drama. Or something like that.