Menelaos in Homer's Odyssey

Menelaos - as depicted in Homer's Odyssey - while not the most sympathetic of characters, is still one of the most poignant. Amid all of his splendor and wealth, and for what it's worth, he's also the spouse of Helen, reputedly the "most beautiful woman on earth," he is a haunted soul, grateful to have survived the Trojan war plus seven years of delays getting home, yet still grappling with something akin to post-traumatic guilt. As he tells Telemachos in Book 4: "no mortal man can vie with Zeus. His home and all his treasures are for ever. But as for men, it may well be that few have more than I..." He is, in other words, the man who "has it all" - but at the same time cannot help but lament his years adrift after the war: "how painfully I wandered before I brought [this treasure] home! Seven years at sea, Cyprus, Phoenicia, Egypt, and still farther ..." When Proteus tells him of his brother, Agamemnon's death at the hands of Aigisthos, a crime he could have perhaps prevented, had he offered sacrifice to Zeus and the immortal gods, in part to stem the wrath of Athena and thereby avoiding a delayed homecoming, he is smitten with grief: "before the end [of his speech] my heart was broken down. I slumped on the trampled sand and cried aloud, caring no more for life or the light of day." Proteus tries to cheer him up announcing his special status as one of the immortals: "As to your own destiny, prince Menelaos, you shall not die in the blue grass land of Argos; rather the gods intend you for Elysion...where all existence is a dream of ease..." But Menelaos has been afflicted with a set of painful memories, it seems, which are impossible to overcome. He is the man who knows too much, the man who cannot be happy.

Time Capsule - 2014

Since March 8th, Malaysian flight 370 en route to China has gone missing…Months have gone by but the mystery remains unsolved. After annexing the Crimea, Russia's next move in eastern Ukraine is still on hold... Hundreds of miners in Turkey were killed during a horrible mining accident... Jim Abrahamson was recently fired as high-profile editor at the New York Times. Abu Hazam was convicted on 11 terrorist charges...Boko Haram (a terror cell) has kidnapped and is still holding school-age girls in Nigeria, threatening to sell them into slavery... Generals have declared martial law in Thailand...The U.S. has "indicted" five Chinese military officers for hacking into American companies...Wildfires have been burning in Southern California near San Marcos…And more recently in the Napa valley. Fire season started early again. Big tornadoes have been rolling through the midwest at regular intervals...Yet another random school shooting occurred near the campus of UC Santa Barbara by a disturbed youth who posted videos on youtube. Beau Bergdahl was released in exchange for five Guantanamo detainees after having being held prisoner for five years by the Taliban. In other news, a group known as ISIS has taken over Mosul and Kirkuk in Iraq - causing 500,000 refugees to flee. They are said to be marching on Baghdad next!

Schubert's Sonata in B Flat

My Summer Reading List - 2014

Thoughts on Nihilism - Part 2

...In its original sense, nihilism was more than just a feeling of disenchantment, of profound alienation (although it was that as well); it was a "negativity" expressed as an active rejection of all previously accepted social and political beliefs. (Here one thinks of the sense in which Turgenev used the term in his novel, Fathers and Sons.) According to this understanding, we envision a  violent revolutionary bent on destruction, obsessed with exposing and gutting the rot of a dying civilization, pulling down social structures, mores, protocols, subverting the system, etc. etc. or perhaps a radical avant-garde critic railing against inherited forms and paradigms; yet this same nihilism admits of a more conventional meaning. Here one could imagine an entire generation in search of identity and purpose, in need of a context within which to strive, pining for definite goals, for a sense of direction, yet finding nothing within the tradition that is absolutely compelling, that is to say: authoritative, binding, irrevocable. This more casual or at least non-revolutionary strain provides a clue as to how nihilism has become for us a subterranean counterpart to the modern, pluralistic, democratic ideal which everyone subscribes to by default. According to this other meaning, nihilism refers to a passive acceptance of the impossibility of choosing one way of life over another as indisputably "optimum."  In the absence of some "higher  path" or "good life" per se, multiple options or alternatives present themselves as basically equivalent in value - thus indistinguishable in merit, depending upon one's outlook and situation. In such a milieu, multiple moods, beliefs, perspectives, beliefs, orientations offer themselves up for our consideration.  The old vertical hierarchy - that ranking of good and bad lives (think Dante) - now dissolves in favor of a horizontal tableau where every "life option" per se has a certain equivalency attached to it. The goal becomes one of eclectic sampling and combining, experimenting with opportunities, wearing temporary hats or identities, testing the water here and there. For the modern ego, life itself has become a make-shift art form, with experience a canvas upon which many divergent colors and textures must appear; the goal is now to produce an aesthetic outpouring, a seemingly endless work-in-progress, like a spontaneous collage effect, like some unpredictable mingling of possible identities:  athlete, artist, musician, fast-food worker, office drone, foodie, linguist, globe-trotter, etc. etc. And the end goal? Like a best-seller or a b-movie blockbuster, this ever-changing melange must hold our attention, must amuse, provoke, shock and entertain us,  preserving an open-ended, unfinished quality - holding itself immune from final judgments. The moral categories withdraw thus in favor of aesthetic ones. I mention all of this as a prelude to thinking about a recent book of popular philosophy entitled All Things Shining by Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly.

First Thoughts on Nihilism - Part 1

Belief in nothing. Belief that nothing matters. Life without clear purposes, goals, directions. Nighttime of the world. Motto for the present age. Aimlessness. Disorientation. Crumbling paradigms. Loss of faith. Loss of meaning. Vanishing transcendence. The death of metaphysics. Universalism in crisis. No absolute truths. Nothing etched in stone. No unquestioned pieties. Historical consciousness. Dispersal of norms. The old rules no longer apply. History the great nightmare. The abyss in the dark night. Shifting Zeitgeists. A loosening of the bow. Relaxing of standards. Whose justice, which rationality? Enervation. Hedonism. Materialism. Medication. Drones. Automated phones. Automatic sprinklers. A lack of cohesion. Social atomism. Diminished horizons. A sense of decline... Playing tennis without a net... Anything goes. Appearances rule. Subjectivity. Amorality. Discontinuity. An end to infinite strivings. The old values de-value themselves. Instincts tell the real story. Under the surface. Nothing is real. Nothing sacred. Style is substance. Pop art. Commodities. Competing perspectives. Advertising. Planned obsolescence. Game shows, soap operas, bread, circuses, atrocities occurring between commercials. The new normal. You can't make this stuff up. You can't process it, absorb, assimilate, digest it all. Absurdity upon absurdity. Demi-monde. Dream-world. Stream of images. Impossible to take seriously. Tragi-comedy. Negation of reality. Mental illness. Inane conformities. Self-conscious mythologies. Superstition. Idol worship. Mood swings. People admiring, extolling, idolizing; people despising, admonishing, excoriating. In one fell swoop. The new spirituality. The ongoing secularization. The reform of therapy. Peripatetic self-help. Questioning. Skepticism. Anti-metaphysical postures. Against all totalizing systems. Fluctuating opinions. An equal weight to every point of view. Limited attention spans. Walking wounded. Hidden scars. Nervous breakdowns. 24/7 newsfeed. Fodder for shock-jocks. Mockery and ridicule. Oracles and revelations. Stand-up comedians. Celebrity gossip. The inability to step out of the loop. Boredom. Vacillation. Indignation. Sanctimony. Fundamentalism. Easy answers. Emotionality. Paucity of concern. Distancing via film, via tube, via social media. Watching as people are reduced to things, to impediments, to ashes. Haunting memories, half-forgotten. Nausea. Insomnia. Irony. Detachment. Half-hearted participation. Low-risk involvements. Extreme reactions. Exaggerated trivialities. Both-and contradictions. Reality television. Fictional memoirs. Paid actors. Scripted lives. Head-trauma wounds. Good Morning America! Still recovering from the last war...

The Best Lines Hemingway Ever Wrote

For anyone dealing with extended bouts of grief, free-floating anxiety, trauma, stress, PTSD,  etc. aggravated by feelings of aimlessness, despondency, and ongoing lack of focus, Ernest Hemingway has a story that gets at the root of the problem. "In Another Country" is literally a tale of the "walking wounded," a group of recuperating soldiers, to be exact, being "put through the system" as it were, surrounded by dubious medical equipment, so-called healing regimens and smooth-talking doctors. This is a story guaranteed to help a person in the throes of mental anguish not to feel entirely lost or alone or abnormal. (If you have to ask what that means exactly to feel that way, then relax: the abyss has not come knocking for you - yet.) The line that resonates with me at least is one that that captures like no other the gist of the real pain that many of us are feeling nowadays - though we may not feel justified admitting to such feelings. (Each person's plight is somewhat incommensurable and immeasurable - and to be fair, I would not place my own situation on a part with anyone dealing with PTSD.) Whatever our predicaments, there is something deep within that makes us resist a soul-destroying situation, that sense of affliction or malheur as Simone Weil calls it, of descending (with our accumulated private pain) into a state of mere anonymity, the anonymity of a lifeless, forgotten "thing"; such a condition as would make any normal person want to scream, rant, rave, come undone or else find some outlet for a palpable form of rebellion against the status quo. I don't have a name for such an impulse, but it's here in the following passage:

"He stood there, biting his lower lip. `It is very difficult,' he said. `I cannot resign myself.' He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. 'I am utterly unable to resign myself,' he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door." - from "In Another Country" by Ernest Hemingway