Troy, the Iliad and Music

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

My Oxford dictionary has no Lincoln or Churchill, but it does have Hector and Achilles.

I sensed, I felt, I knew a bit of song was profound—but I didn’t understand why my subconscious had dredged it up. It was a line in French, from an English rock song I barely knew. All morning, as I shaved with an old badger brush and then as I moved about collecting my gear for the day, the line kept recurring in my head: an angelic lady’s voice, echoing like a cathedral choir, with long notes rising up a scale, “…Les yeux sans visage…” Sometimes I’d hear Billy Idol singing down the next line, in translation, “Eyes without a face.”  As I kept hearing the choir lady, I kept feeling like I was looking straight up at the stars out on the prairie. I didn’t understand—Why was that line in my head?

Driving past farms into the sunrise I thought about a movie on DVD I’d seen last night, Troy, “inspired by Homer’s Iliad,” starring Peter O’toole, Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Sean Bean and the heartthrob Orlando Bloom as young Paris. I had watched Troy because last weekend while on the road I’d finished an audio book, translated from Greek poem to English prose, of the Iliad. I still felt awe, and such a connection to the people of the ages… I parked at a lakeside café. As I sipped my first coffee, staring over the lake and musing, still I heard the angelic choir singer. As I sipped my second coffee I quietly thought, “Eureka.” I knew why I was so moved. And I knew why the film Troy, with all those famous actors, had missed the target.

Of course an epic like the Iliad can’t be fitted into a two-hour movie; still, at least the creators of Troy tried, not “fitting in” but being “inspired by.” But they tried too hard to be original which meant, unfortunately, they decided to be cynical.

“Les yeux sans visage…” In the Trojan War the Bronze Age warriors wear helmets with nose guards and cheek plates. All that shows is their chin and their eyes: Sons and husbands, hot blooded and afraid. The singing, then, is most appropriate: sorrow, pity and a hint of something transcendent.

Classics can teach us. In my youth, on TV shows in black and white, we watched as brave cops and robbers intently kept on firing away at each other. Today, on color TV, we see the “New York’s finest” shooting only briefly then ducking back as their nerve fails them. Why the change? I think some scriptwriters must have read the Iliad, for that is how the heroes of old met their fate: as fearful as they were glorious.

A favorite scene for me is where Hector is back in the city of Troy, briefly home visiting his wife and baby, not knowing how long he has left on earth. In the Iliad he lingers with his family, not huggable but fully armored, wearing his helmet. Too bad in Troy he’s sans helmet, sans armor. As Homer tell us, the baby looks up at the sight of his father’s unnatural horsehair crest and starts crying. There’s a war on: no time to make the baby laugh, or to make better memories of what may be the dad’s last visit. Hector returns to war. The field of battle is the plain between the walls of Troy and the wooden wall of the Greeks along the shore. Behind their great ditch and palisade the Greeks have planted their huts and worn footpaths while all this time their black ships, drawn up onto the sand, loom over their thoughts.

How could Hector and Ajax and Odysseus (Ulysses) and all the others bring themselves to fight? They surely knew war is not glorious: The Iliad is filled with detailed scenes of gore, scenes far too indecent to depict today: They knew. In Hollywood’s entertaining Troy the Greeks and Trojans say the walls of Troy are impregnable—not so in the Iliad. In Homer’s tragedy the Trojans tell each other, just as Hector tells his wife, they are almost surely doomed: the towers of Ilium will burn. Yet they still have a slight chance of not losing: They have to try—this is their fate.

The Trojans and the Greeks, clashing on the field between the city and the sea, manage to do something no wild beast would ever do: stand in line for various battles, day after day, hour after hour as blood streams down darkening the sand. The Iliad doesn’t even begin until after the Greek ships have already been beached for seven years. How could they ever cope with returning again and again to the battlefield?

To me the answer is symbolized by their helmets. Like how we protect our horses from fear by having their eyes blinkered with black squares, like how the helmets might shelter the warriors from physically seeing things out the corners of their eyes, just so did the men protect themselves by not knowing what they knew… even as they struggled over straggly grass on darkened sand.

Both Greeks and Trojans spoke the same language, knew each other’s names, honored the same gods. Yet they would meet in battle. For them, perhaps it was for the best how the helmets obscured their enemy’s humanity, while hiding from their own brothers their fear-filled faces. "Les yeux sans visage."

We educated citizens of today, only because it’s peacetime, can safely know of war. In cities across our fair land our knowledgeable citizen-soldiers, at this time of year, in each city armory, have propped up on the counters of each battalion orderly room nice Christmas cards from fellow reservists in armories far away, reservists they may never meet in person. As John Donne put it: No man is an island …, all are part of the mainland; and if a clod be washed away by the sea, is not Europe the lesser? … Reservists understand why Hector will never abandon his dear city. At the same time his countrymen will not negotiate to give up fair Helen, now the wife of Paris—this is their tragic flaw.

People haven’t changed; I’m sure the sages of classical times agree with our modern experts: To have a life we need to transcend ourselves, to see some bigger picture beyond our own little lives. In the night of winter solstice atheists and devout alike will appreciate angelic choirs.

But men who live in a hard bubble will end up with hard hearts.

Just as we of today easily refer to intangibles that transcends us all, such as “democracy,” in order to rebuke and guide each other, without feeling self-conscious, so too would the people of Homer’s society easily refer to their intangible gods. “… Who can oppose the gods? ... My friends, it must have been madness from Zeus that made me so obstinate—I beg you all to forgive me.” A hero would not be surprised to meet a god.

There is a silent night scene in the Iliad where old King Priam sets out alone under the stars with a cart. He is hoping against hope, determined to somehow retrieve his son’s body from the tent of Achilles. He meets a cheerful respectful youth who offers to help. They talk. The lad says he can help the old man to cross the field, and can get the king through the gate at the ditch and palisade, and knows where the tent of Achilles is, and in fact he is a servant of Achilles and can get the old man in to see the warrior. Old King Priam isn’t fooled by the smiling lad: He knows full well he is talking to a god.

In Hollywood’s version Achilles looks up as the king simply enters his tent, asking, “How did you get here?” and Priam answers that as king he knows the land. They talk. Homer lingers over this scene, telling of a humbled old father, in mortal danger from young Achilles’s smoking volcanic temper, making eye contact and earnest conversation with the man who slew his son… Troy spends much less time.

In the world of Troy a prominent sorrowing choir would be out of place, for that world does not show us at our best—nothing is transcendent. With only two hours to tell the tale, Troy depicts a cold godless realm, a realm where the Greek royalty are ignoble and petty, cynical and selfish, caring nothing for the men they command. They might as well be corrupt generals in the army of South Vietnam. And therein lies the problem, for the classic definition of tragedy is a noble figure with a flaw. An ignoble person can’t be tragic, only small and sad. Like how when a mafia godfather dies, and at his funeral a long line of criminals walk past the casket, but good citizens are only dimly interested, their hearts untouched. To them nothing grand has happened, only something small.

I wonder what the rich Hollywood producers were thinking? The poor blind poet Homer would recite his poem in the marketplace amidst his Greek community. He cared for all, for Greek and Trojan alike, even for those characters who would, in Hollywood, be seen as “spear carriers” with anonymous walk-on parts. Homer nobly dignifies their deaths by taking his time, as he depicts each Greek and Trojan’s fall, telling us who they are, whence they came, who loves them, and what is their story. Only then does he describe a man’s soul rushing down to Hades. He shows noble citizen-soldiers, from many green valleys and islands, having volunteered to go fight to bring back fair Helen, she of  “the face that launched a thousand ships,” just as other citizens have left their families and farms to gather at Troy to defend Helen and the towers of Ilium.

                                                          

Helen, safe in the palace, sometimes says, “Bitch that I am.” Not quite of noble character, no, but by facing up to her responsibility for the war she too approaches tragedy.

The proud people of the Iliad have noble leaders worthy of them; everyone tries to be worthy of the gods who see all. Not so in the movie Troy: Citizens there are treated by their leaders as mere “soldiers,” as bodies to be piled up at the wall and wasted for their leader’s private gain.

This morning, as a free man, I drove my car to a lakeside to muse. With the cold fresh air of sunrise it was a nice day to be alive; I found I could not draw a cynical breath while I was touched with transcendence.

I feel for the men of both sides, those frightened yet brave fathers, sons and citizens, walking across the field to meet their fate. … "Les yeux sans visage."

Sean Crawford

On the fields of Alberta

Where once young men gathered from all over the Commonwealth,

Training to be airmen against fascism

January

2014

Footnotes:

~My Oxford dictionary has no Lincoln or Churchill, but it does have Hector and Achilles.

~While Hollywood uses the Trojan horse to have a tidy ending—Troy burns like Atlanta—Homer saw things differently. His Iliad begins with the war in progress, and ends with the war still going strong.

~As a young man, the only Hollywood war movie I ever found without “Yankee B.S.” was 12 O’clock High. (The book was written by two veterans after the war, the movie came out in 1949)

Because of this, you may imagine my excitement when as part of my college class in Outstanding Lives—(We studied three people: Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi and Thomas Merton)—I read Ms. Weil’s The Iliad, or The Poem of Force written during the Third Reich: She points out that, unless you know history, you cannot tell which side wrote the Iliad… so humble, so even handed, with no glory, and no hubris. We have yet to regain the clarity of the Greeks.

Here is the link to my textbook by Simone Weil, the slimmest textbook I ever bought, with translations of quotes from Homer by novelist and essayist Mary McCarthy. It might be easiest, for your first read, to go from quote to quote. I probably read the work all in one sitting myself, but I was a student then, and young.

~ Using Billy Idol’s tune, here is a gory music video, “We Call It the Crusades.” The singer is Amy Burval, the history teacher I wrote of last month in Activists and Music Videos. And here she sings a tasteful video, using “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, called “Trojan War.”

Words, Guys and Unisex

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“The most important thing for a human being to know, from infancy onward, is whether he is welcome or unwelcome, whether he is being loved and cherished and protected or hated and feared; and the give-and-take of speech, with all its modulation of color and tone, provides these essential clues.”

Lewis Mumford, The Miracle of Language

Headnote:

 I could pepper this essay with many “words” in quotation marks, but—how tedious for us both. And then if I read aloud my arms would get very tired from making scare quotes. So no quote marks today. Let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt; let’s imagine for any given word the quotes are there, as needed.

Words, Guys and Unisex

In the beginning was the word. I will never forget reading about a very young girl trying to figure out a little box she was holding. It had a drawer she could open, if only she knew how. She thought by first sliding her jaw open and shut, and then she opened the drawer. I read this in The Developing Child by Helen Bee. I knew at the time that we adults, privileged to think more abstractly than children, thought by sliding words around. Words enabled thought and words were thought. This was around 1980, when we were saying women deserved equal rights, yet women were subtly seen as unequal and undeserving. I kept blinking in surprise as I read the textbook, because Ms. Bee subtly used she as a generic term for child, instead of he. I looked and saw our words could be better. I figured my blinking was my problem, not Ms. Bee’s: She had the right to use words this way.

Besides, best not to complain: Being the only male in my child psychology class, and being fresh from the army base across the airstrip, I figured I had a lot to learn. One of my classmates told me about her little boy looking at the textbook cover, which showed children on a fancy playground, complete with slide. Her child looked up at her and said: “What if there was a button on the corner of the cover that you could press, and then—all the children would start moving, and going down the slide.” Such imagination! Yes, and as students and parents, what new world for our dear children were we imagining?

We knew darn well we had the right to imagine: Having survived the 1960’s, and the kitchen “consciousness raising groups” of the 1970’s, we knew society was not glued in place, but ever changing itself, like partly dismantling plastic red (Or lego) blocks and then happily rearranging.

Words are blocks. Some words are more concrete: mother, father. Other blocks are more abstract: person, parent. We wanted gateway words; we wanted our little girls to pass through to be letter carriers, firefighters and police constables without feeling like de-sexed monsters who had turned into mailmen, firemen and policemen. And as we were naming our hopes for our children, the debates around imagining equality were heated and crazy, just like how today our US cousins are imagining that allowing homosexuals to join the army will mean brawny men wearing dresses on parade, and soldiers digging their trenches with limp wrists. Crazy.

For both individuals and groups, if a goal is true and good and beautiful, and if it is not already accomplished, then there are obstacles. Sometimes the people who oppose noble goals, besides having crazy imaginations, will obstruct by appealing to laziness or saying, “don’t go so fast!” Martin Luther King answered these people when he said, “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy…” (Letter from Birmingham jail)

As it happens, the cart of progress can slow, stop or even reverse. A handy thought-word is pendulum; my despair is mollified when I remember such inevitable word-blocks as reactionary, counterrevolution, and the comforting phrase “one step back for two steps forward.”

It was exactly one year after my child psychology class that my college teacher Chuck Killingsworth, a Vietnam veteran, standing before my recreation class, was fishing for the word sexism, and none of us could supply it for him. (OK, I could, but I was keeping a low profile just then) He couldn’t remember it himself, either. How queer. There I was, a shorthaired veteran among longhaired students who couldn’t come up with the word sexism. They did not require that word-tool for their lives; they were not working through the issues. How sad: There had been a time when our side of the generation gap was going to be liberated from the old, un-new, un-improved generation. Not now. I looked at the students, and I knew: Their long hair was not political but cosmetic, less for building a brave new world than for a fashion statement. Short hair started coming back, with gay men being first. As the pendulum swung.

Before 1990 I remember a university classmate, Pauline, making a face as I was talking to her. She said, “Don’t use that word.” Lesbian. She preferred a nice new word, free of stigma: gay. She had been in the gay students society. Because the initials embarrassed the graduate students society, the name had just been changed. Now she was in GLASS, for gay and lesbian academics, students and staff. But make no mistake: gay was still a gender-neutral term. Gays had fought against the police, and won their legal freedom of assembly in 1969. After that, after being allowed to meet each other in broad daylight, they could see for themselves society was mistaken, that they could in fact have strong wrists and strong self-esteem.

Later came an organization where straight parents could meet and work through their issues and hear for themselves, from each other, that no, they didn’t cause it, they couldn’t cure it, and their gay children could be strong, noble, good church-going citizens. But that was later, after the 1969 struggle.

The year 2,000 A.D. was to be the year the future arrived. I remember, in that year, Professor Susan Cran teaching our business-and-rehabilitation class where I was probably the only male. One day she was fishing for a reply from any student, anyone, and when we couldn’t reply said to us in exasperation, “Guys! ... Come on, guys…” And later that day, in the student union building, I was exiting the Women’s Collective and Resource Centre as one woman asked two other women, “Are you guys going to the concert tonight?” Her word choice was quite unremarkable to us: As gays was unisex, so was guys.

Meanwhile, well before the new millennium, David Gerrold was writing his masterpiece about an ecological infestation, The Chtorr War series. The young viewpoint hero took things like space habitats and a moon base for granted. What fascinated me was when he would mention two soldiers in the background and, just two paragraphs later, mention one of them again, this time saying she. He hadn’t thought to mention the two soldiers were women because his generation took it for granted that soldiering had been decoupled from gender. How… how science fiction-y.

As we time travel into the future, at a breathless velocity of one second per second, new words are appearing and old ones are being lost. A few months ago I was waiting at a store counter beside two high school girls. Presumably these girls knew the words Miss, Mrs. and Mr. I heard them asking each other how to pronounce Ms. and asking what the word meant. I did not enlighten them. Next day I told this to a university graduate friend. She said she didn’t know either, adding, “I think it means a woman is divorced.” Well.

I can remember when we joked that co-eds—meaning co-educational, meaning female students—were on campus to proudly “get their Mrs. Degree”—meaning: get a husband. At the same time, other women, equally happy to get married, thought it was not society’s business to know whether they were married or not. Hence Ms. And from their efforts in the 1970’s, today at hiring interviews employers are no longer legally allowed to ask whether you are married or a tiny bit pregnant. (Not until after you are hired)  Back in 1980, while co-ed was being printed in Reader’s Digest, and few in Canada were saying co-ed, back then no one—including me—ever asked, “Why aren’t men proud to have initials before their name to say whether they are married?” I guess with our plastic word-blocks we had built a world we took for granted.

It’s like how during my boyhood we saw nothing wrong with stage plays like Guys and Dolls (1950) or with saying “guys and gals.” Few dreamed that we would move closer to an equal future, closer to words like Ms. and to having guys as a unisex term. As a boy, between drawing spaceships with little retro rockets by the nose cone, I would do the arithmetic to figure out how old I would be in the year two thousand. Old! It was around that time we had to retro built a word: acoustic guitar. At first there was no such term: The wooden ones were re-named after the electric ones came out. Words can also be retro vanished: Our US Negro cousins are now our Black cousins, while Negro, with a capital N, has retro vanished as a proper noun. (Presumably from being too close to the slang term nigger) And so I can write with a straight face, “In 1950 Buddy Holly carried his acoustic guitar past a Black priest.” (Just don’t use such anachronistic dialogue for time traveling secret agents, not if they are trying to pass for locals) As the pendulum swings.

Of course I respect biology: I have enjoyed referring to a respected woman over age thirty as a girl, when she was my potential girl friend; my child psychology peers in 1980 had enjoyed referring to boys they knew and gorgeous guys in a student club. Of course it’s nice to titillate ourselves. But still, sometimes, female adults are women and groups of adults are guys.

The last time I flew across the Rockies I declined taking a jet liner in favor of a smaller turbo-prop: It flew lower with better scenery. I sat at the very front, for the best view, and next to me on a little fold down seat was a nice good-looking flight attendant. I quite enjoyed our conversation. I did not call the man a flight steward, nor did I call his colleague a flight stewardess. Instead I went in for the unisex term. If I’d had a not-yet-published edition of O Magazine, then I could have asked the flight attendant what he thought of a letter somebody mailed in. I’m not saying the writer wanted to return to the days of Guys and Dolls, but she had managed to retro vanish the unisex term guys. Writing to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, she said firmly she didn’t appreciate a waiter addressing her table with, “What are you guys having?” because, she explained, she’s not a guy.

I do not believe she wanted female soldiers to have color coded uniforms and dig trenches with limp wrists, but I neither do I believe she was thinking through exactly what brave new world, and what brave army, she wanted her nieces to serve in. If my own niece, Darelynne, wearing her tattoo of a Guardian Angel with an M-16, is going to fight for my freedom, then I won’t put obstacles in Darelynne's way. No separate-but-equal uniforms. Meanwhile, as America is engaged in the war on terror, let’s try to set, for the terror-exporting states, a good example of human equality.

My US readers, from their time in Iraq, may recall how the rest of the world felt disturbed to read about nation building there. In exasperation they asked Americans: “Why not do state building?” To English-speaking folks offshore, a nation is a group within a state, such as the nations of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds within Iraq. As a North American, I can understand why the Americans still misuse English this way. They don’t get it because from stirring their traditional melting pot, with hot pressure to blend in, they have prevented separate nations from congealing. In contrast, up in Canada, even as they want to separate from the rest of Canada, a group within the province of Quebec are calling themselves nationalists. In an essay, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said we have to guess which meaning is intended, state or sub-state, when we hear nation. He said we go by context.

Just as I expect people to use context, for continent or republic, when I say “Here in America…” Hint to US cousins: When driving across the international border to Canada, a crude Charles Bronson (Death Wish, the movie) would say “I’m American” while the polite secret agent Matt Helm (Death of a Citizen, the novel) would say, “US citizen,” reminding his partner, “It’s their continent too.”

For my part, for the past decade and three years, while engaged in conceiving essays about liberty, the context for writing has been during war time, and therefore I have always been ready to digress into facing the war that is now before us. It is fitting to act on words like war and citizen. And nation. My alternative? To mentally secede, saying, “This war belongs to our government, to Our Dear Leader, not to the rest of us.” Of course, if I say that, then government by the people has already perished from the earth.

In a New York City accent: “I’m just saying.”

My niece, now home on Christmas leave, is a fully-fledged soldier—Not like in my dad’s war: not merely part of the woman’s auxiliary army corps. You may call me a dreamer, but I think Darelynne will be the first soldier in our family to make Sargent-Major. And I’m not the only one. My sister, Captain Crawford, has dreams too. 

Meanwhile I’m praying and hoping and wishing that in the context of gorgeous guys, guys is male, and in the context of most guys believe in peace, guys is unisex.

Sean Crawford

Civilian on the outside,

Citizen between the ears,

North of the 49^th parallel

January 2014

Lewis Mumford: “…So essential is language to man’s humanness, so deep a source is it of his own creativity, that it is by no means an accident in our time that those who have tried to degrade man and enslave him have first debased and misused language, arbitrarily turning meanings inside out. Civilization itself, from the most primitive stage onward, moves toward the continuous creation of a common social heritage, transcending all the peculiarities of race and environment and historic accident, shared over ever wider reaches of space and time…”

Excerpt from The Miracle of Language in The Conduct of Life, copyright1951, 1979, by Lewis Mumford, Harcourt Brace Janovich, Inc.

Footnotes:

~As the pendulum swings, I suppose Ms. has faded partly because there is less stigma to being unmarried: Nurses find it practical to say partner instead of spouse, and nobody says living-in-sin. And nobody makes a noun by accenting the third syllable in divorce, either.

~A new term is we, as in “Guess what? Michael and I—we’re pregnant!”

~Bias in word or thought blinds us for seeing the future… Killingsworth told us how, back from Nam, he did a thesis paper at university about Vietnam, saying we could win. His academic advisor had to tell him that, according to Killingsworth's own research, the war was unwinnable. It was otherwise a well-done paper, right up until the conclusion.

~Much of what makes the Chtorr Wars future feel like science fiction is the incredible lack of hubris among most people in the chain of command. This healthy lack is partly because the Chtorran plagues removed so many people, (only 76 congressmen survived) and partly because the US had lost a conflict back when the hero was a boy, and then had to sign the Moscow treaty—signing it in Moscow, not at a halfway point. … Sic transit hubris. …Sometimes you can’t see hubris from the inside: If you are a US citizen reading this, and you can gain the confidence of a Canadian, try to get him to tell you what “Yankee B.S.” is.

~Speaking of ego and equal rights: In the Chtorr War series the viewpoint hero, a competent army officer, gets a girlfriend who is taller, older, more common-sense-functional, of higher rank, on track to making general, and more sexually experienced/assertive… Outside of science fiction, can you imagine that in any thrilling novel today?

I think the reason the hero is OK with his life partner being higher is not merely because this is in the future, but because he does not see life as a hierarchy; I think, rather, he semi-consciously has a binary view, collapsing hierarchy to a question of territory: some people, in the hero’s territory, are committed to goals, not excuses, and hence have become competent. Others, outside his territory, have failed to accept the challenge of becoming committed to getting results. Such a pity.

~For my next essay, I’ll go back to putting individual words in quotation marks. (You’re welcome)