The importance in our lives of small things because those small things are our lives.
One thing.
We all know what we think about what’s going on, we’ve known all along. We all saw the same degrading spectacle before the election; willing or not, we’re all going to be forced to live through its aftermath. Many have already lost jobs, careers, and livelihoods. The rest of us either read the news compulsively, or avoid all mention of what’s going on, dreading what comes next. I see no reason to ‘consider both sides’, or ‘give him time’, our only valid area of disagreement is on the duration, on how much harm will be done, and the severity of the aftermath.
I’m one of those who think the collapse will come swiftly, suddenly, and completely, and that from the rubble something good might be built. But what do I know? I mean, really. Like the talking heads mongering opinions on TV I’m not directly involved and have no direct experience. Beyond malice and greed, I also doubt whether any of those who are directly involved have a clear idea, either. When the collapse comes, there will be much hand-wringing, much debate about how it happened and why. But as with the Iraq invasion, I doubt that any conclusions will be reached on how such acts of destructive folly occurred—congressman Swallwell recommends Truth and Accountability hearings, which could be a place to start—and no explanation will make more sense than knowing that smashing things is fun, that smashing other people’s things is more fun, and smashing things of value—culturally, socially—is most fun of all.
What’s been most shocking is the realization forced on us that we are perhaps not who we thought we were. That we are instead who our enemies say we are. That has proved bitter.
When the Trade Center was attacked, I was in rehearsal with a new musical. The planes hit the buildings the morning of our second day. If you’ve ever been in rehearsal with a new musical you’ll know that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can be allowed to hold things up: much like the Post Office—another ‘hallowed institution’ that now seems up for grabs. We were sent home on the day of the event, but next morning we re-assembled in a rehearsal room on 42 Street, swapping stories about the hushed city, about who saw what, who’d lost what, who might be missing, and whose dog was safe, till the show’s director addressed us, his job at that moment being to provide the necessary blindness or resolve to carry on saying, as many did then and have done since, “If we give in, if we let them stop us, the terrorists have won.”
The same is true now, the difference being that today the terrorists are occupying the White House.
Other Thing.
(I’ve likely been through some of this before, but since I can’t remember when or what, why should anyone else?) To recap: I’m unsure how this began: Shakespeare and his actors? and learning lines; because with no Xerox machines, no laser printers, no cheap scripts available, I couldn’t figure out how they did it. Or even how they knew which lines to learn. Think about it: you’re fourteen, known as Robin, your voice not yet broken, apprenticed to one of the members of the Company of nine that includes playwright/actor Will, and you’re told one day you’ll be playing Juliet, one of the leads in an upcoming production, so as soon as the script’s complete you better get cracking. Yes, but cracking how?
Once the play was complete the manuscript was sent to copyists to be taken apart so that sets of pages could be made, one set for each role, Romeo, Tybalt; perhaps, to save paper, doubling or tripling the smaller parts, that would have been performed by one of the supporting actors changing hats, Escalus, Abram, Lady Montague.
You’re given your pages by the copyist and you set about memorizing the lines—but that’s assuming the actors could read. Seems unlikely for all of them. Those who did might well use a technique similar to the one I used to use when I was learning a part, repeating it line by line, slowly running a #10 envelope laterally down the page to reveal the text, picking up speed as more was remembered, till I came to know the whole part. Pro tip: poetry is easier to memorize than prose, rhythm and rhyme are your friends. Was this the useful function of poetry in a non-writing society? As an aid to memory?
The pages you received, the ‘sides’, would be what you said plus a line or two before to give the cue and a line or two after for the lead-out. Till the ‘70s when cheap and easily made copies became ubiquitous, this same technique was used in summer stock here in the States; as if a hand-on from the Early Modern theater to our own. What about the Company’s men, how aware were they of other periods? Did they stop to think how some ancient actor memorized Orestes, or Hecuba? How many of the Greek plays were known by them? Did the Company’s men wonder how those early dramatists wrote such stuff without their modern conveniences; quills (I think of Will’s cramped hand; of him shaking out the stiffness, holding it to a fire to unfreeze it, callouses on the inside of his index and middle fingers), candlelight, paper, ink and tobacco. Before stages and costumes, before scenes for two or more, how did their predecessors manage? Did they consider how it might have been when it was just one guy with a lyre singing—or was it chanting or declaiming, just how was it sung, if that’s the word we’re using? Because if we’re now thinking of one man alone in a darkened room, lamplight flickering, a solo voice addressing a crowd of shadowy onlookers, if we’re talking about Homer single-handedly bringing the tale of Troy to life… how the hell did he do it?
I guess I knew the Iliad and Odyssey had been composed orally, that unlike Shakespeare’s plays which, behind the spoken words, often show the formality of a written text—Juliet’s first meeting with Romeo, for instance, is expressed in a formal sonnet of fourteen lines, three quatrains, If I profane with my unworthiest hand… etc, the lovers taking turns, one quatrain each, then one they share, ending with a couplet divided between them (Juliet later, as they share a cigarette, ‘You had me at unworthiest’.). In such a way, the playwright dramatized the entangling of their thoughts and emotions—but Homer was making it up as he went along. Or did he? If this idea of oral composition, by the beginning of the 20th century was widely accepted, the mechanics of it remained mysterious, till, in the 1920s, the American scholar Milman Parry showed how not only Homer, but also how contemporary Serbian and Yugoslavian singers—guslans—as well as African and Asian poets—were continuing the ancient traditions, singing from memory their own epics of warriors and kings. Parry showed how they used a framework of repetition and formulaic phrases built around the story, to perform what would have been, when they were on form and the audience receptive, something spontaneous, improvised around themes like jazz.
At some point Homer must have come to understand that he wasn’t getting any younger and that the only way to save his work—maybe leave something his children could use to earn a living while continuing the tradition—was to make use of the newfangled technique of writing. To get someone, one of the new scribes, to record his words in a series of what must have been intense sessions, the poet bringing all he knew, all he remembered, all he was creating fresh in the moment, ready to be accessed when he was no more, in time to come, some time, time without reckoning, bridging the unimaginable gulf of time to us. As he sang the poem for posterity did it become for him a dead thing? No longer his voice alone in the dark it was now something living outside him. Rage—Goddess, sing of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles… The invocation is there on the page, in Robert Fagles’ translation, the goddess peering over your shoulder as you read, impatient for you to turn the page.
I’ve been reading a lot, mostly, though not entirely, about and by Athenians of the Archaic and Classical eras, reading the history and literature of those humans then alive, who thought and made speeches like us, bought clothes and dishes, ate dinner, argued about politics, went to the theater, and worried about the world going to hell. They lived through plague and war and did a lot of reckless crazy stuff, but also a lot of wonderful things, those once-alive men and women whose achievements and blunders have shaped the way we think and live today.
In our time together, Vivian and I shared nine dogs. When the last of them died, ending my last living connection with a shared past, facing a solo future I talked about making a trip to where so much happened that I’d been reading about, the epicenter of my imagination. A much-loved niece, a woman with a great capacity for putting stuff in its place, to jolt me into action, put me in touch with a travel agent. Suddenly shit got real: six weeks traveling around the mainland and the Peloponnese, totally Homer, with a large-ish nod to Plato, plus some stops to see present-day Greece. A friend asked, Aren’t you afraid you’ll be disappointed? Oh god, I hope so! was my reply; like Socrates’ unknown unknowns there’s so much I can’t even guess at. For example, I was shocked to see traffic-jams in Thessaloniki on my iPad; I’d been unconsciously expecting what? ox-carts? I’ll stop at only one island, in the western, Ionian Sea; Ithaca, home of Odysseus, man of many wiles.
After it had all been planned there was the election, and I came pretty close to calling it off because was now the time to be sinking a big chunk of change into a trip to my own personal Neverland? But, given my age—I’m seventy-five, seventy-six come July—if I don’t do it now, if I don’t climb Olympus while I’m still able (a nine hour excursion, with a guide), when will I climb it? Also, when is it ever the right time? So I’m learning Greek. Γεια σου! I’ll be in Athens; I’ll walk the Sacred Way at Delphi; stop by Chaeronea to salute my guys, three hundred men, the Sacred Band of Thebes, a hundred and fifty couples, men who loved each other to the literal death as they faced the Macedonian army under another bully, Phillip II; Sparta, Corinth; Nafplio to spend time at Mycenae and Tyrins, Argonauts Assemble!; Pylos, Thebes, Marathon…
Small matters, but by doing something now that would have been impossible in my past life, I hope to find in Greece my own personal freedom.
The weight of the present disaster, one that gets heavier by the day as threats pile up, each more humiliating, more disgusting, more dangerous than the last, can so easily crush our belief in the worth, the value of small things, the importance of small acts of independence, personal ambitions, loving kindness. Almost as if that’s the goal of the current cast of mountebanks, liars, and thieves. The Stoic stance of dismissing what can’t be personally altered can seem like sticking your head in the sand. Is that particular school of thought most popular in times of tyranny? Was that how Seneca tried to avoid dealing with his own feelings of responsibility for having helped to create Nero? Then I read in James Davidson’s absorbing book on Greek eros, the structures of romantic friendship and love between men, The Greeks and Greek Love…
Some say there’s nothing lovelier to look at on earth’s dark face than a division of cavalry, or an army, or a fleet, but I say lovelier than anything else is what the heart desires. It is perfectly easy for everyone to understand what I mean, for Helen, whose beauty far surpassed everyone, left her perfectly good husband and took a boat for Troy, her child, her dear parents, even, not crossing her mind; she was led astray by […] lightly […] which reminds me of Anactoria who isn’t here. Her charming way of walking, her bright flashing face, not rows of Lydian chariots, not armed infantry, is what I’d like to see. (Fragment 16)
Almost all of Sappho’s large body of work has been lost, leaving only one poem complete, the rest being fragments like this one, discovered in the early years of the 20th century. Small things; she compares the weight of affairs of state with the intangibles of her beloved’s presence, which got me thinking of Homer dragging his ass around the islands—being on tour is not much fun—so that rich men could be rude to him as they pretended interest in his art—if today’s rich men are anything to go by—as the poet plotted how to make his art immortal.
We notice: automatically, all the time. We look, taste, touch, smell, think, and love. That’s what it means to be alive. What an artist does is to fix those small moments in time so we can hold on to that glance, that phrase, that taste, those ideas that would otherwise be lost to the avalanche of time. Ignoring affairs of state, Sappho draws our attention to her beloved’s grace, holding that moment forever: or till we lose interest, trash the book, put the picture in the attic, knock over the statue—there go the arms!—forget the tune. But whether through luck or design, some of it lasts. Who were her tyrants? What were the names of those deathless masters of creation who called the shots on Lesbos? They’ve gone, the great ones, the rich powerful men, and there she is, in her work, and through her work we catch a glimpse of her beloved Anactoria, and like the poet, smile with pleasure at her fleeting charm.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? he asked, noting that rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and that summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Well he wasn’t wrong, he was rarely wrong about stuff like that, and whoever it was inspired that sonnet, that person unknown who caught his fancy, remains with us because of Will’s infatuation: that’s one way to read it. Unless he was writing it for pay when plague closed the Playhouse yet again and he needed the money: that’s another.
The atmosphere of the sonnet is a garden in early summer, scented, leafy, the air warmed by a gentle sun one afternoon five hundred years ago. Sappho’s lines bring us to look across another garden more than three thousand years ago, to where her love is smiling somewhat tremulously, perhaps anticipating the night to come when they can be together.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Well, yes, so it does. For now. Is this any consolation? I don’t know. I have no answers. Whatever we expect it’ll probably be worse. I only know I’m going there in May to see for myself.