Μῆνιν as the first word of Western Civilization?

In the Fall of 1979, I entered UNC-Chapel Hill as a freshman. My first class was in Greek and was, appropriately enough, the study of the Iliad taught by the wonderful and learned professor H. Kenneth Snipes. There I was on the first day of college reading what was arguably the first line of the first work of all Western literature written by the oldest and deadest of famous white men. Last night I pulled from my shelf that same Greek textbook of the Iliad prompted by an upcoming study of it in English with my Great Books classmates from the Fall of 1980. 

The first word of that first line is "Μῆνιν" and the lines proceeds famously with "ἄειδε, θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος." What a start! The key to the poem's meanin' may lie in its "μῆνιν." If so, what is its best translation? 

Most translators have rendered "μῆνιν" as "anger" or "wrath." The usage of wrath has been adopted by the greatest of all translators, Alexander Pope, in recognition of the usage of "μῆνιν" more frequently by the gods and goddesses. "Μῆνιν" is clearly not a normal anger and, as the poet's story unfolds, we see how abnormal the anger is. As I meditated on "μῆνιν," two events from my own life came to mind.

When I first moved to my home, the neighborhood was pretty rundown and crime was noticeable. One night, I heard the sound of my ancient Suburban starting. I jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs and out of my house. There I saw three men with my "Hellen" (ironically for the discussion here, her name) and went, well, crazy. I don't know the right words to describe how I ran straight at the group of men. Two of them fled immediately to their own truck, but the third tried to drive off in MY vehicle. However, barefoot and in my boxer shorts, I gave pursuit, successfully grabbed the luggage rack and hung on while shouting the driver what I was going to do to him. He swerved to lose me, went off the road, hit a stop sign and then swerved again. This time I lost hold of the luggage rack, but with a quick four or five sprints, I reattached myself. As I shouted through the driver side window while hanging with one hand and pounding with the other, he looked at me with a mixture of astonishment and fear. We went another couple of blocks before he crashed Hellen into a bridge and jumped out the passenger side. I ran after him, but slipped because the soles of my feet were covered with blood. The value of my suburban? Maybe $5,000. What was that?

My children were crying when the police dropped me back at the house. We often discussed my response. While it was clearly "crazy," it was a certain kind of crazy. My response had been connected with a deep sense of injustice, of losing something of "mine." I had personalized everything - it was "Hellen," and it was in my neighborhood and it was people I could see. In my response, I did not think about my safety, the value of the car or the challenges of the thieves. The intersection of indignation and anger and justice was rooted viscerally - much like I see in David Attenborough videos of animals protecting their domain. "Wrath" or "anger" don't describe the moment nor even the English cognate "manic", but "μῆνιν" somehow fits my situation as well as the story of Achilles.

Later I had another similar experience. One night I recognized that my briefcase had been stolen while some workers had been at my house. I called the workers and got a description. The following day after going to the bank to close my account, I came home to see a person of a similar description walking on the street. I went up to this powerfully built man and told him that he stole my suitcase. When he denied it, I opened my flip phone and told him to explain it to the police. With that he took off running and I took off after him. After about three blocks of running, he looked back and stopped. He told me, "you must be a warrior for Jesus." I told him that I just wanted my briefcase back. He said that he knew who stole it. We went back to my Suburban (somethings never change!) and drove over to a housing project. We went into an apartment where about six men were sitting in the living room. I announced "I don't want any trouble, I just came here to get my briefcase" and, incredibly, one of the men got up, went to a bedroom and retrieved it. 

Again, the elements are the same as the prior experience, but the comment "a warrior for Jesus" highlights the profundity of the conviction. The clarity of this conviction is what characterizes "μῆνιν." This situation was not "anger", not "wrath," not "mania" but something deeply religious, something deep in my value system. It felt like a society that permits this is not a society and I was a piece of that societal fabric. It's this sense of "μῆνιν" that I believe defines the Iliad, defines those two experiences of mine, but continues to defy translation beyond "a certain kind of crazy." What is a better way to define Western civilization?

Architecture as Expression

For high school, I attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. As a result of reacquainting with some of my classmates, I pulled out some histories of the school. Prior to its current alumni-run non-profit status, The Hill was family-owned and family-run for three generations of the Meigs family. Each generation of family leadership was distinctive in outlook, personality and architectural expression.

Rev. Matthew Meigs was the founder and was not much of a fan of overdoing things. The Reverend founded the school in 1851 with 25 students and when he turned leadership of the school over to his son in 1876, the school still had 25 students. The buildings he built were family residences that we simply expanded for school purposes. 

In contrast, his son, Dr. John Meigs, called "Professor" by many, took a school with 25 students and within 25 years had multiplied enrollment nearly by ten to 228 students and by the time of his untimely death in 1911 at age 62, the school had an enrollment of 348 boys. This rapid leadership created financial strains and Professor responded by issuing stock to a small group of investors (family and faculty) as well as getting alumni support. The buildings he constructed were beautiful in the sense of charming and intimate and are epitomized by the chapel:

After his death, the family used an interim headmaster while Dr. John Meig's son Dwight was readied for leadership which he assumed in 1914. Dwight had been a scholar at The Hill, Yale and Oxford. Unlike the term "Professor" used for his father, Dwight was called the "King" to indicate his autocratic manner. While he did not dramatically expand the student enrollment, he did expand the faculty and the buildings - a combination that had dire financial results and forced him to sell the school to the alumni in 1921. Sadly, he committed suicide a few years later leaving behind a beautifully-written, but heart-breaking letter. Yet the buildings he had constructed moved me more than any other.

So profound was that impact that when I left school, I wrote of my first day "Out of the silent, soft grey air, I walked into Memorial Hall, a dark, dank hall with leaded glass windows, dark Gothic wood carvings and ancient tapestries barely visible. It was morning, and as I stood still on the wet flagstone floor, I could faintly make out the names of the men who had died, names which were painted in gold under the small Gothic arches delicately carved." Memorial Hall was initially priced at $80,000, but ultimately cost $400,000. For scale, with inflation and building costs, roughly $16 million and $80 million in today's dollars and pictured here:

The King's biggest project cost him his position and, ultimately perhaps, his life. But in his buildings, I found an inspiration embedded: that life, its thoughts and actions, is not about charm and warmth, but is an eternal presence of beauty and austerity infused with a melancholic awareness of its evanescence.  

The buildings constructed since the King's death have been functional and useful, but not evocative or moving. The expression of private ownership has given way to public functionality. Yet the King's other great work, the dining room, not only carries as the soul of the school, but is also featured on the cover of a book titled "Old School" by a well-known Hill School alum, Tobias Wolff. Even the dining room chairs purchased in 1914 have not been replaced. As they say, "the value is remembered long after the price is forgotten."

Meditation as Brain Damage?

I have accumulated enough hours meditating on a free app called Insight Timer to be considered an expert. But a sufficient number of those hours have been spent snoozing, so the adjective "expert" is unwarranted. I might use the term "avid fan" and have described the effect as "restoring my ability to be fully present by bringing balance to my capabilities." Part of this journey is to become meditatively silent, to embrace being "an ant on a log floating down the river." A recent article on brain damage intrigued me.

Apparently there is a syndrome called Auto-Activation Deficit (AAD). With AAD, a person is absolutely unresponsive to any interior motivation and, in fact, may be devoid of these motivations. The person is present with a "blank mental state." This nirvana sounding state is the result of brain damage to the basal ganglia - a region in the base of the brain which deals with motor activity. The unusual part of AAD is that when stimulated by another person, the "damaged" individual is responsive and appropriate in behavior.

The parallels to an experience of achieving some meditative state is intriguing. In meditation, I experience an awareness of self that differentiates the clamoring of my ego state from an observing self. As I situate within the observing self, I am not motivated internally but am responsive to others - such as a phone call or a knock on the door. AAD seems to indicate that part of meditations powerful effects occur within the basal ganglia, while I would have assumed much more of the impact was within the prefrontal cortex.

Help From Hillel the Elder

Recently a close friend of mine has been studying a course in which personal experiences and resulting value shifts are translated into the public sphere with words (or narratives) and actions. The course framework is based on a famous quote of Hillel the Elder (sometimes anachronistically known as "Rabbi Hillel") - "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being only for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?"

The ingenious concept of this course is to process transformative moments of ones development, such as a traumatic childhood experience, into a fully engaged public life. Applying the course's framework to myself, I discovered that I had encapsulated a couple of childhood traumas in such a way as to highlight my own sense of agency. I presume this was to offset a sense of helplessness. However this encapsulation was faulty and needed to be reworked.

My own traumas had created two powerful modes which I will call Captain Justice and Captain WinLove that consistently interrupted my natural process. While these two modes created tremendous skills, they inevitably brought the attendant miseries of fantastical thinking. To rework them, I focused on the causal experiences and re-experienced them as Not My Fight and I'm Good.

None of this is going to make me Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr, but as Rabbi Zusya told his students on his deathbed, "in the coming world, they will not ask me, 'why were you not Moses?' instead, they will ask, 'why were you not Zusya?'" If I can heal the wounds driving unnatural trajectories, then I have a better chance of being me.