Fate: Bound By What We Don't Want To See

Our Great Books Redux rolled through Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus. John McGowan is taking us through the "trilogy" in the order of writing - starting with Antigone and followed by these two. Our discussion was animated and insightful but foundered on the concept of fate.

The Greeks were clear that there was such a thing as fate, but our modern mind of increased powers denies the concept - the fundamentally human and, to my way of thinking, primary theme of the Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus works. Dr. McGowan outlined two approaches to these works - a conservative one and a radical one. 

In the conservative view, Oedipus is not a hero but an atheist who attempts to fight his fate and thus the gods. In the radical view, Oedipus is a hero as he attempts to address the huge gap between what is divinely ordained and the humanly acceptable. In these terms, I find myself a radiservative - with elements of both views.

Fate is fate. We can will what we want, but we can't we will what we will. Fate gives rise to a notion of powerlessness and that seems fatalistic. Yet, accepting powerlessness as limitation is the basis of sanity as opposed to the insanity of Greek-termed hubris. Oedipus was reactive as he heard his fate and moved through three of the four Fs: flight (from "home"), fight (killing his father), f (with his mother). All of these Fs assist in removing conscious attention from reality. But the body knows.

Oedipus's name is rooted in a Greek cognate that "he knows something." Oedipus exhibits a long-term "willful blindness" (as one of the classmates perfectly put it) that is how we function in today's world - making these plays as relevant as ever. In twelve step programs, the essential power given to the recovering person is "in-sight" - the ability to see her or his role in life. Oedipus's journey is one of accepting his fate and moving to surrender. His surrender is how that huge gap between what is divinely ordained and humanly possible is closed and, in that, a model for all of us.

Embracing the idea of fate, then, is critical to accept to gain the fullness of the play's meaning. Incest and parricide are introduced to simply elevate the terms of the acceptance of fate. Great fates require no surrender. In surrender is power and Oedipus's awful fate requires great surrender - which he ultimately achieves through the peer support of Theseus. 

We, too, live in a world of fate but our "willful blindness" makes that of Oedipus look puny. While we exhibit enormous individual latitude, the dynamics of probability indicate on a law of large numbers, we continue to head inexorably towards our individual and collective fates. Acceptance of that sets our feet on solid ground and builds towards the fifth F: freedom.

It's All Power, All the Time: Reality

Given that power is primary and occurs within the context of a unity, the maximization of power is reality - that elusive presence clouded by our perspective and our imagination. Sadly one of the most recurring patterns to minimize power is to engage in "efforting."

I came across "efforting" when I was dropping my son off at Princeton University for a Ph.D in Math. I had some free time so I took a yoga class at the local Y. As we were doing various poses, the teacher came over to me to get me to stop "efforting." I thought she was nuts and went ahead with my "efforting."

Of course I did. I had been "efforting" my whole life. What the yoga teacher pointed out was a valuable insight and was similar to my running coach who advised me to keep breathing through weight training exercises. To move my breath or prana smoothly or efficiently meant that I needed to be positioned in such way that I could maintain my pose for a long period. 

Basically we all recognize how quickly we tire if we hold our arms out to the side even with little or no weight. The reason is that I don't have any ground support. I have to be "efforting" the whole time. However, if I can rest my arms on some ground supports, I still get the benefits of extending stretch but without the tension introduced by "efforting." "Efforting" takes away power in order to express power. 

The concept of asana in yoga is designed to offset this efforting. An asana is a pose of being that allows for smooth breathing as well as some expression of stretch or movement. In order for the asana to be maximally effective, I try to find the grounding or structural support. Prior to this emphasis on grounding, my yoga movements were labor intensive and athletic endeavors. The healing properties of yoga eluded me.

In the same way as this occurs physically, my "efforting" can show up mentally. To maximize power in the mental area relies on what Spinoza causes adequate ideas. Basically, our inadequate ideas are those configured by our imagination. These "efforting" structures of the mind rely on our continued reiteration to make them "real." Adequate ideas, on the other hand, need little support because they are grounded properly.

Yet like my tendency to be tense all over when I simply flex my toes, my habits of mind to connect to a series of imaginations when I engage in new ideation. The most power series of imaginations are those which become purpose-driven. Like "efforting," purpose-driven patterns indicate that the power is at the end of the rainbow when in fact it lies at the beginning. 

It's all Power, All the Time: Unity as Breath

The primacy of power that I described in an earlier post combined with its bad general reputation is not good for clarity of thought. If fundamental truths are ignored, elaborate systems are contrived to provide work arounds to avoid the truth. 

At one point, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous trumpets "lack of power is our dilemma." Having tried every self-help approach, the authors of the Big Book finally conceded that lack of power was the primary issue so that led to a search for the necessary power "to restore sanity."

If power is primary, then the primary principle of power is unity. The reason love songs dominate musical charts is because the natural pattern of love is unity. As two become one, so power is increased. But right there is how we avoid power as primary. It sounds callous to say they are together for power unless you are a friend of mine who claims, "she married me for my body, but keeps me for my money."

But unity starts at home. Spinoza describes singular things as those which have complex parts but all express as one effect - elegantly connecting unity to power. The word yoga comes from the sanskrit word "yuj" for unity or oneness. (Give me another year of Covid and sanskrit will be mine!) The emphasis of yoga is to establish an internal unity so that the body functions as a whole as if a well-directed orchestra, rather than fighting within itself through internal divisions of body and mind as a dissonant experience. What's yoga's secret to this?

The essence of yoga is breathing rooted in the word prana as "breath-spirit." In breathing the body is unified. Underlying this concept is the term spiritual which is just Latin for breath. In the Big Book, the authors are looking for a spiritual solution. Here breath is connected to unity is connected to power. Breathing is the fundamental way that we experience unity which brings power. But its regularity and continuity hides its characteristics.

The first time I became aware of breathing as an act was when I was working out with a personal trainer. She assured me that holding my breath while I bench pressed weights was not helpful. That struck me. Why was I doing that counterproductive activity? It's simply that I perceived that by shutting down all activities except for the bench press would lead to a better outcome. But it doesn't; unity always outperforms division.

Breathing is all important. Longer out breaths drive a slowdown in a cooling of the unity and shorter out breaths drive a ramp up in a heating of the unity. Pranayama is a set of breath exercises that are not only designed to enhance unity but express that unity in different ways.

It's All Power, All the Time

Recently I had a discussion about Kanye's interview with David Letterman concerning Kanye's "maximum expression of self" concept. I shared that it was rooted in power. That provoked some pushback because power has a bad connotation - an unfortunate aspect of the current times.

Power is what we are after. It's a manifestation of the reactive and diminished thoughtfulness of today's environment that power is bad but empowerment is good; that police are bad, but policing is good. If empowerment does not lead to more power, then what does the word mean? If more power is not good, how can empowerment be good? (Of course, empowerment does indicate a connection and a larger sense of self. But that is the essence of power - two are always more powerful than one.)

In a parallel way, I noticed that Oedipus Tyrannos is the name of Sophocle's play. Tyrannos translates to the English cognate of "tyrant." But in fact the Greek meaning of the word did not connote abuse or cruelty as it does for us today. Instead, it simply indicated someone that did not gain rule through heredity - more of the "self-made person" idea.

In Spinoza's framework, the Latin language has two words for power: potentia and potestas. Potentia is relatable to its English cognate of potential as virtual power or energy. It's similar to an untapped resource. Of course that sense of power is always good and there is an aspect in which empowerment is about resourcing those who lack resources. 

But potestas as in manifest power is what's gotten the bad name. My high school English teacher had an aversion to potestas when he quoted, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In some ways, this journey of the word tyrannos from "self-made ruler" to "cruel and abusive ruler." The increased focus on historical misuses of power has similarly given power as potestas a bad name. There is some inevitability here.

To have "maximum expression of self" means that one expands limits. In most situations, this maximization of self-expression comes at a cost to someone or something else. There are rare situations, like exercise or meditation, which don't compete for limited resources. But in addition to an attempt to expand self-expression, there is an attempt to at least maintain power. This, too, is inevitably a failure as attempts to maintain power become attempts to thwart the emerging power of others (by say innovation or competition).

In the corporate world there is always a journey from doing things for the customer to doing things to the customer. This is not sinister, but is a manifestation of the same power dynamic. At some initial period, a corporation expresses potentia and emerge to meet an unmet need. For example, look at Google's quick and powerful emergence. However, once that emergence has occurred, potestas is present. Now the phase of doing to the customers emerges in attempts to maintain and expand that power. 

Jeff Bezos identified this as he attempted to focus on Amazon always considering his business on Day 1. On Day 1 for any business, the mission is clear - delight the customer by exceeding expectations. By making the virtual idea of pleasing others a reality of exceeding expectations, potentia is shaped beautifully into potestas.

This is a natural cycle for individuals as well as corporations. Calling power a bad thing is inaccurate and inevitably leads to blind spots in self-management and social policy. Instead, accepting as reality the dynamics of power leads to frameworks which facilitate power in an organic cycles of change. As Spinoza posits, "reality and perfection are the same thing."

Philosopher Kanye West

Recently I watched an interview of Kanye West by David Letterman. I had anticipated that the insightful David Letterman would reveal Kanye to be the mad man of his reputation. Letterman certainly attempted to establish that. But by the end of the interview, the positions were exactly reversed for me. 

The crux of my reversal was Kanye's view that we are all about maximal expression of self. This position is the basis for his musical journeys and his clothing lines. This sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but always Kanye approach is also the basis for his controversial support of Donald Trump. While not endorsing Trump's articulations, he strongly supports Trump's attempt to articulate his views.

Since freedom for maximal expression of self has always conflicted with an obligation towards the feelings and beliefs of others, why has this topic turned into such an issue? It seems to me neither a higher level of sensitivities or in-sensitivities is to blame. That mistakes effect for cause. Instead, the morphing from the limited range of the power of advertising soundbites into the limitless bounds of memes through the internet turns up crazy for all involved.

This emphasis on maximal expression of self struck me as Spinozist and sane. Spinoza argues for a concept of conatus which defines our essence as an attempt to perservere in one's self. Spinoza's position put him as an early advocate of free speech and democracy. Yet conatus is most easily viewed physically, or as Spinoza puts it, within the attribute of extending. For Spinoza, every mode with an aspect of extending also has an aspect of thinking. Kanye's concept of maximal expression of self is the interior and thinking aspect of conatus. 

This maximal expression of self seems better than "the pursuit of happiness" structured into our nation's founding document. Certainly "life" is the physical notion necessary to individual development and "liberty" is the contextual importance. But liberty spent in the pursuit of happiness is poorly connected to real self. Better stated, liberty in the pursuit of maximal expression of self is rooted in the unique characteristics of an individual.

David Letterman was unable or unwilling to hone in on Kanye's point. Letterman appeared to approach the interview with preconceptions designed to caricature the interviewee. Kanye was open and honest about his struggles with mental health, describing a sprained brain syndrome that caused him to tend to ramp up. But Kanye revealed that the madness did not lie within Kanye, but within the collective crowd, included Letterman, obsessed with defining self by not offending others.

Initial Thoughts on Antigone: Love Vs. Respect

Our Great Books Round Two class is now working through Sophocles' play Antigone. The basic outline of the work pits the rules of a ruler named Creon against the personal conscience of a grieving sister named Antigone. Bearing the mark of a great work, its themes are universal but as nuanced as individuals.

Prior to reading the work, I knew that Creon was considered a "bad guy," a kind of prototypical dictator. However, when I read his comments and thoughts, my sympathies went out to him. Thebes, the city over which he rules, had just gone through a terrible war between two brothers competing for rule of the city. In the pivotal battle, both brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices die, but Eteocles went down defending the city while Polyneices led foreign forces in an attempt to conquer and raze the city. As a result, Creon honored Eteocles and attempted to dishonor Polyneices by not burying him.

Creon makes a legitimate point - to honor Polyneices would have been to dishonor everyone who had battled to save the city. However, Creon misses the all-important distinction between respecting someone's achievements as either good or evil versus someone's participation as a human being. It is an easy thing to miss as I did it for years.

In my family of origin, achievements were lauded. My parents were ambitious as they both received college educations at a time and place in which the majority did not. They praised achievement and punished sloth. Such training was perfectly sound for me. However I missed one crucial distinction in this training: praise does not equal love. Praise and respect are earnable, but love is not. Praise and respect are extrinsic, but love is intrinsic. For most of my life, I lumped praise and respect into the same basket as love. Creon makes the same mistake.

When Creon wishes to dishonor Polyneices, he crosses the line from extrinsic action to intrinsic. It would not have been a problem, for example, to strip him of money, name recognition or honorary degrees. But when Creon denied Polyneices a burial, Creon denied him an intrinsic form of love that humans cannot lose no matter what their extrinsic actions. This can be a bitter pill to swallow when the extrinsic actions have been horrendous, as they were in the case of Polyneices.

Polyneices's sister Antigone rebels and attempts to bury Polyneices and incurs punishment for violating Creon's rules. I found Antigone's speech to Creon to be of the same smug and self-righteous tone that I have found at different times in my life. Yet despite her tone, she was correct. Creon was wrong in the same way that I had been by withholding love from myself and others which is intrinsically deserved. And like Creon, the consequences of missing such a distinction have been deeply painful

Oresteia Thoughts

Having finished the Iliad, our Great Books class has moved on to the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus. Given a different personal history than many of my classmates, I find it useful to clarify my view of the work prior to the class discussion. 

The Oresteia is a work about family in the context of society. I don't view the work as primarily about gender or race although it seems as if every book is now read through those lenses. "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does that make it sexist or racist?" seems like a poor way to go through life. I believe that the work attempts to look at the relative power of intrafamily loyalties and how they function.  

While boating on a lake in Buffalo, NY when I was engaged to be married, my good friend Monsignor Henry Gugino asked me, "If your wife and your child both fell overboard and you had one life preserver to save just one, who would you throw it to?" I thought for a moment and answered, "my child." He told me that was the wrong answer. He informed me that the marriage bond was more important than the parental bond. 

Since I had not yet experienced the joys of a teen child, I argued that any parent would want to save the child. He argued back that we could always make more children. Further, he made an argument that as marrieds, we were united as one person and should have each other's back. I never really felt like that worked for me and that may have identified me as divorce-bound. For me, The Oresteia presents a similar problem.

First of all, there are three infidelities involved. #1 is background with Thyestes having an affair with his brother Atreus's wife. #2 is also background with Paris having an affair with Menelaus's (Atreus's son) wife. #3 is in the first part of the Oresteia with Aegisthus (Thyestes's son) having an affair with Agamemnon's (also Atreus's son). One takeaway is that if the men in the Atreus family were adequate lovers, then everyone would've been much better off. But they weren't and very different forms of hell break loose in response to infidelities #1, #2 and #3.

Hell form #1 is also background as Atreus calls his brother Thyestes back from exile to a dinner of reconciliation where he serves Thyestes his children as part of the meal. The marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. Hell form #2A is background as Agamemnon carries out a war to retrieve his brother's wife and sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia to do so. Again the marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. Hell form #2B is core to the second part of the Oresteia as Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra kills her husband when he returns home. Here the parental bond violation sets up the marriage bond violation. Hell form #3 is core to the third part of the Oresteia as Agamemnon's son Orestes kills Aegisthus and his own mother Clytemnestra. Again the marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. 

Hell form #1 seems completely insane. Hell form #2A seems unnecessary in terms of the child sacrifice for setting sail in what was going to be a long war anyway. But the real contrast of the Oresteia is hell form #2B versus hell form #3. Which is worse: to be a parent that kills a fellow parent for killing a child or to be a child that kills a parent for killing a fellow parent? The first structure places the parental bond above the marriage bond while the second places the marriage bond above the parental bond.

The first word of the work, θεους, sets up the divinities as the expressive forces at work. The older generation of divinities supported reproductive power, no different than the animal kingdom. These divinities supported condemnation of Orestes for placing marriage bond above parental bond. However, the newer generation of divinities were more concerned with human communal arrangements of peace and prioritized the communal power of marriage. These divinities supported Orestes and the work ends as a celebration of unity of peace.

I understand this concept and those words from Msgr. Gugino, but my heart still is unmoved and I feel 100% connected to Clytemnestra. Those old divinities still seem alive and well in me.

Mηνιν - the Iliad and stages of Grief

As some earlier posts reflect, I have been going through a review of the Iliad with classmates from 40 years ago. My focus has been on μηνιν, a Greek work that depicts a certain sense of rage or fury that is characteristic of Achilles and the first word of the poem.

Since looking at personal experiences of such rage, I have come to the conclusion that "outrage" is the correct translation. Next I spent time reviewing the arc or impact that this "outrage" had an Achilles. My classmates, more sensitive to the pain of others, have viewed his "outrage" as "murderous, pornographic and obscene." In some ways, I view my lack of sharing this view as personal insensitivity and in other ways, I continue to view that they have missed the point of the theater.

Achilles experiences "outrage" due to an injured sense of personhood by Agamemnon. He's being, in effect, called a nothing. The shock and then anger seems to follow the stages outlined by Kubler-Ross in grief. To me, grief is a process of accepting reality. As the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous declares, "acceptance is the answer to all my problems." Achilles' outrage leads him into an existential cocooning in which I believe he explores the question we all explore - what's is all about? and, as always, the endpoint of grief is clouded - what is it he is accepting?

In the midst of this exploration, he is approached by Agamemnon's people. This is the "bargaining" stage of grief. Like most bargaining stages, there is no progress. Achilles cannot recover the sense of meaning that he experienced before his personal affront by Agamemnon. Having been told (in his mind) that he is a nothing, Agamemnon's entreaties do not restore him to somethingness. The restoration would only confirm Agamemnon as the something and Achilles as nothing. 

Then his beloved Patroclus is killed wearing his armor. Of course it is significant that they are lovers. Patroclus is very much one with Achilles as much as contemporary marriage vows where two become one. Patroclus, though, represents his non-injured self. When Patroclus dies, that injured part, that injured self-state dies and receives a reincarnation in the form of Hector wearing Achilles' armor. The killing of Hector drives Achilles into a sadness or depression. Having been told he is nothing, that life has no meaning, he witnesses that nothingness.

To deal with this sadness, Achilles begin to go into a repetition compulsion. Repetition compulsion is driven by an underlying belief that if you do the same thing over and over again, you can get a different result. Everyday Achilles drags Hectors dead body around the camp three times. What finally knocks Achilles out of this sadness phase is the arrival of Priam for Hector's dead body. The power of Priam's kissing Achilles hands moves Achilles into the final phase of acceptance of life on life's terms. Not Achilles' terms. He becomes a part of a larger whole. Herein is the transformation from the fantasy of individual self to the reality of connected self. After that, Achilles expresses his connectedness with love and concern for those around him in the care of Priam and presiding over the games.

Civil vs. Polite

In English usage, the connotations of civil are different than polite or political. The word civil comes from the Latin word civis, meaning "citizen" and is related to the Latin word civitas, meaning "state." The words political and polite come from the Greek word πολις or polis, meaning "city-state." A recent discussion forced me to reflect on the differences.

Clearly, we intuitively prefer someone to be civil rather than polite. Polite and political both indicate a superficial action designed to create an external environment which may not reflect an interior state. On the other hand, civil and civilization indicate a profound sense of quality and even reasonableness in which the exterior and interior states are harmonized. What could be the linguistic roots for such difference given the similar origins of the word?

In our discussion, we explored different meanings of civil and got around to that civil behavior is one that seeks common ground. From this definition, I began to understand a possible reason for the development of different meanings. The Greek polis designated a "city-state" which carried its own environment, its own gods and culture. On the other hand, the Roman world was concerned about connectivity. A recent National Geographic article highlights the characteristics of roads as the defining feature. In fact, in the Roman's original 12 laws, rules of the road were one of this all-important list.

My take-away? Finding common ground and processing with compromise is the keystone for civilized behavior. We are all the center of our own universes and starting with that humble understand can lead to productive engagement. The recent environment of polite behavior which dismisses opinions not equally shared may have driven some of the recently unleashed divisiveness.

The Case Against Turning a Blind Eye

Recently I have been enhancing my study of the Iliad by watching Friday Night Lights (FNL). This series focuses on the dynamics of the "pre-state society" in a Texas high school which, of course, centers around  the "warrior culture" of football. A major departure from the Iliad is the role that infidelity plays. In the Iliad, the unfaithfulness of Helen sets up the whole story, but in FNL unfaithfulness plays a less fundamental role.

The star quarterback, Jason Street, is paralyzed early in the season. His long-term (since 8th grade) girlfriend, Lyla Garrity, is distraught and shows up strongly to help. However trouble looms as it becomes clear to Jason that he is not going to fully recover, while Lyla continues to see him getting better and getting back to a football career. It appears that he starts to feel like she is loving him not as him, but as a future NFL star. As a result of an explosive conversation to establish the reality of long-term paralysis, Lyla gets distraught and seeks comfort in the arms of Jason's best friend Tim Riggins. Tim, who has gone into a depressed state over a misplaced sense of responsibility for Jason's injury, has already broken up with his girlfriend Tyra.

The situation is difficult for all of these high schoolers who are encountering a challenge beyond the skills they have developed. Life does that. To stabilize, Lyla clearly engages in "triangling" (psychological term) or "cheating" (street term). I was sympathetic to Lyla. She's lost; her anchor is gone. She had built her future with regard to schooling and career around Jason's prospective career. As she swirls out, she ends up in Tim's arms. I was also sympathetic to Tim because he was depressed and single (having broken up with Tyra) and, of course, Lyla is a knock out.

Jason didn't see it my way. At first he stays in denial but as he heals physically, he begins to heal emotionally and honors himself. Based on an intuition and a brief sighting of Tim and Lyla together, he punches Tim in the face and confronts him. Lyla breaks down and admits wrongdoing. Jason takes the difficult journey to go his own way. 

My instinct was for Jason to hold it together and to blame Lyla for not sticking to her story. But my instinct was wrong and is evidence of my own history. The "triangling" (still prefer to be non-judgmental here) by Lyla was because the relationship no longer really worked. Yes she loved Jason, but it's a big and possibly ridiculous ask of a high school girl to take on a life-long paraplegic. Her best avenue would have been to openly address it with Jason, but again, that's a huge ask for so much emotional maturity. The "triangling" worked to get Lyla out of what she didn't really want to be in and for that reason, I think her honesty was a good call. 

The key action was Jason honoring her triangling by leaving the relationship. In a similar situation, I would have (and have) just "sucked it up" and played "forgive and forget." Unfortunately that creates unprocessed trauma that simply blinds the intuitive self - the self that showed up in Jason's sense that all was not right and made the subsequent decisions. I don't view Lyla as a "slut" or worthy of shaming, but she was no longer a person for Jason to be in relationship with. A relationship needs to be based in safety and an emotional sense of being the top priority. 

So what about Tim? Again, in a similar situation, I would have (and have) taken advantage of such discord with various rationalizations. Tim lacks any kind of home life, so I don't judge him as a "piece of sh.." After all, we are all doing the best we can. But pity dishonors a person. The consequence of Tim's damaged home life is the reality that Tim lacks the ability to honor friendship. Jason's confrontation honors Tim and forces realistic self-appraisal. That recognition is ultimately in Tim's best interest.

Mηνιν Part 3; more thoughts on the Iliad

In a couple of prior posts, I have explored the importance of μηνιν, the word that opens the Iliad and describes the kind of rage that Achilles was experiencing. In my first post, I explored the existential feeling of this type of rage and provided some personal examples of moments when some seemingly trivial issue felt like the time to take a stand. In my second post, I proposed the movie of Dazed and Confused and Texas football as modern avatars for understanding the "pre-state" and "warrior society" that serve as the contexts for the Iliad.

The Iliad is primarily about the development of Achilles as a coming of age story (or bildungsroman as my daughter Brooke would say) where the word μηνιν sets up as the gauge of his spiritual journey. This view is not commonly held. The result is that readers often incorrectly think that the Iliad is about other areas that really serve as stage props, such as Fate, the Gods and Goddesses, shields and spears and speech-making. What makes it difficult to see the Iliad as a coming of age story?

Coming of age stories generally have to do with adolescents. In adolescence, we make important first steps to differentiate our singular selves from family and society. The suddenly closed doors of teenagers is a sign of this personal cocooning as we dismember and remember our real selves. Lasting damage, showing up as people pleasing and cowardice, can occur when teens are deprived of this developmental phase. But adolescence is not the only period where we make significant steps to differentiate ourselves. Coming of age moments, like those of Job in the Bible, can occur at any time.

Yet there is a reason that we typically locate this process in adolescence - it is a period of heightened sensitivity. This heightened sensitivity characterizes Achilles and is the nuance of the word μηνιν. This sensitivity sets up the conflict between him and Agamemnon. Readers, and even scholars, view his μηνιν or "rage" as an example of how trivial things can have terrible consequences. This interpretation marginalizes a universal work of defining oneself into an archaic piece on morality and society. 

By viewing his "rage" as a case of "making a mountain out of a molehill," Achilles is seen as a "monster" or a "hero." His athletic, physical and military capacities become defining characteristics of the "monster" or "hero" rather than simply props to highlight the dynamism and sublimity of his personal and deeply human growth. The Iliad's things, people, Gods and Goddesses remain static, while Achilles undergoes significant change.  

The other narrative that plagues readers is that Homer has written an anti-war work. Such a reading simply does not work, but I think this is increasingly popular so as to suit current narratives and sensitivities. Over and over again, Homer gloriously outlines the thrill of the chase in war and the agony of war's injury and defeat with exquisitely beautiful natural similes. The Greeks, of which Homer was one, are repeatedly called "war-loving." In this framework, he is saying that for better or worse, this is what we do. We fight. We love. We die. Nature (no subjectivity) and the Gods and Goddess (no mortality) can't experience life like we do. To feel and to actually love the sensation of "kill or be killed" (give glory to the other or get it for yourself) sets up the sensation of what's at stake in becoming our fullest selves and in this sensation is the most sublime beauty. 

Emergence from Achilles' psychological "cocoon" occurs when Priam kisses Achilles hands. Achilles is affected with wonder and asks himself "Can he (Priam) be a God?" Achilles is overcome by the beauty and the power of an action so unnatural as for a father to kiss the hands that have murdered his own offspring. Achilles pays him the highest compliment, that Priam has "a heart of iron" - a description used repeatedly about Achilles. Achilles' deep admiration creates an ability to abide as Priam and Achilles weep together - Priam for his son and Achilles for his father and his lover Patroclus. Achilles heart fulls and suddenly shifts. It heals. Achilles moves fully into his own, culminating in them mirroring each other with an expansive love physical, emotional with spiritual with poignancy driven by its evanescence. And we all weep with them for the beauty and the pain of our mortal selves.

TGIF

I have a Latin calendar on my bulletin board next to my English calendar. (Of course...as David Ogilvy said, "cultivate eccentricities early because that way people are less likely to think you've gone gaga in old age.") In another clear example of gender inequality, the only female figure after which a day of the week is named on the Latin calendar is Veneris, the Day of Venus. Most Romance language speaking countries follow suit (except for Sardinia because of some exiled Jews - always causing problems! lol). But, while the female named days are in the vast minority, none of the other days of the week are deserving of an acronym. 

Friday, or Freitag in German countries, is also named after a female goddess - Frigg or Frigga (and you thought that was simply some euphemism for not saying the other "f" word). Frigg is the goddess wife of Odin and plays the same powerful yet seductive and tricky role that Hera does for Zeus. It seems likely that the day was named consistently for female divinities because it was the time for going home and restoring oneself. So, the next time you see TGIF, give a little shout out to gender equity and say Thank Goddess it's Friday.

Mῆνιν Part 2; More Thoughts On the Iliad

In an earlier post (here), I discussed the opening word of the Iliad and gave some relevant personal examples to indicate my initial sense of the word. But my thoughts are evolving. Last night, our class opened up a discussion of the first 12 books of the Iliad. Astutely led by John McGowan, the class engaged in a thoughtful discussion of the role of Achilles, of "honor," of women, of Fate (as algorithm!) and "hero" culture.

During class, I did not share my obsession with μῆνιν as I thought it risked a redirect from a fruitful collaborative discussion. Yet I continue to hold that the key to this work is getting that one word right. Dr. McGowan brought out context - that the Iliad depicted a "warrior culture" in a "prestate society." This resonated with me. Before class, I had held the movie "Dazed and Confused" to be the contemporary avatar of the Iliad. I could not better describe my Iowa public high school of the mid-70s than as a "warrior culture" in a "prestate society."

Football was the expression of a warrior culture in which the best were heroes, in which injuries were life changing moments to be told and retold and in which the women and fame went to the winners. Long after trophies were won and put into glass cases as prized possessions, stories were repeated about the heroes who had won them. While we lived in a "state," our high school society was "prestate" and a world of its own. 

When one of the class brought up the "raw authenticity of emotions," it moved to the tone within the context. The raw authenticity of emotions confirms the reality of μῆνιν. Dr. McGowan mused that we can't seem to command and control our anger. In my reading of the Greek language and culture, this power of the irrational was the most disturbing to the Greeks. Just as many religious people concoct fantasies as to why bad things happen to good people, the Greeks did the same to account for irrationality in a world of reason. Is Achilles' μῆνιν is rational, irrational or suprarational?

In the movie "Dazed and Confused," the connective theme is whether or not the quarterback, Randall "Pink" Floyd is going to play quarterback for the senior year. He has his own personal μῆνιν in response to the coach's demand that all the players sign a no drug use pledge. The urging of lifelong friends and teammates have little impact on his struggle to define and live his best life. But through a personal process unclear to those around him, he does define himself and the movie ends with "Slow Ride" playing as they ride off into the Texas horizon. 

Dr. McGowan highlighted the stakes of Achilles' decision. When you know that there is no life like the one you have now, then what's the best way to live it? Randall Floyd understood that life doesn't get much better than being a high school senior and in that opportunity sought his best life. In this way with the fullness of self-reflection, love and engagement, Achilles struggles to define himself. He's not, as some mentioned, a "monster" or "egotistical" or "monomaniacal." Instead, he's a man who struggles to be true to his sense of who he is. He knows he's not in Troy because he hates the Trojans or because he needs more fame or women or money. Mῆνιν is the agonizing birth of Achilles defining and expressing his own personhood not simply as a "doer of deeds and a speaker of words." Mῆνιν captures the powerful "manic" nature of the experience of the transitioning expressive self and the perception of this transition by its community.

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.

"End Period Dominance?"

Years ago, I was discussing an investment result with a business partner. The investment had been lackluster, but suddenly shot up and the impact seemed disproportionate. His comment was that it was "end period dominance." It was a striking term and since he had just gotten an MBA, I assumed it was part of the MBA lingo.

Years later, I referenced "end period dominance" and he looked at me strangely. I retold how I got familiar with the term. He chuckled and told me that he had just made up the term so that we could move on to another topic (I can be obsessive - as my Spinoza studies reveal).

This week new research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience that confirms "end period dominance." Studies show that that two different parts of the brain are activated, and compete with each other, when we make decisions based on past experience. They can cause us to overvalue experiences that end well despite starting badly, and undervalue experiences that end badly despite starting well—even if both are equally valuable overall.

Two parts of the brain are the amygdala and the anterior insula. The part of the brain called the amygdala works out the 'objective value' of an experience, such as a Sum of The Parts valuation. Meanwhile a brain region called the anterior insula was shown to 'mark down' our valuation of an experience if it gets gradually worse over time, such as occurs in trend-following investors.

Not only a likely culprit for an obsession with the end of movies, this "end period dominance" pattern can also affect quality decision-making and is likely to be an objective reason why the political candidates are willing to spend enormous funds to advertise right before the election season. It may be that a "happy ending" disguises an "unhappy experience."

Self-Serving Bias Strikes Again!

Recently I read a blog post on Dr. James Fallon, a neuroscientist who discovered that he had the brain imaging pattern of a "full-blown psychopath." After his discovery, he checked in with family and friends to confirm interpersonal patterns that would indicate psychopathy. As a happily married man, father, grandfather, friend to many and successful scientist, he doubted that he had such traits. However, over the next years, he did identify that he lacked certain empathetic traits but these had been offset by a warm and nurturing childhood. As a result he coined a term for his condition - "pro-social psychopath."

This post caused me to reflect on my own self-assessments. Our "self-serving" biases give us a blind spot with regards to our own characteristics. Dr. Fallon took years after his discovery to become comfortable with the image in the brain imaging mirror. I don't think any of us are immune to the same issues.

When I was in college, I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test as part of a leadership program at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC. The test is certainly not scientific, because it is based on ideas of how you perceive yourself and your interactions with others. I tested as I have tested ever since - an Extroverted, iNtuitive (Big Picture), Thinking and Judgmental (Seeking Closure) personality. However, the personality described as The Commander never really resonated with me (although others have at times agreed with the description!).

Since quarantine, I have had increased time for self-introspection and decided to retake the test with my increased level of awareness as well as a willingness to remove my "self-serving" bias. When I retook the test, I did test differently. I shifted to Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, and Judgmental personality. The personality is described as The Counselor which is a much more fitting description of my offline interactions. So how did I get it wrong for nearly 40 years?

I believe that I have consistently defended myself against perceived weaknesses. I think that I believed people who were extroverted were more likely to be successful and popular. In addition, I think that I believed that people who were feelings-based were weak. As a result, I thought myself into these other roles which I could enact. But in my down time, I would naturally gravitate to my true patterns. Was this my personality "preference" or my "orientation"? I have no idea, but clarity on this issue does provide me a greater sense of internal harmony.

Thinking about Singularity: Nominalism Sets Up Statistics

Since the quarantine has lasted for a longer time than anticipated, I have successfully moved on from my first project of reviewing the basics of all of Latin grammar (see post Completion!) to another project of reviewing the fundamentals of statistics and probability. 

As suffering readers of this blog know, I have been digging into the depths of Spinoza's Ethics in order to explore and articulate Spinoza's promised provision of "continuous, supreme and unending joy." Perhaps the answer is simply doing anything other than reading the Ethics after attempting to read the Ethics.

As a result of studying the Ethics in Latin, I have been exploring the medieval (6th - 14th centuries) philosophical traditions in Latin which precede those of Spinoza. These readings have not only been excellent for encouraging sleepiness at bedtime, but have also shown the meandering development of language. However, last night's study had a wakeful impact.

In the late 11th century lived a theologian and philosophy named Roscellinus. He is considered the founder of nominalism. Nominalism is a school of thought that holds that universals, such as brown, chair or wood are not real. Instead, concrete singular items are the only reality and these universals such as brown, chair or wood are simply abstractions which function as mental tools, but are not realities. So radical were the implications that Roscellinus had to retract most of what he wrote. Political correctness has always been a central part of the academic world.

This nominalism debate is interesting to me because the same issue arises for Spinoza as he grapples with the role of language, belief and Aristotelian categories. Without wading into those areas in this post, I have found myself agreeing with the idea that the most detailed description of an item is the most real and thus, regardless of my self-serving bias, the most perfect.

As I come to statistics, I find that the same issues come up. Statistics is a mode of reasoning which attempts to observe, describe and summarize without a loss of "meaning." This is precisely that challenge that nominalism presented to medieval thinkers. Nominalism challenges Right and Wrong in the same way as statistics does. The central idea of nominalism is singularity while the central idea of statistics is randomness. Both modes of reasoning reject a transcendence of Right and Wrong. If everything is a singularity, what modes of thought, language and belief are relevant? Statistics holds methods for reasoning within singularities. As nominalism set up statistics, the modern age could establish itself in the face of Right and Wrong.