War and nemesis
№ 8 | 24 December 2021
Christmas Eve this year is overshadowed by the threat of war in eastern Europe and the Pacific. Let us consider what Christmas is for adults at this time. ⁂
Descending – photo Beth Macdonald (Unsplash)
Mithraeum at Römerstadt Carnuntum
for Dr Olympia Bobou
Just as there is night and day, so is death
Hidden from life by the sun’s crown, and then
in winter Aldebaran and Elnath,
Capella the herdsman star, happen
to stand where we would expect the sun
to be shining still. Taurus has a den
in place of our star, the Zodiac spun
to this pass, and it is up to us
to be the light. It is painful to stun
and slay the bodily bull with Mithras,
have the flesh torn apart, and find we blaze,
yet do not join ranks with the cruel cursus
of coiled stars. Time is not death – just a phase
to prepare in. Burn on beyond – in pain
and yet free, since fate is a lie we raze,
and even as seraphs, we are detained
before dying, for in blood – spirit burns,
and we are pure lions of the burning mane.
Mithras our crown, as the Zodiac turns.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 12 December 2021
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On Mithras, and more
25 December was Mithras Day for the Romans, as well as Saturnalia. Happy Mithras!
Fed up with relatives and the master/slave role inversions of Saturnalia, those Romans would sneak off to a mithraeum, if they were initiates of that religion, and celebrate a very different festival. A saviour god, born from a rock, would come again and deliver us from time and necessity. We could be his collaborators in that eschatology, if we prepared ourselves as sons of light. This was Valhalla and Ragnarok but with a happier ending.
The religion may have been brought back to base on the Danube at Carnuntum by Apollo’s Fifteenth Legion, after its service in Armenia and then Palestine during the Jewish War under Nero, Vespasian and Titus. An unknown religious genius may have turned a Zurvanist heresy of Zoroastrianism, picked up in Armenia, into this rugby club and Masonic lodge-like religion. We do not know very much about it. It had degrees of membership and, in some places, women could join. The Christian Church regarded it as a rival and appropriated 25 December for a very different birth.
I have been down inside mithraea in Rome and London. It is like waiting at a Tube station for a train that never came. The tunnel mouth is silent. We feel that silence right now as the prospect of war looms in Ukraine and thunder mutters over the South China Sea. Most of us want to enjoy Christmas and get on with our COVID lives. The chief concern of many in the West is how their governments would respond. All of us, potential adversaries on whichever side, feel caught in a cloud of nemesis dating back to the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.
And what is nemesis? It was imagined as divine vengeance and retribution for human wrongdoing. The Greeks did not imagine power relations in terms of a Cuba Street bucket fountain balance of power, like Metternich and Dr Kissinger, or as wheels of fortune as in the Middle Ages, or even as Einsteinian fields. They thought in terms of a contagion, or miasma, that affected everyone.
Wellington’s bucket fountain – photo Matt Boulton (Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Shakespeare seems to have thought like this too. His characters, unlike those in Chaucer, are never merely unfortunate. Macbeth’s Scotland, Lear’s Britain, Hamlet’s Denmark and Othello’s Venice are gangrenous infected environments. China and Russia have grievances against the post-cold war and post-second world war settlements of the world order.
Climate change? How can we make progress with that when we live in a climate of mutual accusation and distrust? We have been living under the overhang of this for just over five years now, and this is the mithraeum I have been down for five years too, watching developments day by day by day. ⁂
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Sophocles translated by Hölderlin
for Seamus Kennedy
We have to be Sophoclean and crawl
out of the storm-wrecked shells of delusion,
leaving coils and smashed spirals as a caul
behind. We call it fate, when the fusion
of destiny and dream is smashed in this way.
In no way is the result confusion,
if we can cope with the bare light of day,
as pressure on skin tissue bone,
the mind already shaded from those rays
forever. You thought some dream had flowered
into stone. That Athens of yours in Spring
perpetual, became an overpowered
outlaw outrun, and cut off in a ring
of judgement. To live condemned, and endure
such birth is the witness Athens would bring –
the day they woke to an amputee’s cure,
learned that their sons quarried in Syracuse,
that their city and ships were unimmured.
Join Hölderlin, and side with the accused.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 15 December 2021
On Sophocles translated by Hölderlin
Athens was a revolutionary and democratic imperial state. This is why it is worth studying. Hölderlin grew up to adulthood during the French revolution. Like Emmanuel Macron, for example, he wasn’t a Jacobin, but he would have supported the Girondists. Hölderlin published a translation of Sophocles’ plays that confused and appalled readers. It was around 1804 that his schizophrenia took definitive hold. Napoleon was on the verge of conquering and subjecting all of Germany, and by 1806 he had. Many readers were in denial, not just at what he had to say but at what Sophocles had to say.
The Sophocles whom British, German French and Italian readers thought they knew in 1804 was a ‘classical’, and not a Romantic or philosophised Sophocles. His plays were read as if they were precursors of the French stage of Racine, for example. Characterisation, action and plot devices were important to those Enlightenment readers. What Hölderlin brought them smack-bang up against was the metaphysics of evil. His was a Sturm und Drang Sophocles. How is evil, evil? Nemesis feels evil even when it has justice on its side.
‘The metaphysics of evil’ is a phrase I have seen applied to Sophocles. I am interested in it, but am a little puzzled because what we call metaphysics had not yet been developed by Plato and Aristotle. In a pre-Socratic sense, yes, we might talk like this in shorthand, while acknowledging we are being premature and anachronistic. It is like the clock chiming in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Yet just as the Globe Theatre could not silence church clocks during performances, so too Sophocles, like his contemporary Thucydides, explored disease and pandemic metaphors from the war environment Athenians found themselves in.
The real Thucydides trap was not Graham Allison’s misreading of that author, but a sump or morass of contagion in which guilty and guiltless alike are trapped in a community of fate. What happens when a democracy commits war crimes just like a tyranny and is made to suffer the consequences by its enemies? What can be done about this? What do we do with ourselves? Recognition that we belong to a shared community of fate even with enemies is the understanding that concludes the Iliad. Priam and Achilles weep together for their separate losses, Priam for his son, Achilles for his friend, and then they share a meal together.
The Greek answer was to own up to Nemesis’ prosecution of us and face the consequences, while seeing if it could be delimited by the human practice of Law. Aeschylus’s Oresteia is a great trilogy because it works with: what do you do when you have to kill your mother because she killed your father, and the law requires you to wreak vengeance and be avenged upon in turn? The Greeks knew vendetta was futile.
Chain reactions of violence never simply ceased, but were inherited by later generations.
One answer was genocide. Wipe everyone out. Oedipus’ family became extinct. The Athenians did this to the Melians. Many of Athens’ enemies would have inflicted this on Athens, but for the Spartans refusing to treat Athens this way. The Romans totally destroyed Carthage, Corinth and Jerusalem in their day.
Photo Jr Korpa on Unsplash
The other answer was law. Law is the discovery of reality, Plato has Socrates say. Law delimits the dust cloud of horror approaching from over the horizon. In the Eumenides, Athene and Apollo protect Orestes from the Furies, by making them a deal. A casting vote lets Orestes off, but the cheated Furies are assured that they will have an honoured cult in Athens, and be known there as Kindly Ones, the Eumenides. Philip Pullman borrows this solution for his harpies when Lyra descends into the underworld.
To be frank, monetised transactions may well have assisted the Greeks in coming to proportionate equity-based solutions, to dispel the atmospheres of doom they felt they had to live under, in their Balkan environment.
The community for them had the monopoly of violence. Aristotle said in his Politics that you can tell who rules in a constitution by who controls the courts. In Athens that was the democracy. Theatre represented the possibility of the polity finding against itself in a court. For us it is the Crown that holds the monopoly. Not the jury at Kenosha. Not a political party as in China.
How does the individual respond to such times? The Mithraists went through the degrees of their mysteries. For his part. Sophocles was the master of showing how people must survive themselves. Modern readers tend to identify with Oedipus Tyrannus. Oedipus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax, Heracles in the surviving plays, are people who have survived themselves. Ajax and Heracles in the earlier plays seek suicide to escape their misery. Orestes in Electra survives his banishment from Mycenae, his non-recognition by his sister Electra, and his role as a corpse, as he and she spring a surprise on their mother’s lover and father’s murderer, Aegisthus. Philoctetes is promised healing from his infected wound. Antigone must endure immurement. Oedipus freely chooses to live, but sightlessly.
He does not sing I did it my way. We are not treated to a male version of Je ne regrette rien. Nor are we getting a monologue such as British poet Caroline Bird would perform, giving voice to the unspeakable monsters in all our lives, and what they do, as the late John Money wrote about. How in English and French, tirade and tyrannie, tirade and tyranny, can be made to ring with an initial rhyme. Is not a tirade in French drama a challenge to tyranny? The tyrant only talks like that when in error.
Getting back to Christmas
It is Christmas, so I conclude with another Woodford Madonna poem, despite the climate of nemesis over the world. Tomorrow, I will take the kids to a manger ceremony at the village church around the corner. A Caroline Bird poem might end with a plea for pity. Oedipus was a king, a civil authority. His beggary is not an exercise in abjection and misery, as the Christian Church would understand it.
The character seems to regard himself as a caution and warning, as a salutary monstrum. His fallen condition is a party political broadcast of the need for delimiting law. Having deprived himself of his eyes, by his own sentence, he has blocked further consequences. The ruler has not decided that he is the exception.
The village of Marathos, Crete – photo Evangelos Mpikakis (Unsplash)
General Freyberg was a New Zealander who had to cope with an age of nemesis. He is a major figure in my Crete 1941. The failure to defend Crete was a massive defeat for his first independent command. As a professional soldier and civilised man, he did not reach for a suicide pistol, or hit the bottle, or act out in misery, or lash out at subordinates. He made himself and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force into the best fighting force they could be.
What more can be done, though, than such stoicism and professionalism? Maybe the following poem is indicative. Perhaps the poverty and weakness of poetry can offer that more. Poetry can only report truth as poetry sees it. Not as law, science, philosophy or theology see it. Poetry is a vulnerable lit candle in a dark season before the serpent of history. For all that, it is not the pensiere debole, weak thought, that the contemporary philosopher Gianni Vattimo talks about.
Poetry is a weak practice, but its thinking can be stronger than law, truer than dogma, wiser than science. Fire is strong though the candle is a weak thing. ⁂
Villanelle to the Koziol Madonna
for Mathew Madain
Light touches the Virgin Mother’s knee,
a glow from our suppliant candle,
inside that tallow hearth and chimney
which soon dissolve in a molten sea
as it trembles on the heart’s cantle.
How are we moved to make such a plea?
The wonder is we can touch lightly,
and do so without fear of scandal,
when smoke gives off such impurity,
and beads of wax gutter from the lees.
She steps on the serpent without sandals
even; so may we with impunity.
Now in a curious symmetry
she cradles her babe as she handles
the cosmos and all its destiny,
while we and the world burn – hive and bees –
in a mother’s love, as he is dandled.
We shall not go out in the wax’s scree
before we shine on that green mantle.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 19 December 2021
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