Women and their epic lives
№ 6 | 10 December 2021
Women lead epic lives. Yet, where are they as the composers of epic poetry? The truth is that women are continually composing epics – through their careers, their relationships and their contributions to community.
Photo by Parij Borgohain on Unsplash
Diotima – after Simone Weil: in memory of Lydia Wevers ONZM
The poet is not the blind singer.
She is the muse weaving fate and fury
into pitiless cloth, the bringer
of nemesis which strikes down singular
men metaxu. She sings in no hurry,
to tell of the collider, the mingler,
and parter of lives. The gangsters clinging
to status, weaker ones currying
mercy or favour, the malingerers
from that endless plain – she will linger
on them all. Black blood spurts forth and slurries
with the dust. We find the story springing
back true, even as she fingers
our threads, spreads the pool of fear and worry.
How she stimulates the amygdala
to bitterness. Knife-crime harbingers
Troys of our own. While the police tarry,
judge the sex-trafficking row, ‘business’ strings
out; judge, muse, and bury your jury.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 7 December 2021
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Commentary
Diotima and Simone Weil are women’s names. Diotima was the sage priestess in Plato’s Symposium, who mentored Socrates. Simone Weil (1909–43) was a promising French Jewish philosopher who had served as an auxiliary in the Durruti Brigade on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war.
No Hölderlin you might think with relief, but no, he is there. He is the blind singer, and Diotima was the name by which he dedicated poems to Susette Gontard. So while I write poems in that style there is no escaping him entirely. However Weil was the philosopher of connectedness, to metaxu in old Greek: that which breaks links, connects them, according to Plato. It is like the prison wall that separates prisoners, yet enables them to tap messages using Morse code, to update the myth of Plato’s cave.
And isn’t this the perspective that women’s wisdom and leadership bring to the world when male violence is blind to connectivity, indeed refuses it when it is proposed? Achilles refuses to be like Hector, even though he too will fall into the same dust.
Weil’s 1940 essay, ‘The Iliad, or the poem of force’, was a reflection on the fall of France that year. It brought out the theme of ‘bare life’ in that war: victims were reduced to things, while the victors of the moment turned into psychopaths of stone. If they were not goddesses and nymphs, women were either slaves or slaves-to-be, apart from that ambiguous embodiment of female sovereignty, Helen. The war itself was an unremitting seesaw with no end in such. Today’s winner became tomorrow’s carcass.
Weil emphasised the bitterness that pervades the entire epic. It is its tone. This is infused by the muse, Calliope. The performance of the epic is a woman’s. She sings, she composes it. The male bard is only her medium. To quote from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: ‘He do the Police in different voices’. She relates the speeches and exchanges of the protagonists in the same incantation, despite their different voices and personae. I am reminded of a child playing with figures and making them talk.
Even divine agency is caught up in the maelstrom. The gods in the Odyssey can make decisive things happen. In the Iliad, even the gods are at sea in the violence, unable to get a handle on it. In the modern era, we have witnessed how easy it is to start a war, and how hard it is to finish it on acceptable terms. The world of the Iliad and our own are not ages of Cabinet warfare like in the 18th century.
Simone Weil in Spain
Women have a decisive role to play in a world congested with male ego. Much emphasis has been placed on the role of the activist lately: Greta Thunberg, for example. But what about the wise, accomplished woman whose epic life is to be an organisational or institutional leader, in government, the judiciary, international and academic Institutions?
The skills required for writing an epic poem are precisely the skills needed to lead in precarious times. Since 2015, we have shifted from ‘change management’ to ‘volatility management’. There has, for example, just been a complete turnover of academic management at the top of the food chain in the UK. The dinosaurs who got the new geopolitics wrong are undergoing a mass extinction. ⁂
What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds
Ask for it in good bookshops, find it in the Tuwhiri online store
After Rilke’s Sixth Elegy
Karaka scarcely flowers, but presses
its sap into the gold poison of figs,
then its leaves are laurels, not at all stressed
whenever a gale lands and threshes
the shore. Wind alters nothing of their rig
below, when lovers resort to that mesh
of calm, driven by the sun’s duress,
or falling night to follow trails like pig
runs, in the pixelled dark, to some nest.
Rilke, I do not quite follow your context.
I can tell though a woman is big
with child, and her son Samson is expressed
into the world, that temples are wrested
down, while the sheltering shrine keeps digging
deeper into dune. As death thinks it best
to flower in youth, where flowers are suppressed –
Palestine or New Zealand – let the trig
stations of love and the unmeant caress
fail, girl. Only mother that deadly sprig.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 8 December 2021
Commentary
Women of power and influence are expert decisionists and deliberators. They should not occupy an echo chamber, and are more likely to be able to discern better than many men, feedback that is confirmation bias, or merely exhaust or even carbon monoxide in information terms.
An epic is a contribution to civilisation. So is the work of the woman leader. An epic is an architectonic work of organisation. The whole and the parts must be present to the mind as a fluid adaptive structure, rather like a language, or a river finding its way to the sea. An epic in the western tradition often starts in media res in the midst of the action, not at ‘once upon a time’. Organisations are handed over without a moment’s respite. There is no time to stop and take stock.
Epics are filled with lists and catalogues. Excellent mental training should ensure that such inventories are acquired without effort. Epics require deep structural variation and patterning or else they become boring and incoherent. This has to be done in such a way that readers, or as in ancient times, the audience or listeners, will not guess what will happen next. In other words, Scheherezade the narrator of the Arabian Nights is the archetype of the epic woman. With her head on the block and a tyrannical male to appease, she took control of the situation.
This requires not just the best structural techniques and toolkits of one’s profession, but also confidence in one’s own technique, to the extent that it amounts to an inimitable governance style. One is employed and renowned for that style. Like Penelope in the Odyssey, you have to work on the shroud, even if you do not know what will come next.
Trust your subconscious
I did not plan ‘Crete 1941’. I composed it during the first UK lockdown between late March and early May of 2020. It consists of 2475 lines, with five cantos of 55 stanzas. Some asked whether I laboured over it, preparing blueprints and architectural models for myself. No, I did not. Once I was satisfied with a test sequence of the first 15 stanzas, I let rip.
I had the idea that the first canto would be about international law, the second about war, the third about love, the fourth about the partisans, and the fifth about the 28th Māori Battalion. I had no idea how to develop these themes over each set of 55 stanzas, nor how to merge them between the cantos. I placed my trust in the one-off performance of the composition over those six weeks. I never once doubted, or backtracked.
At work in a munitions factory in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand, during the second world war
Music is similar to epic. A symphony is a kind of epic. Nadia Boulanger was famous for her school of composition in Paris. She gave students different tasks on different days of the week, and these included ‘Black Thursdays’ when she would give the students unrecognisable back parts from the composers and ask them to continue the music, finishing them as exercises in counterpoint.
Once she had a brat in the class who had to her come from the Juilliard School in New York. Full of himself and his technical brilliance, he contested her rejection of his continuation. She told him quite coolly, this is such and such by Mozart, and it goes on like this. She played it on the piano. At that point, the student realised the difference between technique and style. His name was Philip Glass.
The point of this exercise was to teach that distinction. A woman’s epic life is a sustained tour de force of style. And the lesson in handling the gifted student is one we older men can learn from Boulanger as well. The epic is just one among several genres. It should only be practised in necessity. Good lyric is better than a bad epic.
There is more to do than epic, so I shall end on a religious note about the church from our house, where I am to read the lessons at the Carol Service on Sunday, which will have to be sung by the choir I expect, while the rest of us listen in facemasks, for we are on the verge of another lockdown in the UK. ⁂
Poetics, and composition of the epic
If you would like advice or teaching on poetics, and on the composition of the epic I, Bernard, am willing to assist. Write to:
poetry.polis@gmail.com
I am offering a far better course than any creative writing school.
You will join Anne Bradstreet and Alice Notley as epic poets!
The Koziol Madonna – after Rilke
Time was a dragon that would eat my child.
I stopped time and crushed the serpent.
The Zodiac and its coils are now piled
under my feet, and their firmament
is closed. You may wonder where is my moon
and crescent, why am I not standing
on its scythe; but I am the lunar
eclipse as well, and I am handing
my son over to you. I am as red
as your earth and as green as your hills –
a brown girl who has quietly bred
this future. Brown as the rivers that spill
from underneath your hills, my bare feet
and naked son have the snake as our seat.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 5 October 2021
The 12th-13th village church of St Mary the Virgin in Woodford Halse has a lady chapel with a Madonna by the German sculptor Hermann Koziol (1926-2011).