tang dynasty times

Hot Gates (A Confucian Perspective)

So, not only did the son of a bitch bring home a concubine with him from Troy, but he had killed with his own hands their beloved daughter Iphigenia.

Really, what else could she have done-- what else would any woman do-- but murder him that night when he was in the bathtub. 

The Chorus, though, was not convinced. I mean, despite whatever marital issues they may have had, wasn't Agememnon--son of Atreus and brother of Menelaus-- a great and virtuous King? Had he not led the Greeks in their stunning victory over Troy?  

How could she do it?

The chorus, demanded an answer.

And, so in a series of speeches, which would be the envy of any Washington speech writer, the queen lays out her case. Her husband-- the King-- has killed their beloved daughter. That he had brought a concubine home with him from Troy and that she and her lover were already happily ruling the Kingdom ensconced in the castle were reasons as well. But Clytemnestra-- make no doubt about it-- is clear about her reasons: he killed their daughter and for that he must die.

So, she sets him up.

In what is one of the most famous homecoming scenes in all history-- Clytemnestra gives her husband Agamemnon the "red carpet treatment."

Laying out the family's priceless textiles, she urges him:

"Walk across, my Lord."

He tells her he will not. For that is the kind of arrogance that Persian Kings show-- believing themselves to be as all-mighty as the gods.

"We are democrats," he responds.

And when she continues begging him to glide across the sea of blood-red tapestries, he retorts:

"These are heirlooms, how can we soil our family heirlooms?"

In the end, exhausted perhaps from the trip, he allows himself to be persuaded and across he walks-- to his death. For it was this final show of arrogance that will become the all-important piece of evidence that Clytemnestra will require to persuade the chorus of the need she had to get rid of him. For most Greeks would have agreed that an all-powerful monarch in the style seen in Persia was something to be avoided at all costs.

And, so we see that this theme developed by Herodotus was already to be found in Aeschylus-- just waiting for him and his retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. 

**

I am re-reading William Golding's famous essay on Thermopylae, "Hot Gates." It is such a wonderfully written essay, harkening back to better days in travel writing, better days in essay writing too (with some exceptions, of course, essay writing seems to have become an almost lost art). Truly and with thankfully not a trace of any personal journey of self-discovery anywhere in the essay, Golding sets out to walk the ancient battleground. What was at one time only a narrow sliver of land-- pressed up against the cliffs, the edge dropped straight down into the sea. Thermopylae. Between cliffs and the sea, it was here that Leonidas made his legendary last stand.

Μολών λαβέ (molon labe).

It is so famous, I hesitate to attempt to even describe the armies-- the myriad of tribes and peoples comprising the Persian army alone went on for pages and pages in Herodotus. Here is Golding:

No man had ever seen anything like this army before. It was patently unstoppable. It came along the neck of the hills on the banks of the Asopus, from the heights of the mountain and along the coastal track from Alope and Phalara. Lengthening rivers of men—Persians in fish-scale armor, turbaned Cissians, bronze-clad Assyrians, trousered Scythians, Indian bowmen, Caspians, Sarangians in bright cloth and high-heeled boots—came down and spread in a flood that filled the plain. Soon there was nothing to see but rising clouds of white dust, pierced and speckled with the flicker of steel. If each of the seven thousand Greeks should kill his ten men, there would be more than enough to press forward—and this was only the vanguard.

The numbers alone are exhilarating-- the Persian army being said to have been comprised of a million men! Impossible, of course, but Herodotus' famous anecdote about the great Spartan warrior Dienekes is unforgettable:

Although extraordinary valor was displayed by the entire corps of Spartans and Thespians, yet bravest of all was declared the Spartan Dienekes. It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that, their arrows would block out the sun. Dienekes, however, undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, 'Good. Then we will fight in the shade'

Μολών λαβέ (molon labe).

Truly one of the most exhilerating moments in history, when the Persians try and persuade them to lay down their weapons, Leonidas responds, "Come and get them."  Not that he thought for a minute that his Spartans could overcome numbers like that. But, he knew, there were some things worth dying for.

Everytime I read it, it makes me breathless.

Golding's conclusion is rightly famous:

I came to myself in a great stillness, to find that I was standing by the little mound. This is the mound of Leonidas, with its dust and rank grass, its flowers and lizards, its stones, scruffy laurels and hot gusts of wind. I knew now that something real happened here. It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all argument to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of a violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood right in the line of history. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free.

What is worth fighting for?

Thermopylae-- this battle which the Greeks lost after all-- will always stand as something greatly symbolic. Indeed, it formed so many of our Western notions of bravery in the face of great obstacles-- of a few who gladly gave up their lives to take a stand for freedom and the law. And, maybe it is even to suggest that to not have something you would die for is perhaps one of the saddest fates a person can have (ie, Kierkegaard).

There is this great speech given by Leonidas to his men in Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire: 

"Listen to me brothers. The Persian king is not a king as Kelomenes was to us or as I am to you now. He does not take his place with shield and spear amid the manslaughter, but looks on,safe, from a distance, atop a hill, upon a golden throne." Murmured jeers rose from the men's throats as Leonides spoke this. "His comrades are not Peers and Equals, free to speak their minds before him without fear, but slaves and chattel. Each man is not deemed an equal before God, but the King's property, counted no more than a goat or pig and driven into battle not by love of nation or liberty but by the lash of otehr slaves' whips."

For two thousand years, the West has held up freedom as personal liberty as the ultimate value to be prioritized. Never mind that Leonidas' own culture was itself based on slaves--some say some 50% of the Greek population was comprised of enslaved people. And, we see even in this speech above, the conflating of Democracy and Freedom with personal liberty (and negative freedoms).

It has been-- since the time of Herodotus-- presented as a great "clash" of values. 

But what values were the Persians holding up as the Greatest Good? Well, the same values that we see being held up in many East Asian societies: Order, stability and collective Good. This is what the Persians were offering and their own ideas of freedom were inherently tied up with these values. I think we really can find this in Confucian philosophy-- this idea of "Freedom to" as opposed to "freedom from."

Melvyn Bragg had a great In Our Times show on Thermopylae in which he and his guests trace the rhetoric of Orientalism back to Herodotus' version of the battle. One of the guests describes ancient Greek culture as being unique in its holding up of dialogue and competition, and that it was this dialectical predeliction in Greek thought which would pave the way for theorizing and for philosophy. In her explanation, she describes two lawyers arguing or philosophers debating; Clytemnestra persuaing the chorus... and that out of this acceptance-- indeed it was a preference-- for the dialectical that true theory and true philosophy came into being.

The narrative surrounding Theropylae is also constructed in this dialectical framework. And, without a doubt I think we can see that it has laid the foundation for certain ideological constructs that continue to influence the way the West views other cultures. From Theropylae to the Ottoman Empire to China. This was what was so interesting about the great emotion surrounding Daniel Bell's work about China, for example. Nothing he said was so shocking from a Japanese point of view. That is because, perhaps, Japan, like China and maybe like the Persia under Xerxes prioritizes values differently. Freedom is certainly not defined in the same terms. Neither is "philosophy"... And so, like with so much else, everything comes down to translation and interpretation. And one's comfort zones; cf 須藤元気(Genki Sudo)のパフォーマンスユニット (arigato Sam)

And, this Battle, which has been re-told for generations upon generations in the West, hardly even showed up as a blip in Persian history. 

For more, see Travels with Caesar (Battle of Vienna) and the Road to Oxiana (Battle of Talas)

--For SCW

Kafka on the Shore

"Everything's a metaphor," says Oshima, quoting Goethe.

I was reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore when a friend on Facebook remarked that, “Murakami makes me nonchalantly suicidal.” This pretty perfectly summed up the effect that Murakami has on me. And, come to think of it, not just Murakami but most modern Japanese literature --from Soseki to Oe-- gives me the blues.

A friend (who is also a Murakami scholar) asked me, Why? And thinking about it, I realized that it's the characters that seem to always depress me. Randomly bumping up against each other like pinballs in a pinball machine, they are people who make their way through life alone trying to find meaning. Indeed, in many ways his characters remind me of the sinners in Dante’s Inferno. With no sense of community, no over-reaching authority or collective vision to make sense of things, for me the overwhelming mood of the books is of a dazzling isolation. And, this makes me feel lonely, I guess.

"Hurting themselves but harming others," we know from reading Dante that those in Hell choose to be there. Feckless and friendless, Murakami's characters also live with abandoment and often speak of a terrible void within themselves. But, I think what is perhaps so depressing about them is that rather than in friendship and love, they try and fill this void alone, in their private journeys within themselves. Contrapasso? 

As a contemporary philosopher once remarked that,

 Heidegger would point out that a minimally meaningful life requires sensitivity to the power of shared moods that give mattering to our world and unity and meaning to events

Everything for me comes back to the motion that true meaning resides in the finest details of our shared imagined experience. And in being good to each other.

**

 

Then at the river--an old man in a boat:
White-haired, as he drew closer shouting at us,
"Woe to you, wiked souls! Give upthe thoughts

Of Heaven! I come to ferry you across
Into eternal darkness, on the opposite side,
Into Fire and Ice!

 

 

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here

Western critics sometimes complain that Murakami's characters are "passive." And, I think--indeed-- they drift in emotions that are so large it seems they are helpless to do otherwise. In this way, destiny, rather than being a person's character as the ancient Greeks suggested becomes instead nothing but personal angst. And meaning (or metaphor) then seems somehow depressingly  accidental, ambiguours and fleeting. Inhuman, even.

Don't get me wrong, Murakami is a genius I think. First and foremost, a fabulous storyteller, I love his stories and am looking forward to reading his novel Chronicle next.

Reading Kafka on the Shore, though, I kept thinking of Hannah Arendt; and to my great surprise, there it was in the novel-- that famous scene about the Nazi Eichmann as a cog in the wheel that Arendt had written about so famously after the War. The Librarian Oshima says it this way:

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann [the Nazi].

 

Yes, imagination is essential for human understanding and compassion, responsibility and the Good Life. What Hannah Arendt taught us, however, is that this imagination must be collective-- that is, the human heart must go visiting--otherwise we lose our power to be moral. This is to suggest that danger for lying and moral decay begins in isolation (in fear).

 

It really, then, comes down again to the heart (our inner lives and imagination) and its connections to others. The ability to look at the world from another's point of view in an imaginative way. Kant required this of us, and perhaps such dialogs-- even in times where we think "nothing will come of it;" well, still such dialogs serve an important purpose, saving us from some sort of schizophrenic solipsism on the Shore. Arendt put it beautifully, calling such conversations that arise out of our contemplative lives as aiming to cultivate an "enlarged mentality" whereby " one trains one's imagination to go visiting."

 

Prints: Michael Mazur's Inferno

 

 

Mountain birds, unfettered and proud;
Plum blossom pollen, soft and scattering softly.
This painting-- but a promise
Of a thousand autumns to come
Drawing mountain birds

A promise of a thousand autumns... he writes these words in calligraphy of such stunningly elegance that it continues to take my breath away every time I catch glimpse of it.

Read more here.

wings of desire (a parable)

Have you ever heard the story of when Ibn Arabi went to the market to buy some figs?

Hot and dusty, it was summer in Al-Anadalus. Seville, to be precise, which was after all the center of the world. Well, at least it was the greatest empire standing that far to the West during those Moorish times.

The largest and most prosperous land in Europe, water flowed through the city of Seville in countless canals; flowing water pouring out of countless fountains; there were great libraries and bath houses. It was a place where a philosopher could always find a job. 

Walking toward one of the city's legendary markets, our young philosopher smiled in anticipation. He knew the future was bright and, though he was only sent to buy figs, he knew so much more awaited his senses. He could spend hours in the city markets-- in delight listening to people speaking in dozens of languages and catching in the wind the fragrance of fruit from the Levant and sweet sugar from Egypt; there were perfumed vinegars and syrups made from grapes. Wines. Cherries, endives, oranges, spicy sausage; dried fruit, dried fish, mint, orange blossoms and roses---cumin, peppers and of course saffron. 

Just thinking about the perfume of these things caused him to quicken his pace. And, turning the corner into the narrow and covered streets which led to the market, for no reason whatsoever, our hero looked up.

It was at that precise moment that the woman had flung open the window of her bedroom. She needed air and so had spontaneously-- on a whim-- opened the window from her room on the second floor.

Not surprising-- given the story-- their eyes locked.

And as a thousand birds took flight in his heart, the woman stood there barely breathing. Time stopped. Too quickly, however, time started again as she heard someone in the house approaching her room (opening windows being something not encouraged in her world) she quickly shut the window and went back to her chores. Somehow, though, she felt absolutely sure that she would never be the same again.

Our hero, Ibn Arabi, by that time had started running- back in the direction from which he had come. Being the man he was-- even so young-- he sat down and immediately composed a love poem. And attaching it to a letter penned in almost impossible beauty, he had one of his servants deliver the sealed letter to her home. Of course, she knew at once it was from him.

Then, for precisely one year, every morning at precisely the same time, he would walk to the market to buy figs. And every morning, at precisely the same time, she would fling open her window. Their afternoons were consumed by the writing of love letters to each other.

And like the love letters they penned to each other, their desire too required an answer. "I will soon go mad if I cannot taste your lips," She actually said this (for we have the letter to prove it). To wait is to be enchanted... this being something that Medieval physicians declared could lead a person into madness (see Averroes' study of love as affliction)

Only a few of their letters survive today. A taste of what must have been pure intoxication, the two became quickly overwhelmed in a Sea of Love. Or so it seemed, at least. Scholars have tried to analyze their few surviving letters and the general consensus seems to be that she sought to make herself known to him. As he sought to know her.

I want to understand. I do understand. I understand, I understand

And so in this way, they circled each other-- like planets circling the sun; like dervishes circling God. In love, there is a great desire to be known by the Beloved. Just in the same way that the Beloved seeks to know the soul that he feels belongs to him. As the poets insist, true love is a great mirror reflecting one's soul at the same time reflecting the soul of the Beloved in unio mystica.

All of this being part of a playful game of hide-and-seek that God plays with Himself, says the hindu and sufi mystics. Perhaps no one in history worked out a theory for this like our young philosopher. Indeed, his theories on divine love made him famous throughout the Islamic world. Born 100 years before Dante, scholars posit that it was Ibn Arabi's poetry and philosophy which would inspire, illuminate and be reborn within Dante's poetry of Beatrice. Beatrice's Body. Beatrice's soul.

Stranger things have happened, I am sure you will agree. Ibn Arabi's theories of love-- born from their love letters-- became a dialectic of love, which itself became a religion of love, characterized by angel's wings and planets circling the sun (both images which came themselves straight out of their letters). Desire transfigured by imagination-- imagination, says Arabi being the function of the heart. As the brain thinks and body moves, so does heart imagine and desire. And this is expressed in the form of heavenly angels--their wings beating in desire, they leave feathers behind in bed.

**

When I think of them-- Lover and Beloved-- I cannot help but wonder what became of them. Well, I know what became of him, but what of the woman in the window? Her angel's wings beating in desire, I imagine sometimes that she did go mad from longing... falling in love, falling in despair, falling ill. Falling out of her window.  

I wonder too whether people still fall in love in the same way. In times past, we know from poems and novels that people did fall in love precisely in the way described above. A veiled glimpse ignites a fire causing two people to circle each other as Lover desires Beloved; each seeking to know the Other. This all being something which took place within the landscape of the heart itself. It was something imagined-- over weeks upon weeks; months upon months. Imagined as "'spirits take bodies and bodies become spirits'"

People reported that like the other magical incantation-- abbracadbra-- that just whispering the words out loud "I-love-you" had the power to move mountains. It even had the power to cure gout. I wonder, looking at their letters, whether people are still capable of this i fedeli d'amore (or in this translation below) a "wondrous" Religion of Love.

"Wonder"

A garden among the flames!

My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Quran.

My creed is Love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.

Paintings by the great Farah Ossouli.