ABlog
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1.21.2008
The Poem of Piercing
What an epic of attrition is the Iliad! And what a matchless paeon to war's eroticism--between the way in which the dressing of the hero's beautiful sacrificial body is described, and the way in which the text "loves" that body's destruction, with its butcher's chart precision.
Just where did it go in, Homer?
Where did the blade/spear point, arrow enter the yielding flesh?
Someone better equipped than I should speculate on the psychological difference between a bellicose eros based on piercing and one based on blasting the human frame to smithereens. Suffice it to say I'm surprised that the enthusiasts of "beautiful" male martyrdom--I'm thinking of Mishima, maybe Pasolini, or the Fassbinder of "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul"--didn't set the image of these punctured boys alongside those of their favorite tortured saints.
Maybe they really did dig the Greeks and I just didn't notice.
What a pinup! How could tits and ass compare?
The description of Patroklos dressing for war is a ritual description: he is shown not merely dressing but transforming into the beautiful killer. The beautiful martyr.
The protective dress of war is by no means simply utilitarian. It carries great psychic power.
These guys seem in many ways more subtle and sophisticated than our modern state-sanctioned killers. For example, there is no hyper-powered conviction that GOD IS ON OUR SIDE; the gods are understood to be unreliable, wavering supporters, which, interestingly, does not stop the belligerents on either side from believing that they have every right and reason to prevail. On one hand, there is a rigid ethic of war: you are supposed to "man up," stand your ground, behave like a proper hero and all that. On the other, Zeus's fickleness tempers the rigidity, for once the fighter intuits that the alpha deity has turned against him, it would be simply suicidal to attempt to prevail. In this respect, perhaps Zeus served as the classical equivalent of the "stab in the back" hypothesis so popular as an explanation for the outcome of the U.S.'s adventure in Vietnam.
The other day I read in the NY Times a comment by some military authority or other about the problem of veterans who evince violent destructive tendencies. The guy had written a book in which he looked to classical sources to comment on issues surrounding the military. He said that vets who go on rampages are not a new problem--it's not so easy to bottle up the destructive forces war encourages men to let loose--witness the fact that in the Odyssey,the first thing Odysseus does when he leaves for home following the sack of Troy is to sack some other place. However, I seem to be reading in the Iliad that a lot of those guys did plenty of looting and plundering ON THE WAY to Troy. So maybe the problem is a little more complicated. Maybe war is a PERMISSIVE force that ENABLES and indeed ENCOURAGES rape and plunder, not just a trauma that creates victims who no longer have the self-control to refrain from mayhem and who thus extend the collateral damage endlessly, both within the countries they sack and occupy and back home in the bosom of "civilian" life.
The other night I watched "Apocalypse Now," a movie of such matchless badness, after it stops being a satire and turns into a solemn update of Heart of Darkness, that I had to marvel at the unflagging will of men to ennoble and solemnize the simple act of chopping up bodies, turning living humans into rotting meat.
In the cesspit where I teach, someone is offering a spring semester course: "Is War Good for Art?" Clever question. Suppose it turns out that most of the formal niceties of the storyteller's craft are owed to someone's need to make war look attractive (so as to keep indulging in it). Then art itself becomes another excuse for slaughter. After all, without a bracing conflict to concentrate our minds, we'd probably just drink beer and watch the soaps. When instead, we can read this:
Patroklos now put on the flashing bronze.
Greaves were the first thing, beautifully fitted
to calf and shin with silver ankle chains;
and next he buckled round his ribs the cuirass,
blazoned with stars, of swift Aiakides;
then slung the silver-studded blade of bronze
about his shoulders, and the vast solid shield;
then on his noble head he placed the helm,
its plume of terror nodding high above,
and took two burly spears with his own handgrip.
--The Iliad (Robert Fitzgerald translation), p. 375
(Homer said that.)
What would we do warless with our anger?
What reason would we find to rape and slay?
Too bad to see our skill sets going begging:
we got so good at blowing enemies away.
(I said that.)
Just where did it go in, Homer?
Where did the blade/spear point, arrow enter the yielding flesh?
Someone better equipped than I should speculate on the psychological difference between a bellicose eros based on piercing and one based on blasting the human frame to smithereens. Suffice it to say I'm surprised that the enthusiasts of "beautiful" male martyrdom--I'm thinking of Mishima, maybe Pasolini, or the Fassbinder of "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul"--didn't set the image of these punctured boys alongside those of their favorite tortured saints.
Maybe they really did dig the Greeks and I just didn't notice.
What a pinup! How could tits and ass compare?
The description of Patroklos dressing for war is a ritual description: he is shown not merely dressing but transforming into the beautiful killer. The beautiful martyr.
The protective dress of war is by no means simply utilitarian. It carries great psychic power.
These guys seem in many ways more subtle and sophisticated than our modern state-sanctioned killers. For example, there is no hyper-powered conviction that GOD IS ON OUR SIDE; the gods are understood to be unreliable, wavering supporters, which, interestingly, does not stop the belligerents on either side from believing that they have every right and reason to prevail. On one hand, there is a rigid ethic of war: you are supposed to "man up," stand your ground, behave like a proper hero and all that. On the other, Zeus's fickleness tempers the rigidity, for once the fighter intuits that the alpha deity has turned against him, it would be simply suicidal to attempt to prevail. In this respect, perhaps Zeus served as the classical equivalent of the "stab in the back" hypothesis so popular as an explanation for the outcome of the U.S.'s adventure in Vietnam.
The other day I read in the NY Times a comment by some military authority or other about the problem of veterans who evince violent destructive tendencies. The guy had written a book in which he looked to classical sources to comment on issues surrounding the military. He said that vets who go on rampages are not a new problem--it's not so easy to bottle up the destructive forces war encourages men to let loose--witness the fact that in the Odyssey,the first thing Odysseus does when he leaves for home following the sack of Troy is to sack some other place. However, I seem to be reading in the Iliad that a lot of those guys did plenty of looting and plundering ON THE WAY to Troy. So maybe the problem is a little more complicated. Maybe war is a PERMISSIVE force that ENABLES and indeed ENCOURAGES rape and plunder, not just a trauma that creates victims who no longer have the self-control to refrain from mayhem and who thus extend the collateral damage endlessly, both within the countries they sack and occupy and back home in the bosom of "civilian" life.
The other night I watched "Apocalypse Now," a movie of such matchless badness, after it stops being a satire and turns into a solemn update of Heart of Darkness, that I had to marvel at the unflagging will of men to ennoble and solemnize the simple act of chopping up bodies, turning living humans into rotting meat.
In the cesspit where I teach, someone is offering a spring semester course: "Is War Good for Art?" Clever question. Suppose it turns out that most of the formal niceties of the storyteller's craft are owed to someone's need to make war look attractive (so as to keep indulging in it). Then art itself becomes another excuse for slaughter. After all, without a bracing conflict to concentrate our minds, we'd probably just drink beer and watch the soaps. When instead, we can read this:
Patroklos now put on the flashing bronze.
Greaves were the first thing, beautifully fitted
to calf and shin with silver ankle chains;
and next he buckled round his ribs the cuirass,
blazoned with stars, of swift Aiakides;
then slung the silver-studded blade of bronze
about his shoulders, and the vast solid shield;
then on his noble head he placed the helm,
its plume of terror nodding high above,
and took two burly spears with his own handgrip.
--The Iliad (Robert Fitzgerald translation), p. 375
(Homer said that.)
What would we do warless with our anger?
What reason would we find to rape and slay?
Too bad to see our skill sets going begging:
we got so good at blowing enemies away.
(I said that.)
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