Futile Horn

09.25.2003 - 7:17 am (embrace the Greeks)

I saw Barton Fink recently. It was gorgeous and had a great story, and even though it was about a writer, it was particularly harsh on writers (I really hate writers; they are preposterous human beings) so that was forgiven. It was funny in that dark horrific Coen brothers sort of way: for example the heat from the personal hell of the man living next door literally melts off the wallpaper in the title character’s hotel room.

I’m also reading a fun book called Who Needs Greek?. The first chapter is about how Erasmus lead the fight to have Greek restored to the academic curriculum and how this created such an uproar that the knowledge of Greek itself was called heresy by some despite being the original language of the New Testament. Learning Greek undermined the authority of the Latin translation of the bible and contributed to the Reformation; commenting on and amending the stylistically shabby Greek of the New Testament challenged the divine inspiration of the text; perhaps even being exposed to the “Greek” character made people unscrupulous. Whether you spoke Greek, and indeed even how you pronounced Greek became an index of your political and institutional affiliations. The issue was at the heart of power struggles in which people were put too death. An interesting legacy for a dead language.

I picked up a couple of more useful commentaries on Horace, so I am getting back into that as well. It’s pretty exciting: quod mare Dauniae / non decoloravere caedes? / quae caret ora cruore nostro? “What sea is not discolored with the Italian slain? What country is free of our gore?” (Odes. II.i.33-5). Some fairly interesting things go on between the poems. For instance in one poem he celebrates with an old comrade-at-arms even though they lost in the civil wars. In another, someone inconsolably mourns the loss of a loved one during a time of Roman victory. Between them he sings of a faithless lover, and how the gods smile at their broken vows, how coquettish women are feared by mothers, poor old men, newly married girls. But what if, because it is bookended by two poems of exactly opposite themes, this poem is also about war; that the gods’ laughter at human affairs is something more sinister, that it is soldier’s gore at the end of Cupid’s arrows; that the new generation of men growing up to enter her service, that the older men still hanging at her door signal the endless martial conflicts; that the mothers, old men, and wives fear being separated, perhaps eternally, from the young men whom this faithless mistress ensnares. If the comparison were done by simile, or even expressed metaphor, it would feel forced and artificial, but because there is not a word of it in the poem, because it is accomplished entirely by where it is placed in collection of poems, it is poignant. Now, by no means am I saying that this is how the poem must be interpreted, but the human effects of war is certainly not what it’s not about. And I don’t know about anybody else, but to me this is a new and exciting way to infuse meaning into words – simply from it’s physical placement on a page.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn