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LABYRINTHS I

6/19/2015

MAZES TO THINK WITH

June 2015

I.                    STORIES

In the all but abandoned Alhambra Washington Irving moved into a new set of long deserted rooms. It was the spring of 1829. When night came he took a lantern and by its dim light began to explore the rooms, terror growing as he went along but unable to turn back, Then, he found a shuttered window, threw it open, and looked out to the moon in a clear heaven.

Or so I remember the story after reading it on his Tales of the Alhambra, dreaming about it, and when I awoke, trying to think what it means. It’s ab archetype, I am convinced, and so not surprising if someone finds it deeply rooted somewhere in the psyche --   wandering outside the familiar world, fear of losing one’s way, dim light in deep darkness, then a break through into something unexpected and wonderful. It’s the story of explorers discovering new lands, scientists making discoveries after protracted discouragement, of Jesus wandering for forty days in the wilderness, of Jews in flight from Egypt wandering forty years until they found the promised land.

And it’s the story of Theseus in the labyrinth. Maybe the Greek myth helps us understand the terror that drives the story. It’s personified as the Minotaur, of course, a boundary crosser, , half human half animal, like us and not like us. Theseus has to confront all sorts of fears, wandering in that labyrinth, being surprised by the Minotaur, or worse never finding him at all, finding only himself , and that self less than fully human.

But no fair! Theseus was not clueless in confronting the Minotaur. He had, literally, a clue, the ball of yarn, gift of the Minotaur’s half-sister, Ariadne. By unrolling the clue as he wandered, Theseus could deal with one fear, being eternally lost in the complexity of that maze, wandering not for an evening, or forty days and forty nights, or forty years, but forever. So all the time Theseus had the yarn that kept him in touch with “The Super Holy One,” as Ariadne’s name seems to mean.

Washington Irving had no ball of yarn, no contact with this saving female presence.   Modern, secular, enlightened he had to walk it by himself. I wonder if he whistled the folk tune there in those dusty palace rooms, “Jesus walked a lonesome valley; he had to walk it by himself.   No one else could walk it for him. He had to walk it by himself.” If so, it was whistling in the dark, not reaching out to some implausible sanctity.

He didn’t slash with sword or dagger as Theseus had. He opened a window, and then he could see beyond his fear. Plato would have had fun, I bet, with that variation in the archetype. He’d have recognized quickly enough the symbolism of the shuttered window and worked it into a conversation with Socrates.

Too bad Plato didn’t go that route. Big help he is! We have to figure it out for ourselves. No one else will figure it out for us -- except we already know, I think, what that window was, at east for Irving -- pretty clearly it was writing, or more precisely the ability to turn unexpected experience into well-crafted story. He makes beauty out of fear. And next to that window, surely, was another, waiting to be unshuttered, music, and next to it another, art, and so on down a whole bank of windows. What are they all? Is that one mathematics? is that one astronomy? How many are there? Nobody else is going to tell me; I guess I have to figure it out for myself.

II.                  THINKING THROUGH LABYRINTHS

Professor N. opened her class in Art History by paraphrasing the story from Washington Irving, and asking her students whether the story meant anything to them. Did it match their experience at all?   It didn’t take long for someone to make the obvious joke—that college was a lot like groping one’s way through one dark room after another without a clue. The class laughed the nervous laugh of recognition.

“OK,” Professor N. said, “What’s the window?” That was a harder question. Were there any windows? After an awkward silence she told another story:

“Another young person in another part of the Alhambra entered another identical suite of rooms that same night. He’d heard the legend that at the end of these rooms a Moorish treasure was buried. It had to be dug out at night lest the authorities arrest one for damaging the site. What do you think happened to him?”

“He didn’t waste time opening any windows.”

“He hurried, stumbled, fell through a hole in the floor.”

“Did he find the treasure?”

“There wasn’t any treasure to find. He believed in a fairy tale.”

The class got the point. Then (and only then) Professor N. said, “Look, the propaganda issued by the administration of this college is full of pious chatter about persona growth and development, nurturing the whole person, all that sort of stuff. I can’t do that for you. You have to do that for yourself. But if you want to stop and open a window, I can help you do that. I can help you see. There are plenty of other windows, if you want: colleagues of mine who can help you hear music, or read poetry – there are lots of windows, if you’re not in a rush to find the Moorish treasure. I can help you open this one window, and you won’t be sorry if you do.”

There was an awkward pause. A few students closed their empty notebooks and left,

“Let’s start in ancient Crete, with a structure near Knossos that …”
They are off and running.

“

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SKIN

6/18/2015

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I try to keep this blog focused on liberal education, but here's something different:

SKIN:

A Probe into Greek Ways of Thinking

DRAFT: Criticisms and suggestions welcome

Wrconnor1@gmail.com

This draft essay is part of the Thinking Greek project –an attempt to bring into sharper focus the distinctive nature of thought among the ancient Greeks –not , for a change, the great ideas, philosophical insights, or attainments of the intellectuals, but how ordinary Greek citizens went about making decisions, and figuring out how to cope with the world around them. One underlying premise of the project is that abstract categories, such as beauty, truth, were slow to develop and gain traction. Most people, most of the time, I hypothesize, thought through analogues and metaphors drawn from the natural world, not least the human body.   Skin, then, may be a useful staring point.

Bob Connor

June 2015

--

χροῒ δῆλα

Skin makes things clear.

Pherecydes of Syros (cited in Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Eminent Philosophers I 118)

At a do or die moment for Greek mercenaries trapped in the middle of Anatolia and facing possible extinction from Persian forces attention turned to an ear lobe. Had Apollonides’ ears been pierced? The issue was not a suspicion of effeminacy but doubts about Apollonides’ Greekness, even though he had a good Greek name and spoke a well-known Greek dialect. Xenophon, rejecting Apollonides’ contention that ”anyone who said he could gain safety in any other way than by winning the King's consent through persuasion, if possible, was talking nonsense “ (Xenophon Anabasis 3.1, 27). Xenophon interrupted him, refuted his arguments, and urged his fellow commanders to remove Apollonides from their councils. Then Agasias, one of those commanders, went a step further, breaking in and saying, “For that matter, this fellow has nothing to do either with Boeotia or with Greece at allt all, for I have noticed that he has both his ears bored, like a Lydian's.” (3.1.30)

That did it. Apollonides was out and so was any attempt to conciliate the Great King; the Greks would fight their way home if anyone tried to stop them.

Detail of Attic red-figure amphora, ascribed to Myson, in the Louvre (1836 G 197), showing Croesus, the Lydian king, with an ear-ring.

That is a minor episode, but revealing about the taboo against skin piercing among the Greeks. In many cultures skin has magical powers, and needs to be treated with great respect; but often that is accompanied with piercing, curing or scarification rituals. But not among free Greek males. Attitudes toward the tattoo remind s of that fact. Greeks might brand or tattoo their slaves, but with one notable exception (Epimenides of Crete; separate discussion forthcoming) we know of no free Greek who was tattooed. Egyptians tattooed; so did Scythians, but never free Greeks.

Greeks also avoided circumcision, even though it was practiced by many people inn the ancient world. After Alexander’s conquests in the Near East there were powerful economic and cultural reasons to Hellenize, and that meant avoiding circumcision. Those forces were at work even among the Jews in Jerusalem in the second century before our era:

In those days lawless men came forth from Israel. And misled many, saying, “Let us go an make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king. He authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, the holy covenant.

1 Maccabees 1 vs. 11 – 15 (RSV)

The situation in Jerusalem is described with further detail in 2 Maccabees ch. 4 , where the responsibility for the Hellenizing movement is [;aced on the high priest, Jason, who “at once shifted his countrymen over to the Greek way of life” ( 2 Maccabees 4.10 ) including the building of a gymnasium. The account goes on to describes the priests hastening “to take part in the unlawful proceedings in the wrestling arena after the call to the discus,” (v.14) and the quadrennial games at Tyre (vs. 18). In short, Jerusalem Hellenized; it became a Greek polis, in which, of course, there was a gymnasium, and there circumcision would be evident. It was a sign one had not really Hellenized.

Skin, then, provided a negative but powerful way of defining Greekness. Being Greek meant avoiding certain practices that were well known in the ancient Mediterranean world. It also, encoded gender differences among the Greeks: women could have their ears pierced, but not men Skin coloration, moreover, encoded socissl oles, to judge from some Attic vase painters who represented females with white skin, as if they never stepped out of the dark inner recesses of the Greek house, and males with dark skin, as well tanned outdoorsmen.

Skin also, however, seems to have provided a boundary on seeking certain kinds of knowledge seeking. Heinrich von Staden has shown in a brilliant article the cultural context within which the dissection of human beings was long avoided, then flourished briefly in Alexandria in the third century before our era, when Herophilus and Erasistratus conducted autopsies, and then disappeared untilthe fourteenth century.

Marsyas: The norms that were reflected in Greek attitudes toward the piercing or cutting of human skin could be inverted in myth. Greeks retold the story, probably originally tied to an ancient Near Eastern mourning ritual, of a competition between Apollo, the divinity who embodied many Greek ideas of manliness, and a contentious Silenus figure named Marsyas.   The story is localized near the river Marsyas in Phrygia, that is, in a region imagined as a virtual anti-Greece. There the Great Mother, Cybele, dominated religious life, along with her consort Attis, and castrated priests, the Galli. There Marsyas used his aulos (a reed-based instrument closer to a recorder than to a flute) to challenge the divinity whose favorite musical instrument was the cithara, the antecedent of the modern guitar.    Apollo was not satisfied with the victory accorded to him by a friendly jury of Muses; the presumptuousness of the Marsyas in challenging an Olympian divinity had to be punished. So Apollo stripped the skin off him while he was still alive, treating a human-like creature more brutally than an animal flayed after slaughter. Marsyas’ hide, it was said, was then hung up for all to see in the market place of Celaenae (Herodotus 7.26.3).

The Marsyas myth, as Greek and Roman authors tell it, turns upside down several antitheses that often recur in Greek thought –the contrast between human and divine, the frenzied music of the aulos vs. the Apollonian restraint of the cithara, and skin vs. hide. The myth carries with it a warning about over stepping boundaries

The Greek language, like English, distinguishes the skin of a human (ho chros, he chroiao,   ) from the hide of an animal (derma). In Greek the linguistic distinction corresponds to a difference in practice. To kill and animal, strip its hide, tan it, use it as leather (diphtheria) posed no problem for the Greeks. But to do the same to a human would be an abomination.

This distinction between animal and human leads into fresh territory, for in the Geek imagination that distinction is permeable.   Men, particularly in moments of sexual excitement, are imagined to have goat hooves and tails; they become satyrs. Man and bull are fused in the ferocious Minotaur; centaurs, half human half horse, seize women and fight off the fully human Lapiths.

Just as the divide between animal and human is crossed by these imaginary creatures, the skin too is not an insuperable separation. The ancient Greeks seem to have been well aware that the skin had many passageways, poroi, pores, through it. It was not a protective sheath around the body, but permeable, quite literally porous. (See LSJ s.v. πόρος I 6). Like other openings in the body the skin provides, in effect, means for inflow and outflow. That notion is especially important given Greek attitudes toward the inspiration and the emotions, both of which are often conceived of as flows from the outside into the body. Eros, for example, is often imagined as originating through vision, but in concrete terms, through the eyes. [Separate discussion forthcoming].

In addition, the process of inspiration was sometimes imagined as an infusion through openings in the body. Origen, in the third century of our era, criticized the idea that the inspiration of the Pythia might be understood as sexual possession by Apollo:

It is said of the Pythian priestess, whose oracle seems to have been the most celebrated, that when she sat down at the mouth of the Castalian cave, the prophetic Spirit of Apollo entered her private parts; and when she was filled with it, she gave utterance to responses which are regarded with awe as divine truths. Judge by this whether that spirit does not show its profane and impure nature, by choosing to enter the soul of the prophetess not through the more becoming medium of the bodily pores which are both open and invisible, but by means of what no modest man would ever see or speak of. Origen Against Celsus 7.3

Origen does not reject the idea that Apollo has inspired hisproestess; he simply substitute other openings in the body for the idea of sexual penetration.

Conclusion: Skin is a boundary marker and as such a locus for anxiety. That ca be seen in the treatment of the skin in many cultures.   But cultures and sub-cultures differ widely in the ways the ski is treated and conceptualized -- the three images at the head of this   essay are there to remind us of just that point. Among the ancient Greeks the anxiety associated with skin may have been comparatively high, since it was used in that culture to mark important contrasts, Greek v. non-Greek, male vs female, animal vs. human, inner vs outer. Yet the Greeks observed strict restraints on any form of bodily penetration or cutting. That may in part result from the vulnerability of the body in a culture where war was recurrent and fought out spear, javelin and arrow. But the restraint may also have a metaphorical significance, reflecting the perceived permeability of the very contrasts and categories embodies in the metaphorical significance of skin in that culture.   It is not surprising, then, to find among the Greeks a reluctance to cut, pierce or in any way weaken the skin.

Some Reading:

E. Fernandes “Disease” in N. Wilson, ed. Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, pp. 233 –34.

Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press 1987) Adrienne Mayor, “People Illustrated” Archaeology March / April 1999 pp. 54 -57. PDF

Heinrich von Staden, “The Discovery of the Body: Human Dissection and Its Cultural Contexts in Ancient Greece“ Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 65 (1992) pp. 223-41

S. Tougher, “Eunuchs” in Nigel Wilson, ed., Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece (   )   pp. 280- 81.

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THE HEALTH OF THE CLASSICS: SOME RECENT EVIDENCE SUGGESTING WHERE TO BUILD FOR THE FUTURE

6/8/2015

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The Modern Language Association recently released data collected from colleges and universities in 2013. Foreign language enrollments compared to 2009 were down overall: ”… aggregated results for enrollments in all languages show a decrease of 6.7% from the 2009 survey, thus ending a steady rise in enrollments since 1980. “ Enrollments in European languages almost all showed significant decreases; Latin and ancient Greek were especially hard hit: “Several other languages experienced more radical decreases: Ancient Greek (35.5%), Modern Hebrew (19.4%), Russian (17.9%), and Latin (16.2%). “

A census taken by the newly reconstituted Society for Classical Studies does not refute this bleak picture but lets it be seen in a broader context. The society surveyed over 400 US and Canadian institutions where it has reason to believe the ancient classics have recently been taught.

Of the over 400 institutions polled by the SCS 265 replied, either completely or in part, for a response rate of 65%; a slight majority of the responses came from free standing departments; another third from classics combined with other fields (e.g. a “Foreign Languages” department), the remainder reflects a variety of arrangements, including, it would seem, a fair number that offer some instruction in classics but not a degree program. This picture is consistent with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators estimate that there were 276 degree granting Classic programs in the United States in 2011/12. (That means that organized classics program are available in only about 10% of the four year institutions in the United States.)

In the SCS census about 190 departments or programs reported that one or more undergraduate received a bachelor’s degree in classics in 2013 – 14; on average there were about 8 graduating majors per department or program; the total from the reporting departments was about 1600. Adjusting for the institutions that did not respond one might guess that 2400 undergraduates in the US and Canada received a bachelor’s degree in classics during the 2013 -14 academic year. The Humanities Indicators estimated 2240 bachelor’s degrees in classics were conferred in the academic year 2011-12. These figures all seem to me to be within the static range resulting from studies based on somewhat different approaches in different years.

More alarming, however, is the finding in the Humanities Indicators’ 2012 survey of Departments in the Humanities that 5% of classics programs ceased to offer a degree at some level; the losses were concentrated in public institutions (11%) while 1 % of private institutions experienced a loss of a program. “Primarily Research” institutions were hardest hit. The overall loss in Classics is slightly less than that experienced on average in humanities fields; foreign language departments and, apparently, English experienced the heaviest losses. Stil;l, any attrition in a small and perhaps fragile fild is worrisome.

In addition to majors the SCS census found 1190 classic minors in the responding institutions; adjusting for the non-responders perhaps there were 1800 minors in all. The census also found 18 MATs, 122 MAs, and 62 Ph.D.s. These numbers probably all need to be adjusted upward, as we have seen. The number of minors seems not to be far off from the Humanities Indicator’s estimate of 1928 minors in 2011 - 12.

The SCS census also looked at enrollments in the wide variety of courses offered through classical programs. These figures, if tracked over time, may provide a better indication of the overall health of the profession than those for majors and minors. The snapshot currently available points to generally solid enrollments in courses such as Classical Mythology, Classical Civilization, Etymology, Ancient History and others. These courses may be a firewall for classics programs at a time when other foreign language programs are being hard hit. Given the negative trends affecting the humanities fields will need all the protection they can find.

Finally, the SCS census also asked departments about certain educational practices; Adam Blistein of the SCS informed me by email, “Of all the 253 departments that gave any response to this question, 158 (62.5%) participate in a study-abroad program and 68 (26.9%) offer internships for majors.” While there is room for improvement this is very good news since studies based on the National Survey of Student Engagement and other data show that these practices have powerful, long lasting educational effects. The high percentage of classics programs that contribute to honors colleges or similar operations is also noteworthy. It would be interesting to know how many other humanistic fields have demonstrate a similar commitment to these and other high impact practices.

The jury is still out, waiting for more evidence, gathered systematically and tracked consistently over time. The evidence available at this moment, points not to an imminent collapse of classical studies, but to the impact of trends adversely affecting most humanistic fields, especially foreign languages and literary studies. The wide range of approaches represented in classics departments, and their commitment to practices known to contribute to students’ cognitive growth give reason to believe that there is a secure foundation on which to build in the future, and that the field, while small and vulnerable, can continue to play an important role in North American higher education.

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