04/30/2014
David Lummus on Mythology
David Lummus is currently Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University. Prof. Lummus specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian literature and intellectual history. His research and teaching interests include fourteenth-century literature in Latin and the vernacular, Renaissance Humanism, medieval and early modern mythography, and the pastoral tradition. He explores critical approaches such […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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I have with me in the studio a very special guest who goes back to the mythic beginnings of entitled opinions.
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David Lummis, our first production manager on this show.
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He was with us when we aired our now legendary first season with guests like
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Ganesi Dad, Richard Roy, Andre Linde, Shirley Hazard, and other members of the generation of titans.
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David is this show's original Hercules, the one who learned the ins and outs of the KZSU studio
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who created our website, who found a way to get our podcasts on iTunes at a time
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when that was not an easy thing to figure out how to do.
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David Lummis is also our wandering a disiess.
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Stanford is his true Ithaca.
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He arrived here with a degree in classics in 2003 and received a PhD in Italian literature in 2008.
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He then journeyed eastward through the Straits of Schiller and Carabits
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and spent four years as an assistant professor at Yale.
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Cheerches this craft, the Trimcoif goddess, but eventually he made his way back to Stanford
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and for the past three years he's been a faculty member in our home department of French and Italian.
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Stay tuned folks, we have a show on myth and it's after lives with David Lummis coming up.
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Among his other projects, David is working on a book about mythography and the early modern reception of classical myth.
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But before we talk to him about some of the great archetypes of Greek myth,
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including Prometheus, Orpheus, edipus, and Narcissus, your host feels the need to opinionate a bit about the topic of today's show.
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I don't know where the West's earliest myths came from, whether they originated in pre-human gestural behavior,
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whether they grew out of religious ritual or from archaic terrors, or from imaginative storytelling.
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Yet I believe along with Freud and Jung that there is hardly anything in the human psyche, hardly anything about its basic configurations,
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its deepest impulses, or its recurrent nightmares that the Greeks did not crystallize and give expression to in their great treasury of myths.
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Every time we go back to them, it's like a homecoming for us.
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In the story of Cronos devouring his children, in the story of Antigone, or Pygmalion, or Icarus, or Action de Hunter, we recognize the elementary particles of the human psyche.
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There are only a finite number of such elementary particles, called them archetypes, and I'm with those who believe that the Greeks discovered and gave narrative form to just about all of them.
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There are very few primal myths in Western culture, ancient or modern, which do not go back in one way or another, to a Greek source.
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Freud had no doubts that Greek myths, as well as the art and literature they inform, or gave rise to, constitute the West's underlying grammar of the elemental impulses and patterns in the unconscious and subconscious of the human race.
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Like Freud, I have no doubt that ancient myth already mapped out the basic landscape of the human psyche, a landscape that psychology and sociology may survey more in detail, but not discover, because the Greeks already did that for us.
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I'm also with Carl Jung when he declares that the archaic levels of the psyche are, I quote, like an old riverbed in which the water still flows.
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Nothing has ever lost Jungifirms, and this means that no matter how many millennia separate us from the Greeks, we still recognize in their myths, what he called the archetypal psychic structures of extreme antiquity, some of which correspond to the Greek structure.
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Some of which correspond to levels of consciousness, which have hardly left the animal sphere.
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End quote.
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Only if they personify in a primal way those archaic forces from which consciousness originated in the first place, can mythic figures live on and assume new variations and iterations across the ages.
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No matter how evolved or secularized, the conscious mind feels a primordial pull or draw of its earlier stages of existence.
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When we hear the story of Agamemnon murdered at his doorstep upon his return from Troy, we know that we've been there before.
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When we hear of Orpheus descending into the underworld with his lyre, we undergo a homecoming of sorts.
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By we, I mean our collective unconscious.
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And if anyone tries to tell you, there is no such thing as the collective unconscious, just refer them to today's show.
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We'll set them straight. David, welcome to the program.
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Thank you Robert, it's a pleasure to be here.
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Welcome back home as I was saying.
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In a different capacity.
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Yes, on the other side of the microphone, that's great.
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So first question I have for you. A number of the myths of ancient Greece have gone on to have a vigorous afterlife in western culture with many retellings of their stories and literature.
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And not only literature, but also the visual arts, opera, philosophy and of course modern psychology.
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Where do you think this staying power of these myths come from?
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Well, like you said, a lot of what I do as a scholar has to do with medieval and early modern remaking and understanding of classical myth.
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It's pretty amazing the links to which a lot of these Christian readers go to salvage pagan stories.
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They recognize them as valuable on a human level, but also as somewhat difficult to relate to their own Christian faith.
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Even though sometimes they're willing to ascribe mystical interpretations to them.
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Most of the interpretations that these Christian thinkers end up with are really a lot of times just a modified retelling of the story that relates what they see at its human truth to their own time.
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In fact, the most compelling interpretations of myth, I think, are really just good stories in themselves.
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That's how I see the mythical thinking of Freud and Jung, but also Denny DeRoucheman, who talks about the modern myth of love.
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They retell the story and infuse it with a different meaning.
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So I think it's important to remember that myths are really fundamentally stories.
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Their tales are told between people in different places and in different times.
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They do capture something that's essentially human, perhaps, but they do so in a renewable medium.
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That's really a part of who we are.
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So if we can still relate to these characters, it's because there's something fundamentally human about telling stories.
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They help us make sense out of life in a way that analysis and logos cannot.
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Yeah, I agree with that, except that there is a difference to be drawn between a primal myth that has this extraordinary staying power, which never loses its relevance, as opposed to the countless stories that we invent every day.
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On any given day, you can turn on a television and see 20 or 30 stories in progress, and these are not stories that have that mythic power, and I mentioned to them.
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And as I said in my introduction, I believe the myths that come to us from antiquity are, they feed into some kind of deep strata of what makes us human in a way that will assure that they will continue to live on in our cultural history.
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I agree with you. I think there's something essentialistic, something human, there's something sacred at the foundation of a myth, whether it's a violence or a change, or something that's maybe a kind of a myth.
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But I think that that in speak of a myth is inseparable from its narrative form.
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Oh, for sure.
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Yeah.
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There are plenty of stories I'm sure from Greece and other cultures that never made it pass at some, that they're their own time, and maybe even for a good reason.
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But there's something special about these stories, about what they capture and how they capture that makes them special.
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Well, probably the reason they've come down to us is because they were already pre-selected before they got written down.
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If you believe, as I, along with the other people I mentioned, that they probably go back to our pre-history, the pre-history of the human race, then there are countless stories from that time which probably never made it into the archive as such.
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Alright, and I think you can think about the way one approaches myth in two different ways, at least.
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There's this archaeological, anthropological dig into the past for their origin that he always multiplies itself because they're multiple origins.
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They're multiple places where a myth is born and it's associated.
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But then there's kind of a creative, interpretive way of dealing with myth that makes it new each time.
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In that propagates it, that doesn't focus on its originality and its origin, but on what it means now.
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And I think that's the part of the renewable medium, the way in which we can make it our own now, that same story, that same unspeakable part of that myth.
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Well, in fact, today what we want to do is discover the ways in which some of these myths have gone on to have retellings in, especially the 20th century.
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And perhaps even in the 21st century now, let me tell our listeners that you and I are team teaching a course as we speak on Italo Calvino.
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And tomorrow we're going to meet our students and we assigned a reading, which I was doing yesterday from his book Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
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We never done a show on Calvino in the last 10 years on this show, but I am going to do one.
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I was not a first sure, very soon I hope. But in the meantime, for the listeners who don't know about Calvino Six Memos to the Next Millennium, there are a series of lectures that he wrote to be delivered at Harvard for the Norton lectures.
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And he finished five out of the six memos before he died very suddenly and prematurely on the eve of his departure to Boston.
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And in these memos, what he's trying to do is identify literary qualities or characteristics that he thinks will enable literature to survive in the 21st century.
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And so you have lightness, quickness, exactitude, multiplicity, visibility.
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Highly recommended book to anyone out there listening to the show.
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But rereading the one on quickness for our class.
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Here I was struck again by the fact that here is a 20th century writer talking about the 21st century.
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He dies in 1985. And what does he do? He has to fall back on the most ancient myths in this case at the end of his essay on quickness.
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He invokes the figure of mercury.
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So he says that, let me quote from this, he said, all the subjects I have dealt with in this lecture are all under the sign of an Olympian God who my particularly honor.
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Hermes, Mercury.
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Hermes is the Greek name, Mercury, the Roman.
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God of communication and mediation.
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And he says, Mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile, adaptable, free and easy, establish the relationship of the gods among themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and individual destinies.
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I think he's extrapolating a little.
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Hermes is the God of communication.
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It's a messenger. He carries messages from the gods to the humans.
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And so he's a God of interconnection as you got.
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You know exactly. He's the God of quickness really.
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And he's a vote as someone who can move from one place to another in a flash.
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But not just movement, he carries something within all times.
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He's really a perfect figure of our information age.
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Absolutely.
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When everything is instantaneous and is carrying little bits of information.
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Well in fact, and it's all under the, I say under the eegis of Hermes or Mercury, this fast God of telecommunications.
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Exactly.
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And I think Michel Seab brings up Hermes in a similar fashion, the God of Networks.
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And well, yeah, Michel Seab, our colleague, done a couple of shows with him on entitled opinions.
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And he has a five volume series called Hermes where he speaks about communication, interpretation, messaging, angels.
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And angels are also messenger. So Mercury is a kind of angel.
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Right, exactly.
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And therefore in the spirit of lightness. So that's why Colveno will go on to say that what better patron could I possibly choose to support my proposals for literature in the 21st century than Mercury.
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And then he contrasts Mercury with Saturn, the God of melancholy.
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And he says that ever since antiquity it has been thought that the Saturn I temperament is the one proper to artists, poets and thinkers.
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And that seems true enough.
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Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion,
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discontented with the world as it is inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end, and fix their gaze on the immobility of silent words.
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And then in a confessional mode he says certainly my own character corresponds to the traditional features of the guild to which I belong.
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The guild of writers who are tend to be melancholic under the ages of Saturn.
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I too have always been Saturn I my cult of Mercury is perhaps merely an aspiration what I would like to be.
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I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury and everything I write reflects these two impulses.
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I don't think that Kansvino could have said what he is saying here in such an economical penetrating fashion had he not had recourse to these mythic figures.
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Right. No it's true.
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On the one hand he is assuming that they are common knowledge.
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But on the other I think it's interesting that he doesn't talk about myth to evoke the past.
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These are for the next millennium.
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They are for armilenium. He is using mythic figures to evoke the future.
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As a representation for the future. It's a great example of how these figures from the past can be de-boned and reconstructed for the future.
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But still maintain some kind of core significance.
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I found it interesting that he then goes on to juxtapose Hermes Mercury with a festus who was Vulcan in the Roman.
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That is a weird and I think he is actually getting it from someone else.
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But let's just dwell one more moment on this idea of Mercury and Vulcan because these are two very opposed gods.
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Mercury is in the air, he is fast, he is quick.
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Hephesus is a god who does not roam the heavens but lurks at the bottom of craters.
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Shut up in his smithy where he tirelessly forges objects that are the last word in refinement.
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Jewels and ornaments for the gods, weapons, shields, net traps, to Mercury's aerial flight Vulcan replies with his limping gate and the rhythmic beat of his hammer.
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Hephesus has a handicap.
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Then he is referring to a book by Andre Vuereil, the Frenchman.
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He says that Mercury and Vulcan represent the two inseparable and complementary functions of life.
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Mercury represents sintany or participation in the world around us.
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Vulcan represents focalization or constructive concentration.
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This is quite fascinating.
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No, I think it's great.
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It's a great story.
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You tell me that they mean those things.
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It makes me think of them in an entirely different way.
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It's a continual accretion of repropose of meaning to these figures.
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Vulcan is perfect for the figure of the artist who is continually making things in his workshop.
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It has a handicap that keeps him from moving quickly.
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You need the material to move around and to interact and to make connections.
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You need that separation and focus to make something and to craft it in perfection.
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And Galvino is a perfection.
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His style is crystalline.
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Absolutely.
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That's why he goes on to say that only when he read Vuereil, bringing these two gods together,
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to understand something about himself, about how I am and how I would like to be,
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about how I write and how I might be able to write Vulcan's concentration and craftsmanship
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are needed to record Mercury's adventures and metamorphoses.
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Mercury's swiftness and mobility are needed to make Vulcan's endless labors become bears of meaning.
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And from the formless mineral matrix, the gods symbol of office acquire their forms.
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So you got it right on the nail when you said the artist, the poet, the writer, needs that focalisation that you get from a festus in order to do justice to the Mercury's aerial lightning-quick flashes of insight.
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Right.
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And I think you get in those two figures is something that's typical to those six memos.
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He exposes five values really, but only in contrast with their opposite.
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And so the real values and the tension that comes out of those two things.
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And I think that the idea of the artist as a person who makes networks and connections and things happen.
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And does so in a very economical way, is dependent upon the foundation of concentrated making.
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Well, we're going to have fun tomorrow, what you just got set for sure.
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I know. And it's great because the quickness, the quickness he starts off talking about myths and legends,
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make sure. Yeah. And the way they're so economical about communicating information.
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And he does the same thing in lightness in almost every one of the memos where Perseus becomes his figure for the hero of lightness,
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who manages to avoid the petrification of the Medusa by looking at her indirectly.
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The Medusa representing this unprotected gaze into the heart of reality that can paralyze.
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And they're Perseus who defeats her by looking at her through the reflection in the shield, becomes a figure for a writer who manages not to abandon reality,
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but to approach reality in a transversal in direct way the way Colvino did with his fantasy fiction.
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And giving free reign to an imagination.
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So he says, "My writing falls under Perseus."
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Right. I think that all of these are their video myths.
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He really thinks in terms of Avids craftsmanship.
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His craftsmanship as well as Avids metaphysics if you want, where you have a horizontal relationship between all of creation,
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where there is an inner kinship of the species from the mineral to the plant world, to the animal world, to the human world, and the gods.
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They're on this continuous not a hierarchy of being.
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And one can metamorphose into the other.
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So Avid is a hero of lightness in that regard.
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Because there's a heavy metaphysics of platonic, great chain of being.
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Right. Everything's divided hierarchically.
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Well, there are a few figures that we want to talk about David who are, have a special vitality in Western cultural history.
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And I'd be beginning with Prometheus, who, as you know, but I'll remind our listeners, he was a Titan God.
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A forethought, his name means forethinker.
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Crafty council, who he was entrusted with the task of molding humanity out of clay.
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And he tried to make our lives better after he created us in ways that brought him into direct conflict with Zeus, King of the gods.
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First, he tricked Zeus and the other gods out of the best portion of the sacrificial feast, acquiring the best meat for us in the sacrifices.
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And then when Zeus withheld fire in retribution, he stalled it from heaven and delivered to humanity, hidden inside a fennel stock.
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So he gives us fire.
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And as punishment for these rebellious acts, Zeus ordered the creation of Pandora, the first woman.
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As a means to introduce horrible misfortunes into our lives.
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And meanwhile, he had Prometheus arrested and bound to a stake on Mount Calcathos, where an eagle was set to feed upon his liver that would continue to regenerate.
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And in some versions Hercules comes along much, much later and liberates Prometheus from this torture.
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Prometheus was important in all stages.
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There are Neoplatonic interpretations.
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There are medieval and early modern and so forth.
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Would you like to draw attention to some of the important ones for your field of study, which is the early modern?
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Well, fundamental in the myth is this idea of the human versus the divine.
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That there's some kind of sacrilege and civilization.
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And Prometheus embodies that future-looking, progress-oriented outlook.
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And there's something that's, like I said, sacrilegious, but Bokacho, for example, one of the authors that I work on who wrote a mythography called the genealogy of the pagan gods, which is currently being translated into English.
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He saw, he saw, Pertmethius' torture as being a kind of contemplation and that stealing fire was really getting to some sort of divine knowledge of the stars and sort of celestial understanding of the cosmos, which he then brings to human beings and civilizes them.
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So there's, for Bokacho, Prometheus was the mediator between the order of the cosmos and a civic order, an ethical order.
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And Prometheus was the hero of that. And there wasn't really a sense of revolt. It was all diffused, really.
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So there's certain key elements of the ancient myth, good diffused to make Prometheus the hero really of the civic philosopher, right, for Bokacho.
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And Fichino, I believe, has a similar interpretation of a figure for someone who gets access to erudite celestial information and is able to synthesize and bring it back.
|
| 00:24:53.000 |
Right, much Sijo Fichino, the 15th century Neo-Platonist, he has a more somber version of Prometheus than Bokacho, very sympathetic with Bokachos, but the theft of fire for him was the spark of divine knowledge that he brings to man.
|
| 00:25:12.000 |
But once we have that, we are weighed down with the burden of not being able to realize it in our own worlds, that reason causes us to realize that we are bound and trapped within our own decaying bodies, mortal bodies, and that we will never have this ultimate knowledge.
|
| 00:25:33.000 |
We only have a spark of it, short of death, and he interprets Prometheus bound to the rock as the necessary unhappiness of beings with a higher consciousness as human beings are supposed to have.
|
| 00:25:47.000 |
Trapped in a body, right?
|
| 00:25:48.000 |
So he sees that divine spark is a kind of promise for a spiritual life that's beyond the body.
|
| 00:25:54.000 |
But Bokacho really saw a connection, it was the kind of knowledge you get by looking at the stars, like contemplating, like considering, right?
|
| 00:26:03.000 |
And by being together with the stars and bringing that understanding of the cosmos, that spark of natural knowledge to political life to civic life.
|
| 00:26:13.000 |
And so Prometheus, remember the hero for Fichino is just a sign of intellect living in a body.
|
| 00:26:19.000 |
You can see how these myths, they maintain something at the center of them that's explained and dealt with by the myth, but that's not the same as what you get in the Greek version.
|
| 00:26:32.000 |
But it doesn't have to be, that's what's great about a myth.
|
| 00:26:34.000 |
Well, no, because a myth is porous, it cannot be fixed, it's meaning, in some sense it's inexplicable, because it's inexplicable is reiterable and re-teleable.
|
| 00:26:46.000 |
Because it had evocations without having explanation.
|
| 00:26:50.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:26:51.000 |
And of course, in the romantic era, we're skipping over a lot of the reception of Prometheus, but he's huge for the romantics.
|
| 00:27:01.000 |
Shelley, for example, he stands for the defiance of everything that's associated with tyranny, which in his case was church, monarch, and patriarch.
|
| 00:27:13.000 |
Therefore, a hero, a rebellious hero who represents, or associated with the French Revolution, with Christ, with even the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, this kind of defiant figure, vis-a-vis God.
|
| 00:27:30.000 |
Right. Maybe you can't rewrite the idea of rebellion, and they focus on it alone.
|
| 00:27:35.000 |
He's a hero to the romantics, in his own rebelliousness, and championing of the future.
|
| 00:27:43.000 |
And a human self-reliance.
|
| 00:27:45.000 |
Right, exactly.
|
| 00:27:46.000 |
And defiance of the gods, and established order, Mary Shelley also with Frankenstein, the subtitle, is the modern Prometheus.
|
| 00:27:56.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:27:57.000 |
It often gets eliminated from the modern edition.
|
| 00:27:59.000 |
I know.
|
| 00:28:00.000 |
I don't understand.
|
| 00:28:01.000 |
It's very strange, actually.
|
| 00:28:02.000 |
So why did she call it the modern philosophy?
|
| 00:28:04.000 |
That's a good question.
|
| 00:28:05.000 |
I'm not a scholar of British Romanticism, but to what it says to me is that she's trying to evoke a kind of ambiguity, and in the creative element.
|
| 00:28:18.000 |
Because she's not talking about really the rebellion, right?
|
| 00:28:21.000 |
They're kind of rebelling against the gods.
|
| 00:28:23.000 |
She's talking about in the video in myth, when Prometheus forms man out of clay.
|
| 00:28:28.000 |
Right, exactly.
|
| 00:28:29.000 |
So the making of man by Prometheus through technology, and she's trying to pull out the sacral edge, and the moral ambiguities, and the questioning that comes out of that, I think.
|
| 00:28:45.000 |
Right, so it's different than Prometheus Unbound, for sure.
|
| 00:28:50.000 |
Yeah, because there's even there in the creation story, the way she retails it, there's something transgressive.
|
| 00:28:57.000 |
There's a potential heuristic, and can come back to haunt.
|
| 00:29:02.000 |
Right, there's a punishment that's going to happen.
|
| 00:29:06.000 |
Right, and in fact, we were talking about Hephaestus earlier, there is some connection between Prometheus and Hephaestus, even all the way back to antiquity.
|
| 00:29:14.000 |
I guess because of the forger on the one hand, and Prometheus being the civil, as you were saying with the bookadchers reading of him, he's the one who, the hero of civilization,
|
| 00:29:24.000 |
Right, right, that's why the bookadcher interpreted the making man of clay, he made these barbarians into civilized human beings.
|
| 00:29:33.000 |
There's another interesting take on Prometheus, it comes from the 20th century from Franz Kafka, who spent most of his time trying to retell stories from the Bible, more than anything, but then he started getting interested in the
|
| 00:29:53.000 |
classical myth as well. And when it comes to Prometheus, let me read you what he says, he outlines what he sees as his perspective on four aspects of this myth.
|
| 00:30:07.000 |
So, according to the first, Prometheus was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus, for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
|
| 00:30:22.000 |
According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper, and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
|
| 00:30:36.000 |
According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
|
| 00:30:48.000 |
According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily, their remains the inexplicable mass of rock.
|
| 00:31:05.000 |
The legend tried to explain the inexplicable as it came out of a substratum of truth, it had in turn to end the inexplicable.
|
| 00:31:19.000 |
I don't think that requires any explanation.
|
| 00:31:45.000 |
That's the future.
|
| 00:31:51.000 |
Another figure that fascinates both of us, I believe, is Orpheus.
|
| 00:31:58.000 |
Orpheus is the figure for the poet with his liar, who, the lyric poet in particular, where our word lyric comes from Orpheus's liar, and who had a special capacity, especially after the death of his wife, you wrote the book.
|
| 00:32:14.000 |
The death of his wife, Eredice, to whom he was deeply devoted, and he sang such songs of grief upon her death that his music moved the gods to urge him to go into the underworld and persuade Pluto and Persephone to allow his wife to come back into the world with him.
|
| 00:32:35.000 |
So we have the famous chapter of the Orpheus story, or myth, is descent into the underworld where with the power of his song he moves rocks, animals, gods, shades, everyone, and so much so that Pluto does indeed give him permission to bring Eredice back out of Hades into the world of the living on the one condition that he not turn around until they get into the world of the light.
|
| 00:33:04.000 |
And of course, for some inexplicable reason, as soon as Orpheus emerges from Hades, but Eredice hasn't, he does turn around and he loses her for a second time.
|
| 00:33:17.000 |
She fades back into the world of the shadows, and then he goes on to become very disconsulate, and turns against women or loses interest in women.
|
| 00:33:29.000 |
And in some versions of his end, he is, because of his scorn or his repudiation of women, he is torn to pieces by these Dionysian Maynads in one of these frenzies or jastic frenzies and dismembered and his bodies float down.
|
| 00:33:46.000 |
I'll dismembered now.
|
| 00:33:49.000 |
He was famous, he moved forward down to the underworld for being a kind of charmer, and he could move rocks and make animals do what he wished.
|
| 00:33:58.000 |
He was a kind of natural poet.
|
| 00:34:01.000 |
He found that he harmonized with the world.
|
| 00:34:05.000 |
He found the inner harmony of reality.
|
| 00:34:07.000 |
But then, when you were talking about the legend where he descends into the depths of Hades, brings back to life almost.
|
| 00:34:19.000 |
Almost, almost, his dead life.
|
| 00:34:22.000 |
That's the powerful image for what poetry does.
|
| 00:34:27.000 |
It goes down into the depths of the human, of the natural world, of metaphysical depth, and tries to evoke something.
|
| 00:34:36.000 |
But it never can entirely.
|
| 00:34:38.000 |
It brings it up almost where you can catch a glimpse of it.
|
| 00:34:42.000 |
It's always a bleak and fading.
|
| 00:34:45.000 |
And it's never a real resuscitation of a feeling, a sentiment, or a truth.
|
| 00:34:51.000 |
It's always an almost, but not quite, situation.
|
| 00:34:55.000 |
And really, it evokes that for all kinds of poets, whether it's the modernist poets, the orific, there's a whole orific tradition of modern poetry that
|
| 00:35:05.000 |
He wrote the country, or the future.
|
| 00:35:09.000 |
He wrote real kids on a store.
|
| 00:35:11.000 |
He wrote a song of story, or a song of story.
|
| 00:35:14.000 |
Any number of them.
|
| 00:35:16.000 |
Early opera was fascinated with the orifice in the uredicine myth, from this sort of proto opera by Paulite Siano in late 15th century.
|
| 00:35:26.000 |
It was called the Fávela di Orfeo, to the early opera in Italy.
|
| 00:35:32.000 |
The earliest surviving one is actually about called uredicine.
|
| 00:35:35.000 |
So, you know, the idea of the power of song, of voice, and of music, to evoke a truth, or to call to life.
|
| 00:35:44.000 |
I think it's really a fundamental part of that myth.
|
| 00:35:48.000 |
Oh, for sure.
|
| 00:35:49.000 |
And I'm fascinated by this power that song, or music has to cross the threshold between life and death, or the living and the dead.
|
| 00:36:01.000 |
Plato said, "Music finds its way into recesses of the soul that no other thing can reach."
|
| 00:36:11.000 |
And I'm thinking here of a movie about 15 years ago, Tulematendrumál, all the mornings of the world, which is about the composer, Sankolombe.
|
| 00:36:23.000 |
I don't know if you've seen that.
|
| 00:36:24.000 |
Yeah, I did.
|
| 00:36:25.000 |
And it's about a real life composer.
|
| 00:36:29.000 |
He loses his wife and ends up composing these heart-rending pieces of music that we still listen to.
|
| 00:36:39.000 |
And at a certain point, his wife, the ghost of his wife, appears to him in the movie and says, "You have to let me go.
|
| 00:36:48.000 |
And I just cannot, because this music is calling, you know, she cannot rest in peace, because that music is traversing the distance between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
|
| 00:37:00.000 |
And it has a power of evocation upon the souls of the dead."
|
| 00:37:04.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:37:05.000 |
And so she pleads with him to have mercy on her, a certain sense, because that orific power is right there.
|
| 00:37:12.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:37:13.000 |
And the sound of his viola is supposed to mimic the sound of human limitation.
|
| 00:37:19.000 |
Yes.
|
| 00:37:20.000 |
The other line I remember in that movie is at the very beginning where his disciple was played by the ball jury.
|
| 00:37:31.000 |
He's trying to teach other people what he learned from Sankolombe.
|
| 00:37:34.000 |
And he says, "No, no, no, no, shaknottwafiniyur amuja. Every note has to end dying."
|
| 00:37:46.000 |
Which is a technique of play with the viola in the mind.
|
| 00:37:49.000 |
So that idea that music is predicated upon the dying of notes in order for it to fall into silence so that something else can reemerge from the silence.
|
| 00:38:00.000 |
And that's how melodies and the whole phenomenon of sound works.
|
| 00:38:06.000 |
That seems to trope the descent into the underworld and the recovery of what you were mentioning that you can almost bring it out into life.
|
| 00:38:13.000 |
But then it has to fall back down again.
|
| 00:38:15.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:38:16.000 |
You register, it has to disappear because the note dwafiniyur amuja.
|
| 00:38:21.000 |
And that's where there are some interpretations of the gaze of Orpheus.
|
| 00:38:26.000 |
Why does he turn around?
|
| 00:38:28.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:38:29.000 |
And I think Maurice Blochaud has a couple of essays where, well, of course, if you're going to remain the poet or the musician or the artist,
|
| 00:38:37.000 |
you need to lose what you love the most because it's in the loss and the mourning and the grief that the song resounds.
|
| 00:38:47.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:38:48.000 |
If you want to think about what is the core of that myth that has to remain, I think that's it right there.
|
| 00:38:54.000 |
That's the unquestionable core that maintains itself no matter how many iterations the myth takes on.
|
| 00:39:01.000 |
There's something that has to be recovered that can't be.
|
| 00:39:04.000 |
And you always do what you're not supposed to do in order to recover it.
|
| 00:39:09.000 |
But it makes you understand, I think, that is that you come back and the musician and the proponents of voice comes back to report.
|
| 00:39:16.000 |
But that's the key of what Orpheus does.
|
| 00:39:19.000 |
And it's the moment of loss that allows that to take place.
|
| 00:39:22.000 |
And those who listen, those of us who hear the poet or that music are undergo that dissent.
|
| 00:39:30.000 |
I think that's where you're just repeating what you're saying.
|
| 00:39:33.000 |
No, right.
|
| 00:39:34.000 |
It's an axe in its own aesthetic medium that Katabashi says the Greeks call it.
|
| 00:39:42.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:39:43.000 |
Yeah, that dissent in the end of the world.
|
| 00:39:44.000 |
No, it's true.
|
| 00:39:45.000 |
I think.
|
| 00:39:46.000 |
I wanted to move on here briefly to Edipus.
|
| 00:39:50.000 |
I mean, I don't want to, we don't want to overdo Edipus as it's a heavy topic there with what Freud did with the myth of Edipus,
|
| 00:39:59.000 |
where he saw in it some articulation of the deepest unconscious impulses in the human psyche,
|
| 00:40:08.000 |
at least in the male psyche, where it's structured according to the so-called Edipus complex,
|
| 00:40:15.000 |
where boys want to have soul possession of their mothers and therefore have a unconscious, murderous urge towards their fathers.
|
| 00:40:25.000 |
And I guess the fathers know this consciously or not,
|
| 00:40:33.000 |
and take measures to protect themselves against the Edipus son.
|
| 00:40:39.000 |
I'm astonished at Greek theogony, how much of Greek theogony is based on Edipus strife between the generations.
|
| 00:40:50.000 |
So you have Uranus being overthrown by his son's cronos,
|
| 00:40:56.000 |
and then cronos in turn being overturned by Zeus, his son. We have this insurgency against the father,
|
| 00:41:04.000 |
and highly antagonistic relations between the generations.
|
| 00:41:09.000 |
And of course the Edipus myth is just one way in which something like that is enacted,
|
| 00:41:14.000 |
although Edipus doesn't know it's his father, Lias, that he's killing there on the roadside in a kind of road rage incident.
|
| 00:41:21.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:41:23.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:41:24.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:41:25.000 |
It's a certain sense what it is.
|
| 00:41:26.000 |
That's true, yeah, he gets upset and takes care of it.
|
| 00:41:29.000 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:41:30.000 |
What do you make of Freud?
|
| 00:41:32.000 |
Here's a proposition for you.
|
| 00:41:34.000 |
Okay.
|
| 00:41:35.000 |
I think Freud could easily have gone the other way around and looked at more obvious elements in the myth of Edipus and his father,
|
| 00:41:42.000 |
where it's actually the father who has been told by the Oracle that your son, if you have a son, your son is going to kill you,
|
| 00:41:50.000 |
and therefore when Edipus is born, he gives instructions to his servant to take him out and actually kill him,
|
| 00:41:58.000 |
and that servant can't do that. It's a little tiny infant, so he puts him in a basket and sends him down the river,
|
| 00:42:05.000 |
and Edipus ends up growing up in a completely different region of Greece, and doesn't come back to thieves until he's an early adult.
|
| 00:42:13.000 |
But the murderous intent of the father against the son seems to be much more obvious in its relevance for what fathers have done throughout history,
|
| 00:42:26.000 |
which is in most civilization, send their sons off to war, to die in their stead on behalf of their nation, their cities, their interests.
|
| 00:42:40.000 |
And I think it's unusual or curious that Freud would want to put all that unconscious guilt on the son rather than the father.
|
| 00:42:52.000 |
Well, like I was saying earlier, whenever you get an interpretation of this myth, it almost always depends on a retelling of the story,
|
| 00:43:01.000 |
and inevitably you focus on one thing and eliminate another.
|
| 00:43:04.000 |
I mean, I think you could quite easily rewrite another trope of our civilizations from the perspective of Lias' sins.
|
| 00:43:11.000 |
Right, or his sins?
|
| 00:43:13.000 |
To the father.
|
| 00:43:14.000 |
Right, and we could read ourselves into that story, and I think it was the unspokenness and the unknowingness that he was...
|
| 00:43:24.000 |
Because Lias knew what he was doing, and he was avoiding something.
|
| 00:43:29.000 |
But, Etopas didn't know, and I think that's why he's focusing on what we don't understand about ourselves, what goes on behind the scenes.
|
| 00:43:37.000 |
And so, Etopas, for him, is the key figure there, because he's committing all of these sacrileges.
|
| 00:43:47.000 |
And the most himself.
|
| 00:43:50.000 |
Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. He's a figure for the unconscious, because exactly he doesn't know what he's doing.
|
| 00:43:57.000 |
Whereas, the Lias' complex seems to be so obvious, and gets reenacted all the time.
|
| 00:44:03.000 |
Right, and there are all kinds of other parts of that myth, his sons.
|
| 00:44:08.000 |
And that's what the Romans focus on.
|
| 00:44:11.000 |
In Roman origin, it's always about brothers.
|
| 00:44:15.000 |
So they see, and even in their own history, it's about fratricidal warfare.
|
| 00:44:20.000 |
And they see his sons probably in I/C's and atchiaclies as representing that.
|
| 00:44:26.000 |
Etopas isn't the focus of the story there.
|
| 00:44:29.000 |
I mean, his story is quite large and multi-generational.
|
| 00:44:33.000 |
And I think any culture can take those key elements and recompose them to mean something new.
|
| 00:44:40.000 |
At the same time, is that it evokes the previous versions and all the other versions.
|
| 00:44:44.000 |
If you can think back to quickness, the great thing about myth is that it's an interconnected multiplicity, which is another one of Covino's values in that.
|
| 00:44:53.000 |
And the memo is, it's a huge vast network.
|
| 00:44:57.000 |
And that's what myth is.
|
| 00:44:58.000 |
It's an encyclopedia of characters and stories and plots that can constantly be recomposed and made into something new.
|
| 00:45:06.000 |
At the same time, it's remaining the same.
|
| 00:45:08.000 |
It's a really versatile collection and encyclopedia of human experience, really.
|
| 00:45:14.000 |
Well, indeed, and in fact, when you're talking about the offspring of the progeny of edipus, you mention the tochales and polynisis who fight to the death.
|
| 00:45:27.000 |
And of course, that then is the basis for the story of Antigone, one of two sisters who insists on this ancient archaic imperative of
|
| 00:45:37.000 |
Ariel of kin against the decree of crion, and that leads to a whole other story which has had a huge reception even much more than the edible myth in western cultures.
|
| 00:45:50.000 |
There's been at least 200 different versions of Antigone, and still going on.
|
| 00:45:54.000 |
She's a figure of rebellion against power, authority, tyranny, and all that kind of stuff.
|
| 00:45:58.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:45:59.000 |
And of course, the weirdness of it is that she is the daughter and sister of edipus.
|
| 00:46:05.000 |
And polynisis, likewise, he's a brother and son.
|
| 00:46:10.000 |
And this is what the Edipul myth is inexhaustible because you say, well, there's a grammatical, there's a generational, and therefore grammatical confusion that is the consequence of incest.
|
| 00:46:27.000 |
So when he answers the riddle of the Sphinx, which is what enables him to go into thebes triumphantly, the riddle of the Sphinx being what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening, and he says, "Anthropos, man," born as an infant, and we end up on a cane if we're lucky to get that old.
|
| 00:46:50.000 |
He thinks that he's solved the riddle, and we think so too, but the fact is that it's much more perverse than that.
|
| 00:46:59.000 |
And it's only once he goes into thebes that he realizes that there's a lot more to the story than that.
|
| 00:47:05.000 |
And that there's a perversity at the heart of that riddle of Antropos, which that grammatical generational confusion embodies, where he calls out to Antigone and Eastmane,
|
| 00:47:19.000 |
my daughters, my sisters.
|
| 00:47:22.000 |
Right, it's a fundamental confusion of connection between generations. It's both horizontal and vertical, and it leads to what would you call it?
|
| 00:47:33.000 |
Promiscuity. Oh, these are promiscuity, but also it leads to their ultimate demise, everyone.
|
| 00:47:40.000 |
The fundamental breakdown in societal relations, because of that.
|
| 00:47:46.000 |
And the Greeks were very wary of the resurgence of the chaotic, from the deepest archaic sources of the human psyche, and there is something that is approaching a return to chaos when the genealogical line is scrambled up that way, as a result of incest.
|
| 00:48:09.000 |
Well, David, one last figure, if we can squeeze him in, I'd like to talk about his narcissist, because I long believe that if we can understand the myth of narcissists, we will understand something about our own contemporary society, which in my view has any number of narcissistic declensions.
|
| 00:48:32.000 |
But I was interested in this story in this regard that you were telling me about your recent visit to New York?
|
| 00:48:38.000 |
Right, yeah, I was there for a conference and took a little side trip to the moment, which was across this three.
|
| 00:48:45.000 |
It had been way too long since I'd been to a major metropolitan museum in the United States.
|
| 00:48:51.000 |
So it was packed full of people, and there's some great works of art there, and I was enjoying looking at them up close.
|
| 00:48:59.000 |
And I would go up to the paintings, and there would be a crowd around them, people would walk up and look at the painting through the lens of their camera, snap a shot of it, and walk away, or they would walk up to the painting, turn around with their back to the painting, and take a selfie of them.
|
| 00:49:15.000 |
And so they would look at the painting, go to the museum, not to examine the other thing, and its materiality, but to either document their own life, or to take a picture of themselves in the background, with the background of the painting.
|
| 00:49:32.000 |
It was a very weird phenomenon.
|
| 00:49:35.000 |
I don't want to condemn it, I was just fascinated, because I never experienced the museum in that fashion.
|
| 00:49:42.000 |
It's really astonishing in the sense that now everything has some self-referential marker.
|
| 00:49:51.000 |
And the technology that has arisen in the last decade or two has promoted this kind of narcissism everywhere, in every aspect of the social media, where people live on their Facebook pages more than in a kind of embodied reality.
|
| 00:50:11.000 |
And I don't say this lightly, I mean, I asked once a freshman student who was talking about his face, I said, what would happen to you if your Facebook kind of disappeared for a week or two?
|
| 00:50:26.000 |
And he said, "My Facebook disappeared, I think I would cease to exist."
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| 00:50:32.000 |
In other words, it's this virtual two-dimensional image of himself that gains ascendancy over what we call the material embodied self.
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| 00:50:47.000 |
The social self, maybe the others.
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| 00:50:50.000 |
Yeah, I don't know, you could think of it as a self-referential narcissistic perversion of the no thy self-victim.
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| 00:50:59.000 |
Or you could think of it as a way of extending this self into unexplored realities in an explored media.
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| 00:51:06.000 |
It depends on how you approach the media.
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| 00:51:10.000 |
Does the reflection of the pond of narcissists make you focus on yourself or do you see yourself in a new way, in a new world?
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| 00:51:19.000 |
And so, you can look at that narcissist's myth in different ways.
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| 00:51:22.000 |
Hopefully it's not as apocalyptic as we like to make it out to be.
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| 00:51:26.000 |
Well, look, the myth is, if not apocalyptic, it's a tragedy.
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It is.
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| 00:51:31.000 |
You have this boy who was loved by, he's already narcissistic before he has this self encountered.
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| 00:51:38.000 |
Let's face it, he was very beautiful.
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| 00:51:41.000 |
He was loved by boys and girls, men and women, gods and even love.
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| 00:51:45.000 |
And he had no interest in anyone. Sounds familiar.
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| 00:51:49.000 |
Kind of solipsistic, self-engrossed youth.
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| 00:51:54.000 |
And repudiating all the advances.
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| 00:51:57.000 |
And that's, you see, the self that finds itself outside of itself is the erotic self that extends outward.
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| 00:52:04.000 |
But this kind of auto-eroticism is one that doesn't extend outward.
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| 00:52:09.000 |
It's trapped within itself.
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| 00:52:11.000 |
He goes to the pond, falls in love with what he, at first, takes to be another being, and tries to embrace it,
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| 00:52:21.000 |
but discovers that the more he plunges his hands into the pool or his arms, he realizes that it's insubstantial.
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| 00:52:29.000 |
That's the difference between an image and an embodied self.
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| 00:52:32.000 |
Is that you cannot hold it. You cannot relate to it.
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| 00:52:37.000 |
In that story, as told by Avid, there's this other figure which is echo.
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| 00:52:42.000 |
In fact, the theme song of this show is a song called Echo, where she is telling narcissists, pleading with him to turn his eyes away from that pool because it will lead to death.
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| 00:52:56.000 |
And this self-absorption is exactly played out in Avid's myth where he can't take his eyes away from himself.
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| 00:53:04.000 |
And he withers away while Echo herself is powered to get him to turn his eyes to her rather than on himself.
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| 00:53:14.000 |
I feel that allegorically, we live in an economy that encourages this self-fixation in any number of ways.
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| 00:53:27.000 |
But we don't have to necessarily give into it. I think that the myth can act as a warning against a self-referential, auto-arroticism of perversion of knowing oneself in our consumer culture, our technological culture of networks and extension of the self into immateriality.
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| 00:53:46.000 |
But I think you can read that myth to talk about what we do in academia too, because the warning that narcissists get, you'll be happy if you don't know yourself.
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| 00:53:57.000 |
And I think that's what academics do in intellectuals do. There's always a risk in reflection on the self and on our society that we fall into solipsism.
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| 00:54:09.000 |
And we turn in the ivory tower, closes itself off to the rest of the world. I think that as academics it's also a warning against what we do that we have to look beyond the mirror of ourselves.
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| 00:54:22.000 |
That's interesting. That's very interesting. Because it's true that Tyreusius is consulted by narcissist's parents and will he live to a ripe old age?
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| 00:54:31.000 |
And he says, "Yes, provided he doesn't come to know himself." And of course, self-knowledge takes different forms. I think that to know yourself in two-dimensional forms, which is what narcissist does, he sees only a reflex, he sees only an image of himself. He's not fulfilling the delphic injunction to know thyself.
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| 00:54:53.000 |
I think you have to know yourself not in two-dimensional form but in the other, in otherness. And therefore the ivory tower, if our ivory tower is a retreat into this two-dimensional, non-breatheism as a French call it, which is staring at our own belly button, a solipsistic way, then we're failing in that quest for self-knowledge.
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| 00:55:17.000 |
I think so. And we can take it as a fabulous warning for our society, I think.
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| 00:55:22.000 |
But why does everyone want to live in a two-dimensional world? I don't understand. I cannot understand the fixation on the cell phone, for example.
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| 00:55:35.000 |
I don't understand why people want to live in these little miniature reduced worlds. Maybe it's because that kind of primary narcissism is given license by virtuality in a way that traps us in a kind of plight that narcissists suffers through and not mythivominate.
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| 00:56:01.000 |
Well, it gives us access to a form of a medium of self-fashioning that's incredibly attractive, I think. And that self-fashioning can become solipsistic and meaningless, or it can become a moment, a mode of connecting with others, I think. There's a fine line between the one and the other.
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| 00:56:20.000 |
So, I don't really understand it. I don't want to condemn it because I have an iPhone, and I use it, and I am on Facebook and things like that. I don't have this intimate connection with my Facebook page, like your freshman, but I think it's...
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| 00:56:34.000 |
I understand. I'm not judging with the "Should I have an iPhone or not?" But at a certain point, I think at a deeper level, you have to shatter that mirror, find a way to shatter that mirror and break through into the real...
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| 00:56:47.000 |
Well, exactly. You're outside and smell of flowers, if they say. But unfortunately, everything in a certain sector of the economy conspires to enslave us into the kind of primary narcissism that suits the interests of those who sell the technology and know how to exploit it.
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| 00:57:10.000 |
I guess that's what we want to look at narcissists. That's what the myth encapsulates. We can still relate it to ourselves today.
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| 00:57:18.000 |
Right. Because it is desire. And desire takes many different forms, but one thing that's constant about a desire is that one can always sell something to desire.
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| 00:57:31.000 |
Right. It's infinite. Yeah. So, it's a basis of a certain kind of economy. Anyway, David has been a pleasure. We've...
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| 00:57:38.000 |
We've been speaking with David Lummis from the Department of French and Italian professor of Italian here at Stanford and the first managing producer of entitled opinions going on almost 10 years now, David.
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| 00:57:49.000 |
Believe it or not. We started in 2005. And I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. We're going to leave you with our theme songs as we've been talking about narcissists. That song that I mentioned on Echo, who is trying to get narcissists to look away from himself.
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| 00:58:07.000 |
Of course, to no end. You take care, David. Thank you. Bye-bye.
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