Discussion: Barthes & Smart

Yesterday we discussed two very different books about love.  One was the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's prose-poetry book, By Grand Central Station I sat down and Wept.  The second was French intellectual Roland Barthes' treatise on love, A Lover's Discourse.

For Smart's book, the discussion ranged through many areas:

• Is your reading or enjoyment of a text affected by the character/morals of the author ?  Some people felt that Smart's affair with a married man did tarnish the brightness of her prose.  Stephen proposed that Smart wanted to be a poet and realized that to write stirring poetry she needed life experiences much removed from her conventional upbringing and remote location in pre-War Ottawa.  He felt this could have been an impetus for her actions in bringing George Barker to North America and in carrying on the affair.

• Someone asked whether we would think differently had Elizabeth Smart been a man.  Laura mentioned than she read this book right after reading Werther and initially thought that the author WAS a man until quite far along in the book, when Smart returns to Ottawa.

There were so many unknown quantities in this book - from Smart's deliberate style which is not based on a chronology of facts to the 1st person style which tells us nothing about George Barker nor about his wife.  We see it all from Smart's perspective.  We had much the same situation in Werther where everyone was seen through his lens.

Most of the class liked Smart's poetic style.

We discussed the fact that, though Smart's book took place during WWII, she barely mentions the war and is only concerned with her love affair.  Apparently she was criticized for this when the book came out.  I didn't agree with this criticism.  I thought she referred to the war in a way that showed she had strong feelings about the reality and the horrors of war.  Much of the book takes place in North America and especially in California.  I would imagine at the time (early 40s) that the war did not resonate to the same degree as it would have in Great Britain or Europe.  I would guess from her comments that Smart was anti-war and as such, could not be expected to be all rah-rah-rah about it.  She was also young and in love.

Stephen mentioned some elements I hadn't picked up on: her use of water or fluid imagery.  Her references to nature and her social commentary were some of my favourite parts.  Her comments on youth and aging were also very pithy - though being middle-aged, somewhat hard to receive.

The 2nd book was Barthes' discourse on love.  Most of the class enjoyed the book.  Joni put together a couple of pages of quotations from the text and posed some questions arising from these, which we discussed.  The majority of the class enjoyed the structure.

We spoke about whether Barthes or Smart were gendered.  I felt that both novels were somewhat gendered - Smart's possibly less than Barthes to me.  I did find Barthes very gendered.  Some of his observations were applicable to both make and female but several of them were from a perspective I could not relate to.

It has been a good experience to read Werther, Smart and Barthes within 1-2 weeks of each other.  Now on to the terror of the French Revolution and Anatole France.

Smart: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Smart, Elizabeth: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; Flamingo/HarperCollins, Hammersmith, 1992

I read this book as a rite of passage in my teens - a Canadian rite of passage.  I'd forgotten what Smart's prose was like.  Some time in the last 5 years I read Rosemary Sullivan's biography of Elizabeth Smart which I found fascinating: partly because of the details of her life in the earlier part of the last century but also because she has a nature so dissimilar to mine.  Her decisions, her actions and the way she lived her life were so different from my life and my choices that it seems far more than 1/2 a century and several wars distant from my lifetime.

I just finished Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and it is interesting to compare the 2 books: Goethe from the male perspective in 18th century Germany and Smart's from the female perspective in North America.  One somewhat fictional (though Goethe incorporated events from his own life as well as an acquaintance who committed suicide because of unrequited passion) and the other poetically autobiographical.  Both writers passionate and literary people.

I enjoyed Smart's writing and imagery though my ever-rational side kept parsing the sentences for truth to anchor the poetry in fact and chronology.  Of course she reminds me of Sylvia Plath, similar time period and both women in love with philandering poets and tolerating their comings and goings, waiting and suffering for their lover to return to spend some time with them.  I also can't help thinking about Pat Lowther.

Like poetry, Smart's prose captures moments and vignettes with brief bursts of strong imagery.  In one of my favourite sentences she captures whole [passionless] lifetimes in one sentence.  

When I hurry down the street it is not any game I hold in my mind and play with the passers by, but the shyness which keeps seamstresses nervously peering out of their badly-lit rooms, half hidden behind the drab lace, preferring to dream over their gas-jets and mild tea than submit to the rude investigations of the world.

This is every Anita Brookner novel, distilled down to one sentence.  Smart then goes on to write:

There are such, you know, and they treat their possessions gently, as if they were children or animals. But don't think they are overlooked. Thousands of angels yearn over them, are even now embroidering them skirts, and getting ready to teach them the rhumba.   [Part 6]

Where Brookner seems to have some fellow feeling for her gentle, quiet, oh-so-correct women, Smart sees their lives with a twist of humour but humour arising from the contempt of the young and passionate for the aged and resigned.  Later in Part 8 she is more explicit about her contempt for the degenerations of passionless old age, saying of the old:

Or does nature walk beside them, holding their flabby forearms and whispering medicinal lies? For memory deserts them and their eyes get dimmer as the past achieves perspective. 

Who can say there is anything won at such a price?

[..] But her eyes were like medieval wild men in her head, clutching at her diminishing days that brought them no rest. [Part 6]

Smart, like Goethe/Werther, also has a strong relationship with nature.  She writes "But what can the wood sorrel and the mourning dove, who deal only in eternals, know of the thorny sociabilities of human living?"

On passion/love:

The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship.  My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy.

[..] I am possessed by love and have no options.

[Part 10]  He kisses the circles on top of the water beneath which I lie drowned.  Soft as a fish, the kiss glides down to me, it swims through me, trailing its bubbles of love.

Smart writes about "the hatred of the mediocre for all miracles."

[...] Not one of all those martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye.  On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die.

Butter is up 10 cents.  The human being is down.

When she and Barker are arrested at the California/Arizona state border, and charged with intending to cross state lines for the purposes of sexual communion, Smart writes at the end of their 2-day interrogation, 

Who is for us if these are so fiercely against?  All our wishes were private, we desired no more scope than ourselves. Could we corrupt the young by gazing into each other's eyes? Would they leave their offices?  Would big business suffer?

Though the majority of the book takes place in America with references to England, I enjoyed the odd Canadian reference

But faint as hope, and definite as death, my possible phoenix of love is as bright as a totem-pole, in the morning, on the sky, breathing like a workman setting out on a job.

Asking no one's forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize, why do I cry then to be returning homeward through a land I love like a lover?

[...] how sympathetic the frozen Chaudiere Falls seem under the December sky, compared with these inflexible faces.

The passion burning through Smart's book, though it only covered a short period during her early 20s, is incandescent.  And the fact that she spent her life in England raising 4 children she had with Barker, though they never married and he only visited intermittently, suggests the centrality of passion in her life persisted.

Discussion: Werther and Antigone

We had our 1st discussion since we broke at the end of the Fall term.  It was great to see everyone again and plunge back in to our progression through the philosophy and literature of the last 4000 years.  Stephen reviewed the texts we'll be covering this term.  They are grouped into themes, and not arranged as chronologically as LS800.  The 1st set deal with overwhelming passion: The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Jean Anouilh's version of Antigone, written in Paris during WWII.  Next week Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes. Then Anatole France's The Gods Will Have Blood (about fanaticism during the French Revolution) and after that Jane Eyre (reason making an appearance).  We then move into the next series, mainly concerned with reason/unreason: Doestoevesky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Kierkegaard; then 3 big texts: Darwin's Origin of the Species, Marx's Communist Manifesto and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents as well as our 3rd version of Antigone, also written during WWII but by Bertold Brecht.  We end the Politics and the Body series with Lady Chatterly's Lover and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The final series are 5 more modern texts that examine much of what we have been reading and discuss where that leaves us: Adam Phillips 'Darwin's Worms', Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own', Antonio Damasio's 'Descartes Error' and Elaine Scarry's 'On Beauty'; finishing April 13 with Jacques Derrida's 'The Animal that Therefore I Am'.

We started with Goethe's Werther, which he wrote as a young man after suffering through unrequited love.  He used the writing of Werther as catharsis for his feelings.  It is considered one of the 1st novels of the Romantic period, where the focus moved to the individual, with the appearance of modern self-consciousness and sensibility (the importance of personal feelings).  Werther was an alienated artist and didn't really have a firm place in any of the worlds he entered: too wealthy and intellectual for the rural Waldheim but too low-born for the aristocracy and court life (though had he been happy to be a clerk toiling away in the background, he would have been fine at court).

Stephen sent out some material about Werther which included a quote by Goethe about Werther.  I always wondered about one term he uses, "true penetration of mind," which I have read in various 19th century books.
“I portray a young person who, endowed with profound, pure feeling and true penetration of mind, loses himself in rhapsodic dreams, undermines himself by speculation until he finally, ravaged by the additional effect of unhappy passions and in particular by an infinite love, shoots himself in the head.”
What does the speaker mean when they use this phrase?  Is it sympathy of mind with the speaker or something more objective?

Lorraine led the discussion.  She brought 2 quotes, applicable to passion, from a book she was reading over the break called Adult Literacy.

[Fear] has no logic.  It destroys confidence and common sense: my actions and my works were sometimes inappropriate to the situation at hand. (Helfield, 1997)  Lorraine proposed that this sentence would apply equally to passion.

Our humanity is most evident in our feelings, yet it is this affective aspect of our nature that is so often ignored. (Goleman, 1995)

Lorraine notes Goethe/Werther's use of "I", very brave to use 1st person.  She felt Werther was arrogant.  He was certainly self-absorbed and I think he was condescending in some regards (to some of the people he met: the rural people, the aristocrats at court and the ambassador he worked for).  He was probably arrogant about his own abilities but what mainly came through for me was his absorption in his own feelings.  For me he would have been a tiresome penpal.

Lorraine mentioned a similar book about unrequited love: Yentl by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The epistolatory style used in Werther was very popular for awhile in the 18th and 19th centuries but is not used as much any more.  I have a fondness for it -  that feeling that you are peeking into someone else's life as it unfolds.  I still remember reading and rereading "Daddy-Long-Legs".  I'm not sure it would count as great literature but I did enjoy it when I was young. The limitation of a book advanced only via letters (usually just one person's letters as is the case in Werther) is you only see things from the letter writer's viewpoint.  We don't know much of Lotte or Albert, or even Wilhelm's viewpoint.

Werther is not only about love and passion and pain but also commentary about the society of the time that locked people into very limited roles and options.  Lotte had no choice but to marry the man her parents had betrothed her to, Albert was busy working his way up the minor functionary pathway.  Werther himself was not part of the labouring classes nor completely accepted by the aristocracy but his options to move in and out of these strata was curtailed.  The farmhand was in love with his mistress, who needed labourers to manage the farm she was left yet they were not allowed to have a legitimate relationship though this would likely have been an ideal outcome for both of them.

The novel is set at a time when we are seeing the beginning of the change towards valuing the individual and also the inroads against the predominance and unassailability of the aristocracy.  Europe's resistance to this change is what soon will result in the French Revolution.

ANTIGONE
Does the metatheatre aspect, with the Prologue/Chorus announcing right from the beginning what was going to happen in the play, add or take away from the impact or enjoyment of the play.  Most people felt that it helped, made them concentrate more on the characters and what they said rather than wondering what was going to happen.  It also put entire audience on the same footing knowing what was going to happen.
Lauren mentioned that a friend of hers had just come back from London and saw quite a few plays and in every single one actors would come out for 30-60 minutes before the play started and put on their makeup on the stage, chatting with the audience.  The new trend it seems.

How did the anachronistic elements work?   For most people it either supported the play or at least didn't detract from it.  The stylistic choice to start with breaking the 4th wall already tears us away from the Greek version of the play and from our expectations.  Having 20th century garb, motor vehicles and manners of speaking was not jarring (to read - I'm not sure how it would be seeing the play itself).  I do remember really disliking and being bothered by reading the "hillbilly accents" given to the Spartans in the version of Lysistrata I read.

In Sophocles' version of Antigone, Creon experiences enormous personal growth (through tragedy) during the play. Does Anouilh's Creon experience any growth or change?  I didn't think he did.  In Anouilh's version, Creon was an urbane city dweller when he was suddenly faced with having to give up his desired life and assume the duties of King of Thebes.  In the play he notes that he did this out of a strong sense of duty.  This Creon is much more nuanced and kinder than Sophocles ruler but he experienced his growth before the start of the play.  He does suffer change (the death of son and wife an his role in Antigone's death) but we don't know how this may have altered him.

In Sophocles' Antigone, her reasons for defying Creon and burying her brother would have been supported by the audience as she was obeying the death rituals required of family in order to honour them and to honour the gods.  In Anouilh's version, Antigone just seems to be stubbornly set on dying because she can't face the inevitable compromises of maturity and age.  She is certainly a figure that is true to her feelings, her passions but her passions are passions for her feelings not passions for anyone else so she is a very self-absorbed character and not as sympathetic because of this.

Lauren asked whether Anouilh was misogynistic in his treatment of his female characters?  None if the 4 female characters were particularly well-rounded or compelling.  Some liked Ismene (Abilio preferred Sophocles' Ismene), some felt the nurse provided a warm glimpse into what the 2 girls childhoods and homelifes would have been.  I'm not sure I would have called him misogynistic.  Creon was the most interesting character but aside from him and the young idealistic passionate Antigone, all the other characters, male or female, were quite superficially sketched.

I found both these books interesting.  Both from the perspective of temperament and of age, I can't identify with either Werther or Antigone but I do feel that being able to respond with emotion, being able and willing to react emotionally to the world around you, are what add the joy to life.  I just can't give myself up to this and ignore all other considerations.  Neither Werther nor Antigone would have approved of me.

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Tr. Michael Hulse; Penguin Classic; London, 1989

This is one of Goethe's earliest works.  He wrote it after a period of time when he fell in love with a woman engaged to another man he was friendly with; and also after he learned of the suicide of a young man over a failed love.  It's written in the form of letters to an old friend but it seems quite dated. Having a man write another male friend bemoaning and sighing over his forbidden love seems very unlikely in this time.

His passion does ring true though Goethe didn't bring Lotte to life for me - she seems colourless and not very present.

Werther has a discussion with Albert (Lotte's fiancé) about love and passion.
[...] a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally, and is regarded as intoxicated or insane.

Werther replies: Ah you sensible people! [...] Passions! Intoxication! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt, passing by like the priest and thanking God like the Pharisee that you are not as other men.  I have been intoxicated more than once, my passions have never been far off insanity, and I have no regrets [...]

As Werther becomes more depressed about the futility of his love for Lotte (the lack of any future togetherness) he speaks about the transitory nature of much love and the relative unimportance of individuals. [26 October]

Your friends value you! You often make them happy, and your heart in turn feels it could not do without them; and yet - if you were to go, if you were to depart from this intimate circle, would they feel the void, how long would they feel the void that your loss tore open in their fate? - how long? - Oh Man is so transient a being that even where his existence is most secure, even where his presence makes its sole true impression felt, he must fade and disappear from the memories and souls of his loved ones, soon, oh so soon!

[27 October]
I could often tear my heart open and beat my poor head on seeing how little people can mean to each other.  if I do not offer love and joy, happiness and warmth, ah! the other will not bring them to me either; nor will my heart, overflowing with rapture, move him at all if he is cold and listless.

Werther continues to love and pine after Lotte but after she marries Albert, he finds that he can't bear the idea, can't keep himself away from her and so he borrows Albert's pistols (such a passive-aggressive move though maybe it wasn't at that time) and shoots himself.  Like the real model (Jerusalem), Werther doesn't die right away but lingers for a day or so before dying.

Goethe has some lovely descriptive phrases about the countryside where Werther spent most of his time, in the mountains.  He speaks about sitting many hours at a table outside an inn, under the linden-trees.

The language is very over-wrought: beset hearts, floods of tears, tear my heart asunder, awesome majesty, torment, ardent pleasures, anguished spirit etc.  High Romance.

It seems very different from the man who wrote Faust.  Werther is very intolerant about reason, maturity and age.  In Faust, the older Goethe is more sympathetic to aging, writing: "Old age doesn't make us childish, as they say, It finds the true surviving child in us."  Though I didn't end up feeling connected to any of the characters or their problems, Werther's passion did seem strong and all-consuming and I felt this was a good introduction to an early Romantic novel.  Exposing my lingering prejudices, I would probably have found Werther's emoting more bearable if he were a female - but then again, maybe not...he did go on and on.

Discussion: Dante`s Inferno and Rumi`s Love is a Stranger

DANTE
This week we discussed Dante's Inferno (Book I of his Divine Comedy).  I was surprised to have enjoyed this poem.  Before this course started Lauren and I looked at a copy of the book and it looked very daunting.    The poetry and the imagery made it quite an interesting read.  I'm not sure I would have called it a comedy myself but the translator explains it in his introduction writing:

a "tragedy" begins in tranquility but comes to a sad end, and a "comedy" begins under adverse circumstances, but always has a happy ending

Stephen mentioned some background and then we discussed several questions.
The classical writings had been lost for a period of time but scholars were digging through old librairies to find the writings of ancient greek and roman thinkers.  The Inferno merges the medieval world with the classics (such as Virgil's Aeneid and the writings of Aristotle).  Power was shifting to the middle class (mercantile often) at the expense of feudalism.  Some thinkers (Thomas Aquinas) were starting to reconcile Aristotelian thought with Christian teachings and this spurred interest in ancient texts.

Is the poem a theological text or could Dante be mocking or satirizing biblical teachings (or the church)? 
The general thought was that Dante certainly had contempt for the church as it was at the time (with corruption, power grabs etc).  Inferno deals very severely with simonists etc but he is also very severe with many other sinners.  Overall though, Inferno is a very serious vision of what happens after death and was intended to let people know what they could expect if they did not live their lives according to the precepts of the bible or Catholic Church.

What is Dante saying about imagination, the idea of sin, power hierarchies and religion?
The numerous and detailed divisions in the Inferno are very important.  For example the vestibule with the castle was a way to try and reconcile good and wise people who happened to be non-Christian (many because they pre-dated the birth of Christ so one can hardly blame them for not being Christian since christianity did not even exist) and the Church's strict teachings that only the baptised could hope to make it to Paradise (via Purgatory) and all others would be automatically consigned to Hell.
Stephen mentioned how the Europeans in the Middle Ages learned about Aristotle and his teachings from the Arabs.

We discussed the proposition in Mark Musa's introduction, that the Pilgrim (Dante) symbolically participates in each type of sin during his journey.  If this is true, it was likely because he was supposed to be learning about sins, not sympathizing with the sinners (as he did with the lovers Francesca and Paolo).  The purpose was to renounce the sins.

We also discussed the hierarchy of the sins and whether these would hold true today.  In general we felt that they wouldn't all be considered the same today - most notably, today's society has much less tolerance for violence so these sins would be lower down - with the exception of suicide which would likely not be considered as harshly as in the 1300s.  Deep at the bottom would be people like Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Hitler, as well as serial killers, mass murderers, pedophiles, domestic abusers etc.  There was a general feeling that the worse sins would be violence against the vulnerable.  We discussed whether treachery an dishonesty would be considered as vile as in the 1300s.  Some people felt that it was almost expected people will lie, and politics was mentioned.  I think that people still want honesty and usually expect honesty but most people do feel a little cynical and so if someone turns out to be dishonest or a cheater (Lance Armstrong springs immediately to mind) we are very disappointed and angry but there is a part of us inside saying "You can't trust anybody".

It would be an interesting exercise in a large group to get people to list sins (and see what would and wouldn't be classified as a sin these days) and then to rank them.

RUMI
In contrast, our other text this week was Rumi's poetry.  I don't know much about Sufi-ism but these poems were a jarring contrast to Dante's world view.  Stephen gave us a brief overview of the ancient picture in the Middle East with the Shi'ites, Sunnis (more fundamentalist muslims) and how the Sufis fit in (as mystics).  Interestingly this was the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes whose invasions were the impetus for Rumi's family to leave Afganistan and head towards Persia.

We spoke about how mysticism tends to become popular in times of political unrest and turmoil.  People want to turn inwards and seek out states of communion with God.

People read various favourite poems and Gordon suggested an interesting exercise which was for everyone to read a line from a poem, going around in a circle, one line each read without any comment or hesitation and you go around until the poem has been read aloud 3 times.  We read A HOUSE FOR THE NAKED this way and it was amazingly powerful and moving.  It was interesting to hear every ones voice, each different and also to hear how the way people read changed each subsequent time around.  I wish I could have recorded it.  Something I'd like to try again in a large group.  It also really made you listen to the poem.

Love is a Stranger by Rumi

Rumi, Live Is a Stranger, Transl. by Kabir Helminski, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London 2000



Rumi was also a 13th century writer (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273).  He was a Sufi mystic, born in Persia but in what is now Tajikistan, Afganistan.

I’d read a few of Rumi’s poems before but didn’t know anything about him.  Like everything else I’m reading this term, there is so much more I want to know about that time period: what was going on everywhere else at the time, more about sufiism, more about Persia and Afganistan at the time, more about Islam.  Rumi’s poetry reminded me of Sappho – maybe because both wrote so passionately about love and the beloved.  It’s hard for me to analyze and dissect these poems – their strength for me lies in the emotions I feel when reading them, in the power of the words - and so I want to save certain pieces I loved, so I can come back and savour them later.  I can see this being a book I’ll want to come back to and read in the future.

Rumi speaks often of love as being as a unifying force, of two souls combining. 

In I AM NOT (on page 56) he says:

I have put duality away

And seen the two worlds as one.

THE RUINS OF MY HEART (page 49)

[…]

My soul spills into yours and is blended

Because my soul has absorbed your fragrance,

I cherish it.

Every drop of blood I spill

informs the earth,

“I merge with my Beloved when I participate in love.”

[…]

He often includes imagery of wine and drunkenness, perhaps to show how love intoxicates the lover, how love infuses you and affects your thoughts, body and reason.  Many of his poems mention his beloved, Shamsi Tabriz.  At the end of  SWEEP THE DUST OFF THE SEA, on page 34

The Sun of Tabriz keeps me

drunk and languishing in this state

THE INNER GARMENT OF LOVE (pg 69)

[…]

Be drunk with love,

for love is all that exists.

Where is intimacy found

If not in the give and take of love.

Love for Rumi seems to be his way through the world, to spirituality, to fulfillment.  It’s not all sweetness & light and angels singing.  Many of his poems mention fire, burning, conflict, suffering, piercing.

DIDN’T I SAY? (Pg 22)

[…]

Didn’t I say, “They will waylay you and make you cold,

I am the fire and your warm desire.”

[…]

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 41)

[…]

Those glances of love were arrows,

piercing and killing all reason

[…]

Hundreds of thousands of full moons

Are dedicated to the all night fever of His love

[…]

All perceptions are riding on lame donkeys,

While He is an arrow travelling through space.

[…]

In SONG OF THE REED (pg 50)

[…]

I want a heart torn open with longing

to share the pain of this love.

[…]

It is the fire of love that inspires the flute.

It is the ferment of love that completes the wine.

[…]

THE INNER GARMENT OF LOVE (pg 69)

[…]

If they ask what Love is,

Say: the sacrifice of will.

If you have not left your will behind,

You have no will at all.

[…]

Between the mirror and the heart

Is this single difference:

The heart conceals secrets,

While the mirror does not.

Rumi contrasts love and reason in some of his poems with reason proving the lesser faculty.

THE PULL OF LOVE (pg 31)

 […]

Though reason is learned and has its honours,

It pawned its cap and robe for a cup of love.

[…]

He describes reason as something very black and white, cold, demanding - not as a quality that brings purpose, depth and joy to life.

LOVE IS RECKLESS (pg 53)

Love is reckless; not reason.

Reason seeks a profit.

Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,

Love proceeds like a millstone

Hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,

She risks everything and asks for nothing.

Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

[…]

Religion seeks grace and favour,

But those who gamble these away are God’s favourites,

For they neither put God to the test

Nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

LOVE IS A STRANGER (pg 18)

[…]

Reason, do not envy my mouth.

[…]

 whether you have raised a flag or a pen,

the night is gone and day has arrived,

and the sleeper shall see what he has dreamed.

He seems to suggest that reason tries to control love, to control the body and the person.  I’m not sure where Rumi thinks reason lives.  One of his line talks about covering “my reason, my head and my feet” suggesting Rumi doesn’t associate reason with the brain, certainly not with the heart as Mencius did.

WHAT A MAN CAN SAY (pg 28)

In the name of friendship

Don’t repeat to my Beloved

All that I said last night,

Out of my mind;

But if, by God, she hears it,

She’ll understand what a man can say

In the dark, loud or quiet, rough or soft,

When reason is not at home.

[…]

THE HOUSE OF LOVE (pg 67)

[…]

But you build up thought

like a massive wooden door.

Set fire to the wood.

Silence the noise of the heart.

Hold your harmful tongue.

While Rumi seems to fully support Love, this doesn’t apply to all passions (greed, envy etc).

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 42)

[…]

If night never came, people would waste themselves

Pursuing all that they desire.

They would give their own bodies to be consumed

For the sake of their desires and greed,

But night appears, a treasure of Mercy,

To save them from desires for a short while.

[…]

When it comes to love though, moderation does not seem to be what Rumi recommends.

EMPTY THE GLASS OF YOUR DESIRE (pg 74)

Join yourself to friends

And know the joy of the soul.

Enter the neighbourhood of ruin

With those who drink to the dregs.

Empty the glass of your desire

So that you won’t be disgraced.

Stop looking for something out there

And begin seeing within.

[…]

When the earth is this wide,

Why are you asleep in a prison?

Think of nothing but the source of thought.

Feed the soul; let the body fast.

Love is not without its suffering but for Rumi even this has purpose. Love and spirituality are joined together in Rumi’s poetry.  For Rumi, Love seems to be transcendent and his words make you feel that even if it hurts and changes and doesn’t give you a “fairytale” ending, Love is a path worth pursuing because of its transcendent power:

THE GUEST HOUSE (pg 44)

[…]

Whatever sorrow takes away or causes the heart to shed,

it puts something better in its place –

especially for one who is certain

that sorrow is the servant of the intuitive.

[…]

WHEN A MAN AND WOMAN BECOME ONE (pg 55)

[…]

The garden of love is green without limit

and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy.

TO TAKE A STEP WITHOUT FEET (pg 59)

This is love: to fly towards  a secret sky,

To cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

[…]

LOVE IS A STRANGER (pg 18)

[…]

Love is a stranger with a strange language

[…]

ON THE DEATHBED (pg 23)

[…]

On this path, Love is the emerald,

the beautiful green that wards off dragons.

 […]

A WORLD WITH NO BOUNDARIES (pg 61)

With every breath the sound

Of love surrounds us,

And we are bound for the depths

Of space, without distraction.

We’ve been in orbit before

And know the angels there.

Let’s go there again, Master,

For that is our land.

[…]

out beyond duality

we have a home, and it is Majesty

[…]

These following lines don’t really demonstrate anything related to reason or passion but they are just phrases that I liked and wanted to remember.

ELEGY FOR SANA’I (pg 68)

[…]

he valued the whole world at a single barleycorn.

[…]

WORDS OF ALI WHEN HE REFUSED TO KILL AN OPPONENT WHO SPAT IN HIS FACE (pg 82)

[…]

I am not chaff but a mountain of patience.

[…]

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION (pg 43)

[…] the eyes of the wise see to the end […]

LUCRETIUS "The Nature of Things"

LUCRETIUS  The Nature of Things  Transl. A.E. Stallings; Penguin Classics, 2007

I had no idea that before 60 BC, Greek and Roman intellectuals had figured out that everything was made out of small, indivisible particles (atomos); that “many things have common elements, as words share letters” (Book I, 197-8).  I had never heard of Epicurus, on whose philosophy Lucretius based his 7000 line poem.  Epicurus lived in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries B.C.E. but his theories came after earlier philosophers, most notably Democritus in the 5^th century B.C.E.  I find it amazing that 2500 years ago, philosophers had already come up with the concept of infinitesimally small indivisible particles, of matter and void, making up everything we see around us.

Lucretius wrote his work as a poem.  He writes in Book I 931ff 
“[…] I teach great truths, and set out to unknot the mind from tight strictures of religion, and since I write of so darkling a subject in a poetry so bright […] I want to coat this physic in rich song, to kiss it, as it were, with the sweet honey of the Muse. […]”. 
I’m impressed by his scholarship but I’m also very impressed by the translator, A.E. Stallings who translated the Latin into English rhyme, heptameter to be exact.  She calls them “fourteeners” saying that their “old-fashioned rhythm and ring will get across something of the archaic flavor of Lucretius’ Latin”.  There are a few times that she has used anachronistic modern phrases but overall being able to read it as poetry seems to preserve some of the original feel of the words.

There are some beautiful turns of phrases (Book I, 143-144)

As I seek the right words and the right poetry to light

Brilliant lanterns for your mind […]

Lucretius’ first principle is that “nothing can be made from nothing”, certainly not by any supernatural power.  Next he says that “Nature does not render anything to naught” meaning that everything eventually breaks back down to its basic elements, things don’t disappear.  Everything is made of atoms “those seeds that abide forever”, the “elemental particles”.  He theorizes that “elements are of eternal stuff linked with bonds of different strengths” – pretty amazing stuff for the pre-electron microscope age.  He explains how  we know there are these particles even though we can’t see them.  These early thinkers also surmised that “there’s also emptiness in things”, that even in hard things like iron or stone, there are empty spaces, that these things are not “one solid mass”.  The universe consists of only 2 things: matter and void. Lucretius argues for the indivisibility of atoms by saying (Book I, 616-620)

[…] since after all

Half of a half of anything can still again be cut

In two, and on and on ad infinitum.  And then what

Will be the difference between the tiniest speck of matter

And all the universe? […]

In Book II (The Dance of Atoms), he writes that “all bodies of matter are in motion" and compares this to dust motes dancing in a slant of sunlight: the random ceaseless motion as well as how this usually occurs below the abilities of our senses to detect.  He also brings in the concept of the “swerve”, the slight variability that allows collisions to occur between atoms and therefore introduces some randomness into the universe that “shatters the laws of fate” (Book II, 254). 

In support of reason, in Book III (Mortality and the Soul), Lucretius writes that he doesn’t think there is any flaw in each human that reason can’t correct (319-322)

But one thing I am certain of, so weak is any trace

Of inborn nature past the power of reason to erase,

That there is nothing fundamentally at odds

With living out our lives so they are worthy of the gods.

 A hopeful and reassuring viewpoint.

I am also impressed by the powers of observation and deduction evident in this work.  Lucretius subscribed to the belief that the way to understand the universe is to observe the natural world around us and then use logic to draw deductions from these observations.  This poem contains many descriptions of natural phenomena with expositions of what we can and can’t deduce from these observations.  Lucretius’ Epicurean viewpoint on religion and the gods seems very brave and revolutionary for the time (or even within the last 200 years).  Early on, in Book I (Matter and Void), he writes (83-84):

[…] on the contrary, it is Religion breeds

Wickedness and that has given rise to wrongful deeds

He then describes Agaememnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, to persuade the gods to send

[…] fair and favourable winds to sail the fleet along! –

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong

An observation that holds true today where mobs of people are rioting and killing in Libya and the Middle East in the name of the prophet because they feel his name was slighted by some amateur American film-makers.  Where is the logic or justice in this but it is all done in the name of Religion.

The evocations of various phenomena of the time were likewise fascinating:

• garments dyed glowing purple from the murex of the Thessalian tide;
• spikenard bloom;
• Hyrcanian hounds;
• Molossian mastiffs;
• Traitor’s [Tarpeian]Rock;
• overpowering lad’s love [southernwood];
• an ancient Roman physician coating the lip of a goblet with honey to disguise the bitter taste of the wormwood medicine from his patient;
• mountains being “two thousand arrow-shots away” or “five hundred javelin-casts”;
• nymphs and goat-footed satyrs;
• a snake that, touched with human spit, will die;
• hellebore a poison for humans but “which makes goats and quail grow fat and sleek”;
• the “snow-white goose, Protector of the Roman Citadel”;
• a belief that the sight of a rooster was painful to a lion’s eyes;
• Babylonian coverlets; Babylonian perfumes; shoes from Sicyon; Alindan silks;
• the currents of the Black Sea uniformly gliding in one direction;  
• 'snake-handed elephants […] trained by Carthaginians to bear the wounds of wars’;
• Etesian squalls. 

The descriptions of phenomenae that I enjoyed the most were the Avernian lakes, where Lucretius  describes all the places where bizzare things have happened: birds falling dead out of the sky, “wing-footed stags enticing […] serpents from their holes” with their breath; trees whose shade kills people; wells of sweet water in the middle of the ocean etc.

There are references to the Great Flood (the notes refer the reader to Ovid’s Metamorphoses” and Deucalion- the Greek Noah - and his wife Pyrrha), an interesting similarity with Genesis.
So many of these concepts broached in the centuries B.C.E. were on the right track.  In Book V, Lucretius talks about a legend that once “Water lorded it over land”, about genes (Lucretius writes of generative seeds and like breeding like).  When trying to explain the movement of the stars he doesn’t have one single proveable theory and therefore suggests a few, one of which is that the heavens are a great sphere with a flow of air spinning  “the sphere in the direction that the stars are moving in”.  Right idea, wrong sphere.  His writing describes the principle that the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound; noting that you see a distant woodsman strike a massive tree with a double-bladed axe before you hear the sound of the axe hitting the tree.  He is off-base however on how lightening is formed, with his theory that clouds contain “a multitude of seeds of fire”.

He is wrong on several theories or conclusions.  He mentions in Book I (1052-1082) the concept that the Sun might be the centre of the universe with people on the other side of the earth who

when they behold the sun, we see the stars of night.  And that the seasons of the heavens come to us by turns, And when it’s night for one, then for the other daylight burns. […] How can there be a centre to to what’s infinitely vast? And even if there were, then why should anything stand fast? Why shouldn’t it be driven far away instead. […]

Nor is there any spot where bodies lose the force of weight

So they can stand still in the void.

However he concludes that the sun and moon are exactly the same size they appear because their outline is “sharp and clear”.  His description of the “dawn of the world” in Book V (Cosmos and Civilization) reminds me of the Garden of Eden in Genesis: greenery, the creation of all the animals and birds, the Earth giving sustenance and warmth, “but the dawn-time of the world did not bring forth harsh cold and snow, nor too much heat nor mighty winds that violently blow”.  There was the same idea of an easier time, with less suffering that we saw in Genesis.  For Lucretius this dawn-time changed when Mother Earth grew tired “like a woman wasted with long years”.  He talks about the Earth bearing food “more generously” in her prime.  In Book I he writes (1150) “Even now the world is past its prime”.  I wonder what Lucretius would think about the world today.

While Lucretius describes everything as being made of atoms in different configurations he didn’t understand (how could he!) what binds atoms together.  The Democritus/Epicurus atomic theory involved hooks and barbs rather than electronic bonds between positively and negatively charged ions.  The ancients wrote of smooth and rough atoms to explain the different properties: sound vs light, iron vs wood, heat vs water etc.  Still, I find it awe-inspiring that they believed that air, water, iron, flesh, plants etc were all made of the same basic components, just assembled in different configurations with different amounts of void between the atoms and some finite variety of atoms.

Lucretius also speaks of there being many “freaks” in the early years including “Hermaphrodites partaking of both sexes” which reminded me of Aristophanes story in Plato’s “Symposium”  where he explains love as being connected to proto-mankind being 3 types of people: man-man, woman-woman and man-woman, and each type was split in half by the gods with love being their eternal search for their missing half.

Lucretius describes some of the advances mankind had achieved, moving from a hunter-gatherer society with people wearing animal skins to a pastoral society wearing woven cloth, living indoors safe from savage beasts; but instead of being at risk from accidental poisonings due to lack of knowledge, and dying of infection due to lack of medical knowledge, the more civilized man now dies of deliberate poisonings or wounds suffered due to more sophisticated warfare and weapons.  He speaks of men dying from over-indulgence rather than starvation.  He describes the development of societal contracts (Book V, 1018-1023):

Then neighbours began to form the bonds of friendship,

With a will

Neither to be harmed themselves, nor to do another ill,

The safety of the babes and womenfolk in one another’s trust,

And indicated by gesturing and grunting it was just

For everyone to have mercy on the weak.

In Book III (Mortality and the Soul), Lucretius writes (54-55)

 […] To truly take the measure of a man,

You must observe him in the midst of trial and tribulation

He speaks about Avarice, blind Ambition, envy and greed and how mankind’s fear of death creates a lot of suffering.  He didn’t think that people should fear death as once we are gone, that’s it, we cease to exist (though our elemental particles remain in the universe) and so there is nothing to worry about as we won’t be there TO worry.

Book III, 1018-1023

[…] the Conscience fears for its misdeeds, and IT applies

Goads and floggings to ITSELF, neither does it surmise,
Meanwhile, that there can be, to all its sufferings, an end,

Nor, at length, a final limit to its punishment,

So it dreads these same oppressions will grow weightier with death,

Until, at last, the life of fools becomes a Hell on Earth.

Lucretius has good advice on how to be happy (Book V, 1117-1119):

But if you’d steer your life by a philosophy that’s true,

The way to be the wealthiest of men is to eschew

High living, and be contented in the mind […]

(Book V, 1131-1136)

Let others wear themselves out all for nothing, sweating blood,

Battling their way along ambition’s narrow road

Because their wisdom smacks of others’ lips, and they pursue

Things that they only know second-hand, rather than through

Their own senses […]

And writes about always wanting more (Book V, 1412-1415)

For whatever is at hand, if we have never known before

Anything finer, it gives us chief delight and reigns supreme.

That is, till something better comes along in our esteem

And ruins the earlier thing that’s now old-fashioned to our mind.

(Book V, 1430-1435)

Therefore the human race is ever laboring in vain,

And fretting the years away in bootless worries. For it’s plain

Man doesn’t realize that even having has its measure;

There’s a point beyond which nothing can increase our real pleasure.

And this is what has by degrees dragged Life so far from shore,

And stirred up from the very depths the tidal waves of War.

His recipe for happiness is simple, Book II 18-22

[…]All your nature yelps for is a body free from pain,

And, to enjoy pleasure, a mind removed from fear and care[…]

And so we see the body’s needs are altogether spare –

Only the bare minimum to keep suffering at bay

Yet which can furnish pleasures for us in a wide array.

He also debunks religion's role in all of this (Book V, 1184-1187)

Moreover, men observed the orderly movements of the heavens,

And beheld the cycling of the year with its returning seasons,

But could not fathom how these came about, and lacking reasons,

Found an escape by handing these things over to the gods

[…]

Lucretius does not have a very high opinion of women.  When he is writing about the development of looms, weaving and spinning he writes (Book V, 1353-1355)

[…] Naturally, at the start

Men, not women, spun the wool – for men in every art

Excel the weaker sex in cleverness by far […]

He seems to have a higher opinion of dogs (Book VI, 1221-1222)

 […] But the clan

Of Dogs was hardest hit, the true and steadfast friend of Man

Given my science background and over 30 years of thinking scientifically, I was very drawn to Lucretius' reasoning.  It seemed a big jump in logic from the writings we've read so far (Genesis, Bhagavad Gita, Plato's Phaedrus, Plato's Symposium) that try to explain the world around us and our purpose but as Lucretius himself said (Book I, 1117):
“One truth illuminate another, as light kindles light”

It's all a progression from there to here.