So thanks, Matthew, for thanking everyone
who I was going to thank.
[LAUGHTER]
This has just been a really, very transformative thing
to be part of.
And so I'm going to read the beginning
part of one of my lectures for the series,
and then if I have time, I'll read
from a long poem that is shaped by the experience of writing
these lectures.
The poem is kind of a lecture.
I really put my bow tie on, big time,
when this whole thing started.
I'm going to time myself.
So this talk is called Wonder--
a Syzygy, and it's in three parts.
The first is called "The World Worlds."
It's probably not the most promising beginning
for this talk, for me to observe that my subject, like silence,
has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it.
Love, anger, regret, even boredom may entrench themselves
in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I'd say,
is always a fugitive affair.
Maybe it's a matter of developmental psychology.
Already in the middle of life, I find
myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder.
These days, I feel it mostly in my dreams.
Or maybe it's civilization itself
that's outgrown its wonder years we start out
with the marvel of the ancient world--
the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes--
only to arrive in our disenchanted era,
at wonder bread.
Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing.
Still, I suspect the occasional sighting
of this endangered emotion has something
to do with why a middle aged writer like
me continues to write poems in the twilight
of the Anthropocene.
Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently,
and in pentameter verse, too.
Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form.
By following that trace for the next 20 minutes or so,
I hope we'll come a bit closer to wonder itself.
Let's begin with an early wonder of
the Western literary tradition.
In book 18 of The Iliad, the God Hephaestus
forges a shield for Achilles, who's
lost his armor in the bloody fog of war.
But as Hephaestus works the shield's surface,
this peculiar blacksmith, being a God after all,
simply can't resist creating a world too.
There he made the Earth, and there the sky and the sea,
and the inexhaustible blazing sun,
and the moon rounding full, and there the constellations,
all that crown the heavens.
A little creation myth blossoms amid the slaughter
as Hephaestus hammers not only the Earth,
but within the brief passage of three dactylic hexameters,
the totality of the known cosmos onto the shield as well.
He's only just getting warmed up, really.
Over the next 150 lines of the poem,
Hephaestus emblazons the shield's surface
with a compact survey of ancient civilization,
including the arts of war, law, agriculture, animal husbandry,
astronomy, music, dance, and so-on.
Essentialist at heart, he sets this panorama buzzing all over
with epicurean minutiae.
We see bunches of lustrous grapes in gold,
ripening deep purple.
We hear a boy plucking his lyre so clear it could
break the heart with longing.
We even taste the savor of a cup of honeyed mellow wine.
Not bad for a piece of antiquated military equipment.
Faced with such artistry, I can't
help thinking of the shield's disabled maker
as a kind of poet, like the blind Homer himself.
Isn't every poet a crippled little god, after all?
Sure enough, Hephaestus incorporates a miniature epic
into the shield's pageantry too, with its own besieged city,
fraught war councils, interfering gods,
and loved ones watching anxiously from the ramparts
as a tiny surrogate Hector is hauled through the slaughter
by his heels.
No wonder Homer describes the shield
as "a world of gorgeous immortal work."
It contains an entire Iliad and more within its gilt compass.
Beguiled by Homer's art, some readers
have even tried to reverse engineer real shields
from this literary blueprint over the millennia.
Probably the most spectacular example of all time
was fabricated for display at George IV's coronation banquet
by the sculptor, draftsman, and Homer enthusiast John Flaxman,
in 1821.
It's a marvel of 19th century British punctiliousness
in low relief.
Here we find bunches of lustrous grapes and gold,
a boy with his lyre, and that cup of honeyed wine
all meticulously accounted for.
And yet, I can't help feeling this luminous artifact offers,
at best, only a low resolution copy of the Homeric original.
Let's zoom in for a moment on those golden hounds
at their master's feet to have a closer look.
The bow tie is coming out.
I'm not sure why Homer enumerates
the figures in this tableau with such exactitude
amid all the shield's masses, and the golden drovers
kept the herd in line, four in all,
with nine dogs at their heels.
But it offers us a perfect opportunity
to check Flaxman's work for quality control.
Four drovers?
Check.
Now let's count the dogs.
You might think I'm being a little persnickety here,
and with good reason.
But bear with me just a little longer.
Where is that ninth hound?
Marianne Moore famously claimed that omissions are not
accidents.
It's hard to say whether Flaxman's missing
hound is an omission or an accident,
but it makes me wonder.
Listen carefully.
You'll hear the poor beast barking, cringing
away somewhere in the vaporous limbo between fiction
and reality, paws flickering.
It's a creaturely cipher for what's
lost when we translate the virtual into the real.
The former US Army cryptographer and Homer enthusiast Cy Twombly
illustrates this splendidly in oil, crayon, and graphite
in his post-modern Shield of Achilles a century and a half
later.
You won't find our missing hound here either,
and that's precisely the point of Twombly's abstraction.
All those kinetic scribbles convey Homer's ἐνέργειᾰ,
or literary energy, but they also make an absolute hash
of the shield's pictorial imagery.
Not even a cryptographer can code so much world
into so small a space.
Whether you reconstruct it like Flaxman
or deconstruct it like Twombly, the shield of Achilles
will forever remain an impossible object.
It belongs to that wondrous category
of things that are larger inside than outside
like a poem, or a person, or a world.
"The world is not the mere collection
of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things
that are at hand," writes Martin Heidegger
in The Origin of a Work Of Art, "but neither
is it a merely imagined framework added
by a representation to the sum of such given things.
The world," writes Heidegger, "worlds."
Homer's shield isn't a picture of all
the countable or uncountable things--
star systems, ripening grape clusters,
flickering hounds that populate the world.
As Flaxman and Twombly discovered,
it can't even be pictured at all.
But it worlds.
"All the many men who see it will wonder at the sight,"
Hephaestus predicts as he hammers the glowing cosmos
on his forge.
If you were to survey the readers'
responses to this literary marvel over the millennia
from the anonymous commentators of antiquity
to moderns like Alexander Pope and G.E Lessing,
to undergraduate term papers in Hum 101,
you'd end up with something like a brief history of wonder
in Western civilization.
Describing the plowman at work on the shield's
figured surface, Homer himself is
the first among mortals to express wonder
at its construction.
I think I might--
yeah.
"And the Earth churned black behind them,
like Earth churning solid gold as it was.
That was the wonder of Hephaestus's work."
I can't imagine a more gorgeous description
of humanity's passage through the dark field of world.
"The Earth churned black behind them like Earth churning."
But why doesn't Homer say the shield's golden surface
churned like Earth churning?
This Mobius strip of a simile is a wonder in its own right.
Spellbound by Hephaestus's artistry,
we forget the shield's a shield in the first place,
so we feel we're watching soil behave like itself.
It's a kind of reverse alchemy where gold becomes dirt,
vehicle becomes tenor, and shield becomes world.
Sometimes it seems there's no escaping wonder
before such worlding work.
Of the golden women depicted in the sheild's wedding
procession, Homer writes, "each stood moved with wonder."
I'm not sure whether we should envy or pity
these embossed figures, forever frozen in transport
at the wonder they inhabit.
But here's the thing.
Though Hephaestus prophecies that "all the many men who
see it will wonder at the sight," none
of the many men in The Iliad, Trojan or Greek,
ever marvel at the sheild's construction.
Achilles's fellow soldiers won't even
look at the God's radiant work.
None dared to look straight at the glare.
Each fighter shrank away.
Only a blind genius could invent such tragic optics.
Homer embeds a gilded cosmos in the midst
of the epic for his readers to marvel at through the ages,
but The Iliad's inhabitants remain
forever blind to this wonder hidden in plain view.
Beholding his gift from the gods,
even Achilles, the only mortal who
scrutinizes the shield's figured surface,
fails to wonder at the sight.
"The more he gazed, the deeper his anger went.
His eyes flashing under his eyelids, fierce as fire,
exulting, holding the God's shining gifts in his hands."
Rage, μῆνις, is the first word of The Iliad,
and we usually associate it with blindness,
rather than perception.
"I was blinded, lost in my inhuman rage,"
says Agamemnon during one of his many changes
of heart in the poem.
But homer envisioned something like a phenomenology of rage
in this scene.
Bow tie.
"The more he gazed, the deeper his anger went."
For Achilles, anger is more than feeling.
It's an adjunctive perception itself.
Only once he's "thrilled his heart with looking hard
at the armor's well-wrought beauty
does he break off his furious gaze."
Far from blinding him, rage furnishes
this exceptional character with a singular perspective
on things.
Why does Achilles alone rage at this world
of gorgeous immortal work?
Maybe it has something to do with his sense of vocation.
In book nine of The Iliad, we find him in his tent,
plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre he won in battle long
ago, singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes.
But I can't help feeling this armchair
bard would have made a passable poet in a different world.
Isn't every poet a sulky egotist with a hyperactive death
drive after all?
But Achilles is born to fight, not sing.
Anything that comes between him and his bloody vocation,
including the beautifully carved lyre, its bridge set firm,
must be cast aside for him to follow his calling.
Not even life itself matters more to him
than this grim occupation.
"Hard on the heels of Hector's death, your death
must come at once," his mother warns him.
But Achilles only retorts, "then let me die at once."
What's the point of living if you can no longer kill?
Achilles doesn't work to live, he lives to work.
Homer uses the word ἔργον, which means something like "labor"
to describe the hero's exertions on the battlefield,
and his business is death.
Wonder for the Greeks led to a very different sort
of vocation.
We see this illustrated in a scene from Plato's Theaetetus
where Socrates plays his customary role of career
counselor to a youth he's interrogated
to the point of utter perplexity.
Theaetetus.
It's always hard to read Plato out loud,
because you feel like kind of should
be wearing a toga or something.
"By the gods, Socrates, I'm lost in wonder
when I think of all these things.
And sometimes when I regard them,
it really makes my head swim" Socrates.
"It seems that Theodorus was not far from the truth
when he guessed what kind of person you are.
For this is an experience that's just characteristic
of a philosopher, this wondering." θαυμάζειν.
"This is where philosophy begins and nowhere else."
Funny how Theaetetus must first become
lost in wonder in order to find himself.
He learns what kind of person he is, a philosopher,
from his brush with θαυμάζειν.
This beats any aptitude test I took in high school.
For Plato, wonder is where philosophy begins
and nowhere else.
No wonder no philosophers, even Aristotle,
who built a whole philosophical system from his lover's quarrel
with Plato, agrees on this point.
"It is through wonder that men now begin, and originally began
to philosophize," he observes in The Metaphysics,
"wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities
and then by gradual progression raising questions
about the greater matters too, e.g.,
about the changes of the moon, and of the sun,
about the stars, and about the origin of the universe."
If this sounds familiar, it's because we've come full circle
to the origin of the cosmos.
The Earth, the stars, the inexhaustible, blazing sun
and the moon rounding full that Hephaestus
hammered onto the shield's bright circumference
in the first place.
But we've yet to consider those greater matters that
form the astronomical rungs on Aristotle's ladder of wonder--
the moon, the sun, the stars the origin of the universe.
Let's take the next step in wonder's
philosophical progression and look to the moon.
So I'll stop there.
Obviously, I talk about the moon.
[LAUGHTER]
Maybe I'll maybe I'll put a little picture of the moon
up on, but I think now I'll just read just a few,
two or three pages from a new book, called Underworld Lit.
One.
"In the inky, dismal, and unprofitable research
of a recent leave of absence from my life,
I happened upon a historical prism of Ashurbanipal
that I found to be somewhat disquieting.
Of an enemy whose remains he had abused in a manner that
does not bear repeating here, this most
scholarly of Mesopotamian kings professes,
"I made him more dead than he was before."
Prisms of this sort were often buried
in the foundations of government buildings
to be read by gods, but not men.
Somewhere in the shifting labyrinth of movable stacks,
I could hear a low dial tone humming without end.
In Ashurbanipal's library there's
a poem written on clay that corrects
various commonly held errors regarding the venerable realm
of the dead.
Contrary to the accounts of Mulian, Madame Blavatsky,
and Kwase Benefo et al, it is not customarily
permitted to visit the underworld.
No.
The underworld visits you."
I'll skip some sections.
Three.
"For the past several years, I've
done an introductory course on world literature
at the university where I'm presently employed.
The offering has frequently proven
to be a disappointment both to myself and to the students,
some in headscarves, some occasionally dressed
in fatigues, who register for this seminar
in order to satisfy their humanities requirement.
As far as classes go, it was an almost painless experience.
The instructor is fairly intelligent and enthusiastic
about the material, but he's un-receptive, even intolerant
of anything that is not a poem or a poem in prose form.
Made me question things, including
the value of higher learning."
[LAUGHTER]
One of those is real.
"Looking over the feedback last summer,
I began to consider a different approach--
new assignments, self assessments, and regularly
scheduled office hours this time around,
followed by a transitional withdrawal of black gowns
through the spring morning mist.
And because I know comparatively little of this world,
I've decided to work my way up from below."
I'll just read one more section.
Four.
" HUM 101, Introduction to the Underworld,
cross-listed with comp lit.
In this course, students will be ferried
across the river of sorrow, subsist on a diet of clay,
weigh their hearts against a feather
on the infernal balance, and ascend a viewing pagoda
in order to gaze upon their homelands
until emptied of all emotion.
Texts will include the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Mayan Book of the Dead,
the Ethiopian Book of the Dead and Muriel Rukeyser's Book
of the Dead."
[LAUGHTER]
"The goals of the seminar are to introduce students
to the posthumous disciplinary regimes of various cultures
and to help them develop the communication skills that
are crucial for success in today's global marketplace.
All readings in English.
Requirements include the death of the student,
a mid-term oral report, and a final paper."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]