Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS October 19 2012 from Llewelyn Morgan's review of Stephen Halliwell's Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek poetics from Homer to Longinus : Homer's works were already, alongside everything else, a meditation on poetry's power to transform the pain and impermannence of mortal existence into kosmos , a lasting order or design. An overarching theme of Halliwell's discussions is the tension repeatedly diagnosed by Greek thinkers between poetry's capacity to transport its audience to another psychological place and its claim to offer insight into the truths of this existence, the "ecstasy and truth" of his title. Homer himself fails, ultimately, to square these two principles, and Halliwell arrestingly ties Homeric poetics to the figure of the Muse, an embodiment of poetry transcendent and beautiful, but representing a resolution only truly achievable on a divine plane, and only glimpsed by mortals.  *  However we choose to th...

What little I have learned about hermeticism, I have learned it from Eshuneutics' blog. He has written about Equal to the Earth in three separate posts, each highlighting a different hermetical aspect of my writing, by looking at an individual poem. His post Sea reads that image in the book and in the poem "Fire Island." Androgyne interprets my poem "Brother" rightly against Plato's Symposium . Mermen looks at the poem of the same name, contrasting its use of hermetical imagery with Simon Lowy's.

The Genealogy comprises three related essays. The first essay searches for the origin of the ideas "good and evil" and "good and bad." Briefly, "good and bad" belongs to a master, or aristocratic, morality: what is noble is good, what is contemptible is bad. The idea of "good and evil," however, belongs to a slave, or subordinate, morality, based on ressentiment : what removes suffering is good, what imposes suffering is evil. Nietzsche argues that with the triumph of Judaism, through Christianity, slave morality has trumped master morality. The second essay seeks to explain the origin and history of such ideas as "guilt," and "bad conscience." After relating the ideas to business contracts, Nietzsche hypothesizes that bad conscience is "the serious illness" contracted by man under the stress of becoming a part of a peaceful society, when all his instincts drive him towards "the wilderness, to war, to prowling,...

TLS June 19 2009 from "World without limits," a version of the Presidential Address to the Classical Association, delivered by Richard Seaford: As I argued some years ago in Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), the pivotal position of the Greeks in world culture stems largely from the fact that the sixth-century polis was the first society in history (with the conceivable exception of China) to be pervaded by money. Coinage was invented  towards the end of the seventh century BC, and spread rapidly in the Greek city-states from the beginning of the sixth. * The new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century, "philosophy" and tragedy. "Philosophy" (or rather idea of the cosmos as an impersonal system) was first produced in the very first monetized society, early sixth-century Ionia, and--even more specifically--in its commercial centre Miletos. The tendency of pre-...

Read "The Apology" for a reading group last week. Unlike the Platonic dialogues, "The Apology" consists of speeches given by Socrates at his trial, though there is a short dialogue, more like a cross-examination, between Socrates and his accuser Meletus. There are three main speeches. The first is Socrate's self defence. The second, given after he was found guilty, proposes a counter-penalty to the death sentence (Socrates proposes outrageously that he be fed by the City in the Prytaneum, as is fitting for a poor man who has served his City well). The third speech was made after his death sentence by drinking hemlock had been confirmed. I enjoyed reading the well-known phrases in their original context, here translated by R. E. Allen in his The Dialogues of Plato . Vol. 1: About prejudices inculcated in us since childhood--"Again, there have been many such accusers, and they have now been at work for a long time; they spoke to you at a time when you were es...