Love and Poetry
Week 5 of my essays on Homeric Performance.
Love and Poetry
The way to make an epic verse is by pairing divine inspiration with formal understanding. The difference between mere formal understanding and the ability to change the world, to make myths that will cast shadows far past their initial performance, belongs to the coveted and cherished area of plaintive feeling that we must all find among the graces of muses and institutions of care: that love, and the ability to love others, and to recognize the love which is inherent in our entire world’s crafting, is the highest goal.
The more one studies epic poetry, choral lyric, or later dramatic verse, or the prose of writers that operated within the milieu of artists that were able to use these wonderful genres, the more one realizes that fashioning poetry is much like building the sacred things that adorn a church. While ornamentation is wonderful, the best part of them is their function. As a performance of Homer goes in extension, it becomes clear that the love of another is that which is the true function of the text, and the real anchoring point for the manifestation of mythography in these works.
“Why write poetry?” Is not simply a historical question to ask of Pindar’s commissions, the tragedians competitions, or the epic poets’ concomitant dining. It is a thoughtful, scaling question that accommodates the earnest didacticism of poetry given to patrons and children in exchange for taking their own glory from them, in both parties’ knowledge that the epiphanies which the poet puts instills within their works will last far longer than those they are giving praise or performance or practical education to.
The didactic sense drives Hesiod, and it can be argued that the more helpful and loving a poet is, the more famous they become. Homer’s sensitivity to this didactic sense is what makes this important element of love stand out more so than the other Greek poets. At the end of the questioning of “Why?”, one has picked up ‘survival instincts’ of poetry, the ‘aesthetic adjustment of poetry to God’s universe (how good it is),’ and ‘the portability of the poetry,’ the three of which give us, in turn, 1) proof for why it may have made it to us, 2) a good measurement by which to judge the poetry, and 3) a formal understanding of what we might be able to hear from the poetry itself after all this time.
Obviously, performing Homer today is far removed from the initial performance. Whether Bacon’s New Atlantis or Plato’s in the Timaeus, one can never know how well we are tracing a world that can definitionally never be alighted upon. It is nonetheless revelatory that we found the city of Troy; it makes the transformation of epic cycle stories over time mean something greater in knowing that they were planted with real seeds. Leaving verification and mimetics aside, the one thing that we can understand as a binary, something that is not in gradation and cannot be obfuscated by the three parts picked up, is judging whether a story has love in it.
A poem has love if it helps someone, and because we all want to do good things, and since good things are beautiful, this help is often beautiful. Perhaps this is why the Gods in the Iliad come as beautiful beings that are ethereal and bearing catharsis. As I find when attempting to sing the Iliad and Odyssey, the ability to find this genuine and pure love becomes an act of melting everything all together and fashioning it again. There is the dry, repetitive obfuscation of the epic diction and the repetitive story, the unending syntactical details and the dizzying intentionality of the poetic tradition, and the reservations we must feel in knowing that for some reason, everything else is downstream of Homer, but we cannot quite understand why, and the plain and simple language of the story does us no favors.
Love often appears to me through the rough positivity of the Gods. The way that the poet must compare individuals to people that cannot exist today is also prescient; ‘as mortals today could never do’ is a common refrain, and powerfully divisive between the heroic and the modern. When taken best, this refashionable substrate seems to make up a logic, and that logic’s edge is borne out best with the entire poem in sequence.
Performing Homer in long stretches then makes the logic of love of the story better visible. One would expect infinite variability here. Considering the improvisatory nature of the poem and taking a step away from the consecration of rendition, we are not lost in our relativity through the infinite variation of one’s own attempt at singing the songs. We are somehow rather better equipped than every other performer in every other work at any other time because of the performance realities of the hexameter.
To discover why this is, I believe, is to ask about where the love in Homer blooms. And this is a question that I believe can only be best answered through sharing it with others. As love is all around us and gives us over to help one another and to love ourselves, it is fitting that sharing Homer with someone, to give them a line of Homer, can be like presenting someone with a gift of the highest fidelity. Perhaps the poets felt the same way when they were given the verses by their years of practice and discovery of what really felt right to perform, in accordance with a standard that seems quite distant to us today.
Even Plato despaired of mentioning Zeus’ speech at the end of the Critias, and Bacon left off the destruction of the world by Salomon’s House’s un-wisdom. But Homer readily offers the true rendition of moral postulate that we face with each of our days, in wonderfully clear, logically coherent questions and orders:
ἡμεῖς δὲ φραζώμεθ᾽ ὅπως ἔσται τάδε ἔργα,
ἤ ῥ᾽ αὖτις πόλεμόν τε κακὸν καὶ φύλοπιν αἰνὴν
ὄρσομεν, ἦ φιλότητα μετ᾽ ἀμφοτέροισι βάλωμεν.
Homer, Iliad, 4.14-16
“Let us discuss how all of these works should be:
Whether we should induce horrible war and awesome battle,
Or cast love and comradeship amidst them.”
I have remarked in my readings the significance of φιλότης. But the word φύλοπις deserves special mention here. Per Graziosi and Haubold, in their combined efforts judging recent editions of van Thiel and West, “The term ϕύλοπις sounds grand, epic and essentially obsolete to later Greek authors” (2015; 8).
In his 16th Idyll of the 3rd century B.C., beyond the great world of Greek μουσική, Theocritus uses it for battle:
τίς δ’ ἂν ἀριστῆας Λυκίων ποτέ, τίς κομόωντας
Πριαμίδας ἢ θῆλυν ἀπὸ χροιᾶς Κύκνον ἔγνω,
εἰ μὴ φυλόπιδας προτέρων ὕμνησαν ἀοιδοί;
Theocritus, Idylls, 16.48-50
“Or would ever know the leaders of the Lycians then, or Priams longhaired sons, or Kuknon’s beautiful, girlish complexion, if it were not for the singers of old who would hymn of battle and war (φυλόπιδας)?”
Elsewhere, Hesiod, composing a bit after Homer, uses it in a similar formula, but with a post-hoc consideration:
ἡμίθεοι, προτέρη γενεὴ κατ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν.
καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνή,
Hesiod, Works and Days, 160-161
“There were demigods in this earlier generation, across the boundless Earth
And they too (were covered up) by horrible war and awesome battle.”
In Aristophanes, the term is used mock oracularly. Perhaps the degeneration of the term goes like this: for Hesiod, it is the completion of the Gods’ whole demise in every way, which is both war and whatever φύλοπις is; for Aristophanes, it is parodying that, and by the time of Theocritus, the term is just a double for war. Today, the murky origins of the term are no longer clear, and the Homeric grandeur of it, if there is such an impulse, is subsumed among the light suggestions of scholiasts and comparative uses hundreds of years apart.
In this way, the didactic of Homer becomes mysterious and cannot be deciphered. And yet the discussion that Zeus makes is still quite interesting, and we still have a general idea of the greater dichotomy of the three lines, which is the choice between war and fellowship. The production of new words, or their dissolution in Homeric logic, may yet break down to where we are no longer able to see this distinction; this may be true already of φιλότης and the second line’s comparison of πόλεμος and it. And if we cannot understand the logic at hand in a passage as clear as this, then what are we to do with the emotionally charged passages and whole arcs of characters?
It is clear that supplement is needed. Almost as if one is creating the definitions for themselves, the words rise out of the page and provide something new. I personally hear the word as meaning something more to do with the nature of witnessing, from φυα and οπις. Just as a child must sound out the definitions of lessons and moral learnings of their surroundings as they acquire language, so we learn about the world while trying to make sense of these stories.
This depth and rigor of examination could have been the heart of what made Homer so wonderfully didactic in his time, and the fact that it has not been triumphed over warrants very close inspection of the text. A relationship of performance is one that takes time, however, and these beginning trials can only provide hints at what the full sense of the greater body of the poet’s work would have meant to those who actually know the language by heart, and could sense most fully where the poet was giving us the opportunity to dream, perhaps the greatest gift and beloved bestowing pause of all. Because no one has discovered this secret to Homer yet, we are all on equal footing, and one must only try to find this love.