My wife was lying very quietly in bed the other morning waiting for me to wake up—her stare boring intently into my left ear. She had been staring silently and patiently at the side of my slumbering head for quite some time until I finally stirred. It was early. With not even a “good morning” or a “by your leave” to warm the cockles of her waking husband’s heart, her opening broadside salvo went something like this: “I know you don’t necessarily agree with my position, but I just wanted to make sure that you really understood my argument about Achilles’ wrath in Homer’s Iliad. The real reason for his anger was a deep-seated rage against his own mortality...”
She
was right, of course – I did not
agree with her psychologizing interpretation of Achilles’ rage; but that is a
subject perhaps for another blog. So began my morning, even before the coffee,
which I had to get up and make myself.
Most of us have heard or at least heard
of “the blues” as a musical
expression (my cultural reference
is Lady Sings the Blues,
based on the life story of blues singer Billy Holliday); but have you ever
wondered why the expression, “the blues”,
came to be linked to music? Have you ever had a feeling of sadness after watching
a great movie or finishing a good book? The Internet-God gave 28,800,000
results to that question after only 0.26 seconds. The English novelist, Charlotte
Bronte, wrote: “In the midst of life we are in death”; but Gandhi also reminds us
that Janus
has another face, and that “In the midst of death life persists.”
Then,
of course, the medical corporation also adds their two-cents to the “blues” question
by “problematizing” the phenomenon, and we learn that around 19 million
American adults are majorly depressed,
which does not even include all the other types of depressions (minorly and
in-betweenly types) with which one could be diagnosed. This, in addition to all
the other types of medically defined “blues” linked to depression, such as separation
anxiety (an original form of existentialism) and
the blueness event associated with the post-coital
condition.
There is, at the very least, one clear
piece of information that we can salvage from this jungle of cultural expressions
and medical definitions surrounding our emotional persona: that nostalgia,
or the sadness of living, is on everyone’s mind. Our ambient cultural voices
show us ways that we might meaningfully express our blues, while our various medical
industries seek to cure us of the blues. Normal people generally seem inclined,
culturally, to muddle along through their blue periods by giving voice to them,
and our medical professionals see the blues as a health problem to be fixed
through drugs and other types of therapy.
However,
as we look to the philosophers and poets for some kind of clarification on this
question of the blues, it would seem that the wise of the world have not
understood the blues as some kind of problem to be fixed; but rather, as a deep-seated
reaction that gushes up and wells-out, in the face of a common experience of
Living and Dying, from some hidden place in our body.
In a rather famous moment in poetic
history, Homer renders a conversation that is taking place in the middle of a dangerous
and bloody battlefield between two enemies who should have been friends because
their fathers had been befriended. Glaukos, who is fighting on the Trojan side,
and Diomedes, who is a great hero on the Greek side, meet on the battlefield,
recognize each other, agree not to fight, and exchange the promise and gifts of
friendship. And although Diomedes gets the better gifts from Glaukos, for which
Homer ridicules this latter, Glaukos certainly gets the nobler lines in
response to Diomedes’ question as to his father’s people: “…why ask of my
generation? As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind
scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves
again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow
while another dies.” (Iliad VI.
146-150).
Where
I have disagreement with my very-early-morning-lying-in-wait-to-ambush-me wife
on the question of Achilles is that, like every Greek of antiquity, Achilles
knew that we are dying things, that death attends us all sooner or later. What
burdens Achilles, again like all Greeks, is not the fact of our day-to-day
dying, but rather to determine what a thnetos,
a dying one, an ephemeros, a creature
that lives but for a day, can best accomplish between this moment right now and
its last day in order to mark its passage in the world.
For
Achilles the warrior, the accomplishments were linked to the doing of great
deeds of war that men would remember afterwards in poems and songs. For the
religiously-minded Socrates, the accomplishment was to teach men philosophy—the
life lived justly and honorably: “Men of Athens, I honor and love you;
but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy,
exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing
him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the
great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about
laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation,
and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of
the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?” (Plato’s Apology 29d).
Another
Greek who is interesting to interrogate on the question, “What is man?”, is Epictetus,
a former slave. According to this freed slave turned philosopher, we Dying Things
must never forget, especially when we get caught up in the routines of living
out our days, that we are and remain things that are dying surrounded by other
things that only live for a day. So in Enchiridion 3
it is recorded that he taught: “With regard to whatever objects give you
delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell
yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the
most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a
specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic
cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you
will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be
disturbed when either of them dies” (aÓpoqano/ntoß).
Even
the New Testament, which is in some very important ways a text of Greek
antiquity, consistently refers to the human body as a mortal, which is to say
dying, thing. It is equally true however, by way of caveat, that the NT never speaks about singing the blues.
Nietzsche was a philosopher of the
modern world, dying at the dawn of the 20th century, and lover of
ancient languages who helped this ancient Greek world-view to find again its nostalgic,
if not to say romantic voice in and for this contemporary world. In Birth
of Tragedy §3,
Nietzsche recounts an ancient legend of the Greeks that should serve to remind
us that human existence was never meant to be more than a blues tune, sung by
each one of us, that would linger in the air for just a little while:
“There is
an old legend that king Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests,
without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into
the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of
all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and
inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill
laughter and said these words, “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of
accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the
greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally
unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however,
is this—to die soon.”’
For those of you who rejoice in the
exotic beauty of other languages, Nietzsche’s poetical outcry is this: »Elendes
Eintagsgeschlecht, des Zufalls Kinder und der Mühsal, was zwingst du mich dir
zu sagen, was nicht zu hören für dich das Ersprießlichste ist? Das Allerbeste
ist für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht zu sein,
nichts zu sein. Das Zweitbeste aber ist für dich – bald zu sterben.«
The people of culture are driven to express the blues; the people of
medicine seek to heal this sickness
unto death that will know no healing until we have run our course. On the other
hand, our philosophers and poets, our wise ones, remind us that we are Dying
Things and that, in order for contentment to attend us, we must make peace with
our dying during the days of our living. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when
he spoke these words for the simple people: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they will be called sons of God.”
So,
we Dying Things are invited to be peacemakers, to reconcile ourselves
philosophically to what it means to be man. Every day we are invited to
contribute our own gentle variations to the Blues of Life; to make peace with
ourselves. In a funny, sad sort of way, a piece of the puzzle of living is also
grieving about the end of living; we are grieving, in a bluesy kind of way,
because Loss is an integral part of who we are and of who we are destined to
become. The blues, though, are not simply about the end of living; they are
also the expression of our own personal lamentation for what we wish might have
or could have been.
As
I write the lament of my life into the Blues Song of the World, there will be
musical phrases woven around Ideas
that I wish I could have believed, because so many around me believe them, but I
simply do not find them credible. I would very much have liked in my life to be
able to wrap myself in the comforting cultural cloak of Christian faith; but my
philosophical mind does not acknowledge that irrational stories should be
accepted as “mysteries of faith”. I find, for example, that I am simply unable
to comprehend in what way it is possible to construe Jesus as a teacher of ethics,
because I do not find either the Sermon on
the Mount narrative realistic or the Jesus-ethic real-world functional. We
should actively “turn the other cheek” with each one who offends us—so Jesus
becomes the only known teacher of ethics in the entire world to do away with the
fundamentally human notion of justice (i.e.,
accountability)?! Likewise, I could never quite extrapolate from the Christian
narrative in precisely what way I am defective (i.e., a sinner) in my person, and therefore offensive to The Great
One—I find no persuasive narrative, argument, or other evidence that my
existence, as such, is an offense of
any sort, let alone an offense against the Supreme One who is supposed to have
breathed life into these nostrils. Nor do I accept as reasonable the notion that
I carry some sort of Debt of being offensive to The Divine, or to the
Universe at large, simply because one of my idiot ancestors stole a crummy apple from the wrong Guy’s garden.
As
I write the lament of my life into the Blues Song of the World, there are
phrases that speak of what I am becoming, of what I have created during
and with the days of my life. Because along with my own aging and experiences
of loss (of parents, family, friends, innocence, and of flexibility in my
joints), comes the wondering whether, and the deep personal conviction that, I
have become the type of human that would have made my parents proud, that would
have made my grandmother proud.
As
I write the lament of my life into the Blues Song of the World, you will hear
in my life-tune a repetitive blues phrase crying out the Realization
that there will not be enough days in my life to discover answers for all the
Big Questions that I have been studying, relentlessly, for as long as I can
recall. This phrase expresses my dismay that all my education has not informed
me concerning what is true about the
world, but rather concerning what I have learned about the world as I have
grown up that is not true.
The
blues singer of Psalm 8 reminds us to keep in our minds a question, which is
both rhetorical and yet profoundly reflective of the bluesy nature of the Human
Condition: What is man that we should be mindful of him?
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