Right on cue! Just as I was beginning to think that I may have caught up with my domestic chores and made some progress up my ludicrously impossible list of projects and might be able to devote some time to Roberto Calasso's book, there they are! - Cadmus and Harmony.
It may yet be a mirage.
I once lived on a beautiful coconut palm fringed beach, blissfully alone, and can attest to the fact that after a while, the wind, the birds, the surf itself, starts talking, and sometimes with a human voice. Towards the southern end of the beach, stands the massive sun-bleached trunk of a long-dead calophyllum known as The White Goddess. She features prominently in all stories which recount the history of that beach. The trickster element of our experiences with the echoes of our psyche tossed in the tumult of the sensory world is universally celebrated in literature, myth and religious lore. Wole Soyinka offers us an African perspective in "Myth Literature in the African World" where the trickster deities are prominent features of the African Pantheon. Wole Soyinka was educated in the Classics and offers his comparative take - a re-read is on that afore mentioned list. Robert Graves celebrated "The White Goddess" in his strange book in which he sets off in search of Her fearless of where Zeus' bright thunderbolts might strike next. And who can doubt that mortal language does not come to us originating in the birdsong of forests, in wind, thunder, and the gathering of storms in the most desolate oceans vast - at least in some onomatopoeic sense. I think that human language can also work like a mirror reflecting back to us our projections and, at times, doing so in the most flattering of ways.
"The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again"
Might there yet be some danger still lurking in that storm, Caliban? Prospero?...Macbeth?
I do love your analogy of the gods being trapped in some great bureaucracy looking forward to retirement - with perhaps a picture of a dream yacht framed upon the office wall. It reminds me of Graves describing the Greek Myths as just so many political cartoons.
There is a rich vein of theology to explore in Zeus as Holy Spirit and, I think, much food for thought in the question why one might appear to choose mortality again and again.
And finally, I have not been able to devote as much time as I had hoped to my studies in the Greek language as I had hoped, but listening to your Greek rendition is now becoming more and more like listening to a song, with the words and meaning slowly beginning to shine through even if sometimes it is just in a sense that I am able to recognise or remember them. Great! I can look them up later.
The poem I was inspired to read immediately after reading this was Eliot's Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock, that final line:
Right on cue! Just as I was beginning to think that I may have caught up with my domestic chores and made some progress up my ludicrously impossible list of projects and might be able to devote some time to Roberto Calasso's book, there they are! - Cadmus and Harmony.
It may yet be a mirage.
I once lived on a beautiful coconut palm fringed beach, blissfully alone, and can attest to the fact that after a while, the wind, the birds, the surf itself, starts talking, and sometimes with a human voice. Towards the southern end of the beach, stands the massive sun-bleached trunk of a long-dead calophyllum known as The White Goddess. She features prominently in all stories which recount the history of that beach. The trickster element of our experiences with the echoes of our psyche tossed in the tumult of the sensory world is universally celebrated in literature, myth and religious lore. Wole Soyinka offers us an African perspective in "Myth Literature in the African World" where the trickster deities are prominent features of the African Pantheon. Wole Soyinka was educated in the Classics and offers his comparative take - a re-read is on that afore mentioned list. Robert Graves celebrated "The White Goddess" in his strange book in which he sets off in search of Her fearless of where Zeus' bright thunderbolts might strike next. And who can doubt that mortal language does not come to us originating in the birdsong of forests, in wind, thunder, and the gathering of storms in the most desolate oceans vast - at least in some onomatopoeic sense. I think that human language can also work like a mirror reflecting back to us our projections and, at times, doing so in the most flattering of ways.
"The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again"
Might there yet be some danger still lurking in that storm, Caliban? Prospero?...Macbeth?
I do love your analogy of the gods being trapped in some great bureaucracy looking forward to retirement - with perhaps a picture of a dream yacht framed upon the office wall. It reminds me of Graves describing the Greek Myths as just so many political cartoons.
There is a rich vein of theology to explore in Zeus as Holy Spirit and, I think, much food for thought in the question why one might appear to choose mortality again and again.
And finally, I have not been able to devote as much time as I had hoped to my studies in the Greek language as I had hoped, but listening to your Greek rendition is now becoming more and more like listening to a song, with the words and meaning slowly beginning to shine through even if sometimes it is just in a sense that I am able to recognise or remember them. Great! I can look them up later.
The poem I was inspired to read immediately after reading this was Eliot's Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock, that final line:
"Until human voices wake us and we drown"
And also the deathless voices of the
" other withered stumps of time
.... told upon the walls; staring forms
.......... leaning, hushing the room enclosed"