Monday, June 30, 2014

The Cleverest of the Greeks



      If you hear the question ‘Who was the cleverest of the Greeks?’ and immediately answer ‘Odysseus, of course!’ then you clearly need to be reminded of the story of the man who outsmarted Odysseus, the cleverer-than-clever Palamedes.
      Odysseus was certainly clever enough. He was the one who arranged the extraordinary and massive pan-Hellenic army to go besiege Troy and plunder it for all its assets, although that wasn’t the way he planned it at the time. It all goes back to Helen’s adolescence (and Helen was a ravishing little girl even then). Her father realized that she would soon be married, and that the lucky man she’d married would be far outnumbered by the unlucky men she hadn’t married, and that for the sake of his daughter’s safety he would have to devise some sort of safety mechanism for the marriage. Naturally he enlisted the help of the cleverest of the Greeks--call Odysseus! Odysseus told Helen’s father to invite all comers to court Helen, but he set down two extraordinary stipulations. First, Helen would be allowed to choose her own husband from the available suitors (A young girl choosing her own husband? Inconceivable!). That way the blame for a bad choice of husband (any man who was not chosen was likely to regard hers as a bad choice) would rest on none other than the woman in question. Second, all the suitors were required to take an oath that, whoever Helen chose to marry, they would support her choice as an ad hoc militia and defend her marriage against any interlopers. According to Odysseus’ plan, even if one of the suitors--or anyone else--interfered with Helen’s marriage, he who interfered would face not only the social consequences of breaking an oath made in public, but also the wrath of all the other suitors who had kept their word (and would feel indignant that someone else had not). So Helen made her choice in favor of Menelaus. Later, when Helen went off to Troy with Paris (whether willingly or unwillingly), the suitors’ oath was activated, and all the suitors were obligated to trudge off to Troy and re-capture Helen to return to her husband--their opportunity to ransack Troy and take all the gold was just a convenient bonus.
      (It is interesting that, if you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Helen has a strong and clearly developed personality. She is unimpressed by Paris’ weakness in battle, she displays complete sang-froid when visited by Aphrodite herself, and she feeds a happiness drug to Menelaus and Telemachus when she gets fed up with listening to them bewail the tragedies of the past. She is very sophisticated and collected; she states her own opinions and doesn’t let anyone change her mind. The Homeric epics don’t reveal a similar level of information about Menelaus’ personality (in the Odyssey he performs standard hospitality practices with Telemachus, but it’s all ritual and there’s not much room for his individuality to shine through), which is too bad, because it would be interesting to see why Helen chose to marry him. Was he just someone weak whom she thought she could manipulate, or was there a more significant connection between them?)
      When the oath is activated, this is when Odysseus’ plan comes around to bite him, because he too took that oath that he would defend Helen’s marriage, and he doesn’t want to go to war. So he feigns insanity: when Menelaus and company show up to conscript Odysseus, Odysseus is out in his fields, plowing for the spring planting and sowing his fields with salt instead of seed. Salt, as we all know from hearing erroneous rumors about Carthage, prevents plants from growing and is more or less impossible to remove from soil; if you spill a bunch of salt in an agricultural field, you’ll be living with the consequences for years. Why, you’d have to be crazy to do it! Menelaus sees Odysseus salting his field, but he knows Odysseus’ reputation as a clever manipulator and decides that he needs to run a test to see whether Odysseus’ mental illness is genuine. Menelaus enlists the only person clever enough to outsmart Odysseus, i.e. Palamedes, who grabs Odysseus’ infant son and places him in the path of the plow. Odysseus diverts the plow from harming his son, thereby proving not only that Odysseus is only feigning insanity and can be duly conscripted, but also that Palamedes is capable of outwitting Odysseus. Odysseus does not like this one bit.
      Odysseus faithfully comes to Troy in fulfillment of the vow, but he does so unwillingly and never forgets his animosity for Palamedes. In the end, he quite cold-bloodedly decides to kill Palamedes in revenge for his cleverness. There is a version in which Odysseus sets up an incredibly convoluted scheme to convict Palamedes of treason and thereby have him executed (it involves a fake oracle, a murdered messenger, a forged letter, and the injunction to uproot the ENTIRE Greek camp and re-establish it in a different location), but the simpler version of the story is that Odysseus lures Palamedes out onto a boat and drowns him, apparently hoping that no one will connect Palamedes’ sudden disappearance with Odysseus’ longstanding, implacable grudge against him. I’m partial to the latter version because it’s so unaccountably direct for an Odyssean scheme; usually when that proverbially clever Odysseus wants to accomplish something, his method involves persuading five different people to do contradictory things. But in this case, what should be his masterpiece of deception--deceiving the only person who was ever able to deceive him!--is rendered utterly flat as Odysseus fails to devise a better murder than Nero plotted for his mother. He does kill Palamedes successfully, possibly because no one can imagine Odysseus committing such a mundane murder.
      In the end, one way or another, Odysseus engineers Palamedes’ death and gets away with it. Odysseus, as we all know, survives the war and eventually returns home after having lost everything, after which he resumes the kingship of Ithaca and kills all his rivals. He himself will eventually be murdered by the son he had with Circe (stabbed with a stingray barb, after they argued over some cattle without knowing each other’s identities). Ultimately Odysseus retains the honor of being cleverest of the Greeks, if only by killing his rival. Even then, his cleverness wasn’t enough to win him a natural death at ripe old age. It goes to show that, even though Odysseus might have been good at manipulating people by lying to them, his demand for respect prevailed over all. He used it to kill Palamedes, but it came to kill him in the end.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Grandpa only lives on video now




Your words were the most solid part of you,
solid enough to cast a shadow on
my clear-as-glass expression. Still your hands
I can't substantiate, nor shoulders yet
can I confirm aren't phantoms, nor your hair,
as weighted down with silver as it is,
could I affirm has mass to speak of. How
am I to navigate the space between us
when you're not there? How can I conjure you?
I need you to be real. All I find
is your voice of dark blue flannel on my ear
and distant eyes on my down-feathered mind.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Surprise Endings



      To open this week, I’d like to pose a trivia question for the mythology experts in the audience: How does Minos die?
      Minos comes up a lot here because he’s an influential iteration of the ‘evil tyrant’ archetype. In the past I’ve described him refusing to fulfill vows to the gods, terrorizing people with monsters, and (the ultimate mark of the tyrant) demanding human sacrifice. He has more skeletons in his closet: when his navy was besieging Athens, a Helpful Princess fell in love with him and betrayed her city to him by killing her father, but he repaid her devotion by killing her. He was also an unrepentant nonmonogamist, against the wishes of his wife, to the extent that his wife put a curse on him to kill all his mistresses. Beyond that, he lost one of his sons and made a series of increasingly irrational demands in the course of finding him. (When his son went missing, Minos first seized a magician named Polyidus and demanded that Polyidus find his son. When Polyidus divined that the child had fallen into a giant pot of honey and drowned, Minos imprisoned him with the child’s dead body and refused to release him until he raised the child from the dead. When Polyidus actually completed this--a feat that had never before been accomplished in Greek myth, and that would only be repeated once--Minos demanded that Polyidus teach his son all his magic. Polyidus, deciding that he didn’t like having Minos as a boss, took off at the first possible opportunity.) You can see how Minos acquired a reputation as an evil tyrant, and yet for all these wicked deeds, none of them directly led to his death--not even his betrayal of a vow to Poseidon, not even his defilement of religious ceremony via human sacrifice. Evil tyrants, after committing many unforgiveable offenses, are usually done in by avenging young heroes (often their own grandsons or nephews, as in the cases of Acrisius or Amulius). But this isn’t what happens to Minos.
      To talk about Minos’ death, you have to start with Daedalus. This is quite a famous story--Minos relishes the prospect of killing people with his new monster the Minotaur, but first he needs somewhere to keep the Minotaur where it won’t kill him. So he hires Daedalus, the most ingenious engineer in the world, to build an inescapable maze. Unfortunately for him, his daughter solves the maze with cunning manipulation of the fiber arts, and Theseus gallantly whacks off the monster’s head. Minos, raging impotently at the death of his monster, imprisons the engineer and his son Icarus in the maze, apparently not realizing that the person who designed the maze is the one best qualified to find a way out. And this is precisely what Daedalus does. He builds two sets of wings and the two of them fly straight out of Crete and over the Mediterranean, although only one of them comes through alive. Daedalus grieves for his son and takes up residence in Sicily. He lives the quiet life of an exile, which is marred only slightly by an episode in which he kills his new apprentice for being smarter than he is.
      Minos continues to play the evil tyrant, and he abandons all his royal duties in Crete to scour the world for his escaped engineer (whose crime, I want to stress, was designing a deathtrap whose fatality rate turned out to be less than 100 percent). He travels in a murderous rage, bearing the implements of his revenge: a snail shell and a thread. Minos claims that he is looking for someone to thread the snail shell, secretly knowing that only Daedalus would be clever enough to solve the problem. When a certain foreign king on Sicily returns the puzzle solved, Minos deduces that the king got Daedalus to solve the riddle and begins making murderous demands that the king hand over Daedalus. The Sicilian king, following hospitality custom, invites Minos to take a bath before they sit down to dinner and negotiate. In the process, he hands Minos over to his young daughters, who proceed to murder Minos by drenching him in boiling water, and teach him a strict lesson about setting down too many orders. (Minos is not the only Greek king to be murdered by innocent young princesses--Jason’s antagonist Pelias meets his end in a similar way--but you might note that the girls who murder Pelias are trying to perform an immortality ritual that they end up botching, whereas the girls who murder Minos are deliberately trying to thwart a murderer before he kills again.) I find it fascinatingly ironic that Minos manages to survive so many betrayals, so many avenging heroes, wars, monsters, and domestic treachery--but he lets his guard down when a host invites him to take a bath, and he falls victim to some princesses with jars of water.
      (If the ploy of killing someone while they’re bathing sounds familiar, it’s because it was known in antiquity as a situation in which a person would be unarmed, unarmored, and generally vulnerable. In the Odyssey Agamemnon admits, when Odysseus meets his ghost in the underworld, that he was killed when his wife implemented a similar scheme. The Roman emperor Commodus also was assassinated while bathing, despite what the film Gladiator might have reported.)
      This is an unpleasant saga to deal with. Minos is not just a character who undertakes a lot of violent action himself, but also motivates others around him to violence. Women kill for the sake of Minos’ sexual attention--the Athenian princess kills her father, while Minos’ wife kills her rivals. Daedalus, a nominal hero of the story, whose specialty is in the ostensibly non-violent field of engineering, builds the Labyrinth for the purpose of killing young Athenians, and Minos punishes him when the Labyrinth isn’t deadly enough. When Daedalus builds wings to escape from Minos, his son dies by misusing the wings--perhaps not Daedalus’ fault, but nevertheless a death that can be traced back to him. When he finds a new apprentice, he becomes so jealous of the apprentice’s ingenuity that he hurls him to his death. Finally, the wake of blood Minos leaves behind him is cut off by some young girls who are convinced that the only way to stop Minos is to lure him into a false sense of security and then murder him. For all of these desperate, persecuted characters, violence is the only means they can find to prevent more violence, in a world that grows daily more dangerous and uncontrolled.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

On a foggy night, and seeing nothing but darkness from the scenic overlook



The city swallowed by a cloud
was not, as thought, mere novelty,
but seeing all of downtown drowned
and disappeared beneath a shroud
as thick and dark as mercury,

to see the lamplight, flickery,
now suffocated, shuddering
beneath vast swaths of misery,
impenetrable, slippery,
that slithers past while muttering,

it chilled me. I thought clouds in spring
should keep respectful distance here.
But in the distance, sirens ring
and rush to aid the suffering
who, blinded, unseen, failed to steer.