Welcome to the first game in the 2020 March Madness—the Sublime!
First seed Homer versus 16th seed Edmund Burke in the Classical Bracket!
Marla Muse, thanks for joining us!
“Glad to be here, Tom! Another March Madness!”
What a crowd!
“Such noise! I love it!”
Why, Marla?
“I’m a Homeric muse. You know that!”
Because you often appear naked, I know.
“I love excitement!”
You do. Well let’s get right to the commentary.
Homer is the poet of war and forced migration.
He is not a known author. We don’t know who he was, or whether there was more than one Homer. Western literature only goes back so far in time and Homer is pretty much the limit, which is really not that long ago.
Homer is a mixture of third person narrative and dialogue. A good story teller tells us what people say, and also paints and describes the scene.
Plato, the great philosophical objection to the poetry of Homer, sums up all literature, and perhaps the whole of the human mind. After Homer/Plato, there’s nothing new. It just repeats, endlessly.
Plato uses dialogue alone; what Socrates says within the dialogue in response to others is the philosophy.
If dialogue is “drama,” then for pure drama, Plato, the philosopher, not Homer, the poet, is your man.
In philosophy, it matters what you say; in poetry, it really doesn’t.
Plato (anti-tears) versus Homer (tears). !!!!
All great poetry is a response to crisis. If war and plague and dislocation are stupid, than unfortunately poetry, which reacts to war and plague and dislocation, is stupid. To skillfully depict war as a story, or as poetry, the story/poetry becomes embroiled in the stupidity itself. This is the curse of the dyer’s hand.
The philosophy of Plato emerges in all its stunning wisdom and magnificence as a reaction, not to war itself, but to the stupidity of war, and also to the stupidity of poetry, because the stupidity of war and poetry are the same: the emotional, which is untrustworthy, excites men to war and makes for a great story. Neither one, according to Socrates, is to be trusted.
In the Homer passage, in which one warrior (a half god) speaks to another (a mortal,) a subject dear to Socrates is expressed: bravery and indifference in the face of danger and death. (Socrates is not anti-war; he wants a brave soldier class to protect the Republic; he’s against poetry bringing fear and weakness to the soldier. Socrates doesn’t want the Republic to be a stupid, emotional, aggressive, war-like state; he wants peace through strength.)
Homer’s poetry works against Socrates, even though the Homeric speaker is “brave;” the poetry must be condemned—because for the poetry to be vivid, cowardice must be depicted, too. The “brave speech” is directed at the cowardly (“why are you afraid?”) and since good poetry paints all aspects of a situation, the poison (cowardice) enters the listener; in poetry, vices and virtues both have a voice, and so the very thoroughess of the poetry condemns it, as strange as that may seem. Once you let the emotions in the door, it’s too late. And foolish wars come about from emotions—and poetry is mixed up with emotions, the “better” it is. As much as Plato appreciates drama (his own philosohy is drama!) he must forbid the excitable depictions of the pyrotechnic, entrancing Homer.
Homer’s opponent in this first round Sublime Madness match-up is not Plato, but Burke, a conservative thinker who famously cautioned against the excesses of the (very excitable) French revolution.
Burke merely elaborates Plato’s injunction against Homer. Without the dialogue. And therefore it’s more difficult to understand Burke, though he brilliantly puts his finger on why belief is preferred to incredulity; why people are naive rather than wise: Resemblances entrance us, while differences leave us cold. The absence of agreement is taxing and wearying, and finally nothing, or even estranging, to the non-analytical, childish mind. “In making distinctions we offer no food to the imagination,” says Burke. Poetry itself feeds credulity. Poetry makes us stupid. Burke agrees with Plato.
Here is Burke’s profound—even sublime—insight:
“The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblance we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect nature. A piece of news is told me in the morning; this, merely as a piece of news, as a fact added to my stock, gives me some pleasure. In the evening I find there was nothing in it. What do I gain by this, but the dissatisfaction to find that I had been imposed upon? Hence it is, that men are much more naturally inclined to belief than to incredulity. And it is upon this principle, that the most ignorant and barbarous nations have frequently excelled in similitudes, comparisons, metaphors, and allegories, who have been weak and backward in distinguishing and sorting their ideas. And it is for a reason of this kind that Homer and the oriental writers, though very fond of similitudes, and though they often strike out such as are truly admirable, they seldom take care to have them exact; that is, they are taken with the general resemblance, they paint it strongly, and they take no notice of the difference which may be found between the things compared.”
—Edmund Burke
To some, the Burke may be boring compared to the Homer:
“Friend! You will die—but why moan about it so?
Remember Patroclus? He was better than you.
Look! I’m handsome and stronger—
A marvelous father, my mother a deathless goddess—
But thanks to fate, I, too, will be brought low.
At midnight, maybe at noon, a mortal will kill me, too—
From a spear, by chance thrown, or a singing arrow.”
—Homer
Marla, the noise in the stadium is deafening! It really sounds like war!
I expected Burke to cooly prevail, but now I’m not so sure…
“The Homeric fans are beating loud drums. I can hardly hear myself think!”
Oh my God!
Homer wins!