by Christopher Fulkerson
Persistent Creatures I,
Photographic Still Life by CF,
12/30/2009
I am pleased to offer to you one of the most important teachings about the ancient world, or the world in general, that you will ever learn: the words of the invocation to the patron deity, with which most ancient epics begin, are a signpost to an actual person known to the reader (including the reader himself), and if a specific time or moment is mentioned, it indicates a particular moment in the life of the reader. Every detail in the invocation, limited only by the art of the bard, can be reflected in the life of the participants.
It is up to the participants - the reader, listener, or actor or bard, to realize what moments in their lives are these moments to which they are directed by the text.
Such moments and their meanings are revealed to the listener through his personal realization. In my experience, the less strictly the realization is required to be made, the easier it is. This is because the moments really do correspond, this phenomenon is real, I am not speaking in some kind of metaphor nor according to any conventional notion of any religion. The ancients thought of it as part of their religion, but we have the wrong idea of what religion is.
If you think I am wrong, you are probably right: that is to say, if you don't believe what I am saying, then you probably do have what you may think is sufficient reason not to believe it, since you don't have the realization it takes to make use of the possibilities. But I am speaking from my realization, and I know this is real. So it doesn't matter that you may think me wrong, if you do, you are wrong.
There is more: this phenomenon was something of which the ancients were fully aware. So in an important sense it wasn't what we call "religion" at all. We are talking about a scripting of life events, of existence. The command as to "where to begin," that bardic judges made to rhapsodes during recitation competitions, was an enjoinder to figure out to what time in their lives the contest corresponded. "First Place" in a competition could for reasons of perfection of memory go to one rhaspode, but if that individual had too little realization, was no more than a puppet with a memory, then the correspondence-realization part of the game, the "deeper part," the "real game," that extented beyond the apparent compeition, could in fact be in the hands - in the mind - of another.
Pornography is an important teaching tool: as usual, the easiest example to understand is the crudest. The droll ancient Greek comic poem called "The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice," a writing by that famous author Anonymous but classed among the "Homerica," begins, as it were, too suddenly, with the words, "I'll begin right her." This is meant as a "hiccup" in the transmission, and can be identified as a moment of that kind, some kind of awkward instant, in the life of the listener. Of course it is meant as a comic reference to the manner in which rhapsodes began their recitations, but I have already explained that those competitions were part of a larger existential phenomenon, which was guided in part through public performance, and partly through "competitions."
All of the phenomena involved are enhanced if they are acted out, and can be most effective of all for the actor involved, though again, it must be quickly pointed out that the actors are not necessarily the most cognizant persons in the room. An actor with no understanding, acting before persons with greater realization, may not know what he is doing or saying, or how it may be of real use to him.
If the epic is being related by a bard then it may correspond to a moment in which the bard is also a person in the listener's past.
Potentially, all art works this way, but in the case of the ancient writers they often had the most thoroughgoing understanding of these phenomena and their example is often both clearest and most archetypal, that is, since they knew what they were doing, and their everyday world encouraged, rather than discouraged, working with these phenomena, the events in their texts were often fully worked-out scenarios meant to actually change the course of events of the participant's lives.
It was rather as though their writings were both literature, full of options and flexibility, and scripture, full of further ramifications to every utterance, to them. Through recitation or drama, they actually became the characters in their writings. We can do the same with theirs, or our own.
**************
You may find the Homeric BATRAXOMUOMACHIA, "The Battle of the Frogs and Mice," in the Loeb Classical Library Volume 57 of Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, where it appears in Greek and with a translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, M.A.
************
Copyright 2010 by Christopher Fulkerson
Posted 8/31/2010