A Mother's Grief

Michael Cacoyannis' 1971 Trojan Women remains my favorite movie of all time. Katherine Hepburn gives the performance of her life as Hecuba, and Geneviève Bujold, as Cassandra, is a vision unparalleled. The play by Euripides speaks boldly to war as the human condition and its inhuman cost, born chiefly by innocents. This scene portrays the abduction of Cassandra and the grief of Hecuba over a life in ruins.

O God, I called to you. You did not help. ...
Why lift me up? What hope is there to hold to?
Count no man happy, however fortunate, before he dies.

The great classicist Gilbert Murray describes this play as "only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music." Well put.

The Return of the Irrational

I'm not quite the classics geek I was before my girls were born. The project of teaching myself Attic greek, for example, died a peaceful death right around the time they started walking. My classics reading group, however, has persevered for eight years. While we rarely talk about classics anymore, some of us will still read the book and exchange some perfunctory geek-chat between the gulps of wine as an entré to discussion of something else.

We're rereading Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. a stately volume first published in 1903 by an unconventional woman scholar who didn't accept that the classics field was for men only. Harrison, through brilliant analysis of vase paintings and other art, penetrating study of the textual evidence, and a bunch of philological acrobatics that I pretty much skim through, establishes that much of what we think of as classical Greek religion — Zeus and shit — was an overlay on a far older and darker set of rituals that had to do with making bad things go away.

Classical Athens, that paragon of bright skies, wine dark seas, and cool reason, seethed with rituals to keep away ghosts, placate evil spirits, bring fertility, and all that stuff that people do in one way or another pretty much everywhere. A certain amount of this, it seems, is hardwired, and every time we deny it for too long, it comes surging back in distorted form. This has been called the return of the irrational.

The evidence, she says, strongly suggests that human sacrifice was still alive and well in the fifth century. This is the Athens of Pericles, Socrates and Euripides, thought by some to be the high point of civilization. Human sacrifice.

But here's the interesting part. They weren't just any humans. Once a year, they would take two of their most despised — people fed by the state, or maybe drunks or criminals — dress them up in ceremonial garb, and parade them around while everyone beat them with special branches. Then they'd burn them and have the wind scatter their ashes over the sea, after which everyone felt much better.

This wasn't a sacrifice of propitiation. It wasn't even about keeping evil away. It was about purgation. They were scapegoats. Through ritual humiliation, beating, and sacrifice, what was undesirable in the community was symbolically driven out.

And that got me to thinking about just how civilized we are, really. Take the death penalty, for example, which study after study says has no preventative effect. The revival of the death penalty has come with that of fundamentalist religion. It doesn't accomplish much, but it makes some people feel real good.

Maybe there's also something of the irrational in the burgeoning prison industry, where 1 in 42 Americans lives under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Maybe this is a sort of a magic amulet for the rest of us. We don't feel especially safe, but we make our sacrifices, and the evil goes away, sort of. But it always comes back to bite us in the ass.

Paris Hilton and the Limits of Compassion

Sunday night was my classics reading group. We've been getting together at my house every month or so for about seven years now. A bookseller, a lawyer, a languages professor, a scientist, and a zoo keeper. The girls call them "daddy's five people."

This time it was Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. It doesn't matter what we read all that much anymore, because whatever it is, we'll spend about fifteen minutes talking about that and then turn to whatever else is on our minds. This sort of disregard for the text, I've come to appreciate, is the mark of a truly great book group.

Anna set the tone. "I'm sixty-two and I don't need to impress anyone: Nietzsche is OVERRATED!"

We all agreed that while the man is a twisted genius, his notion that Euripides killed tragedy, that his nineteenth century world was, at best, a decayed remnant of the Alexandrian Age, and that the best hope for civilization at that point was German culture in general and Wagner in particular, was kind of hard to take seriously. Trevor might have stood up for him, but he had a cold and wasn't there.

Wes and Anitra told me a story once about a Seattle haiku contest in which another friend named Reneene Robertson nearly got herself killed.

"Kurt Cobain," she began, "had two blue eyes." The audience, they said, was in the palm of her hand. She could have said almost anything after that, and they'd have thrown roses.

"One blew left, one blew right."

The room collectively growled. Reneene was off the stage in a flash and looking for the door.

To insult the blessed memory of Euripides, the edgy champion of the outsider, within our group is similarly risky. If Friedrich were to have the misfortune of standing there before us, we'd have gone all maenad on his overwrought German ass and ripped him limb from limb.

Except for Mary. She's a Buddhist.

Which brought us to the subject of Paris Hilton. Stephan was struggling to grasp the meaning of her cultural ascendancy. Her fame, he said, was based entirely on her status as a beautiful rich heiress who hangs out with other beautiful rich famous people. The nothingness of her celebrity was more than he could handle.

Paris Hilton apparently carries a chihuahua around with her, and insecure young women have taken to emulating this. If ever you see a teen-aged girl in six inch heels carrying a chihuahua, he said, you have Hilton to thank.

Mary offered that this was the perfect opportunity for us all to practice wise mind. This is the Buddhist idea that the ego-laden distinctions that separate us are illusory. Even Paris Hilton, she said, was united with us in the oneness of the universe, and our judgments interfered with our ability to grasp the true essence of Paris Hilton.

Stephan and I agreed that we could live with this. The chihuahua thing, so far as we were concerned, relegates her to complete Otherness, no matter what the fucking Buddha says.

Later that night, having calmed down, I found this meditation on wise mind in a book by Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun.

Being compassionate is a pretty tall order. All of us are in relationships every day of our lives, but particularly if we are people who want to help others—people with cancer, people with AIDS, abused women or children, abused animals, anyone who's hurting—something we soon notice is the persons we set out to help may trigger unresolved issues in us. Even though we want to help, and maybe we do help for a few days or a month or two, sooner or later someone walks through that door and pushes all our buttons. We find ourselves hating those people or scared of them or feeling like we just can't handle them. This is true always, if we are sincere about wanting to help others. Sooner or later, all our own unresolved issues will come up; we'll be confronted with ourselves.

Roshi Bernard Glassman is a Zen teacher who runs a project for the homeless in Yonkers, New York. Last time I heard him speak, he said something that struck me: he said he doesn't really do this work to help others; he does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected. ...

That, in a nutshell, is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we'll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves we'll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we'll have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at. Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal we're trying to live up to.

Pema Chodron,
When Things Fall Apart

Dionysius Doesn't Dance Alone

The Greeks had their maenads. Women under the spell of Dionysius would dance all night and then rip small animals apart with their bare hands. The Balinese have the Monkey Chant. The Sioux had the Ghost Dance. Hippie counter-culture had the Grateful Dead and The Doors. The French and others have carnival.

Throughout human history, across the centuries and across cultures, people have come together to lose themselves in drink, dance, drugs, music, and ritual. We all want, it seems, to expand our boundaries and lose ourselves in the company of others.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s thoroughly remarkable Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy delves into the history of group ecstasy, its suppression by colonialists, church officials, and political elites, and what it means for us now as we struggle to hold together a society of individualists.

This sort of social history is where Ehrenreich truly excels. While recent work as an undercover journalist (Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch) have brought her writing to new audiences, one hopes they will move along with her to embrace this profoundly meaningful history of joy.

Euripides’ Bacchae, often described as the most inexplicable of plays, explores the tension between ecstatic experience and order as Pentheus the king and Dionysius the androgynous stranger face off in a farcical yet deadly power struggle.

This archetypal conflict of Pentheus and Dionysius echoes on throughout much of human history. As the increasing popularity of such events as Burning Man and the enduring appeal of storefront charismatic churches and small dark music venues attest, the historic victory of Pentheus, while significant, is never complete.

The depth of the European ecstatic heritage is perhaps best illustrated by the cooptation of Dionysian myth in the social construction of Christ. Dionysius, with his various festivals and close association with the benefits of wine, was the most wildly popular of the pagan deities, although Baal and Asheroth were popular as well for many of the same reasons.

Nor are depictions of the Dionysian limited to the New Testament. While the militaristic god that evolves throughout the Pentateuch was well suited to an imperial religion held by a surrounded people, every time the chosen folk got a little breathing room they’d go running right back to Baal.

A dozen or more centuries later, as class and hierarchy increasingly defined the social experience, the central role of dancing and celebration in the life of the community came under fire, and under the watchful eye of the Calvinists was nearly extinguished.

Ehrenreich traces the evolution of the suppression of community to the emergence of social hierarchy. In case after case, the pattern is the same: elites increasingly pulled back from popular celebration into more exclusive and careful gatherings of their own. As elites withdrew, the subversive aspects of carnival-like celebrations offered both the opportunity and organizing structure to parody and sometimes attack the upper classes. They became threatened, and gradually outlawed popular celebration.

As Europeans took their increasingly dour worldview abroad, the suppression of ecstatic ritual was a mere footnote to the wholesale extermination of entire civilizations. Yet, as in the case of American slaves, what was driven underground would often reemerge in less overtly threatening yet still subversive forms.

While Ehrenreich stops short of offering a blueprint for the restoration of collective joy, she offers the universalizing influence of festival as an antidote to the impoverishment of public life. Being responsible to one another, she says, begins with establishing emotional connection. Recovering joy isn’t just about loosening up and having more fun. It may be a matter of survival.