http://sibilia.com.br/slbyl6.html "The Renaissance of 1910: Reflections on Guy Davenport's Poetics" by Marjorie Perloff. She is looking at Davenport's essay, "Th
e Geography of the Imagination." A couple of his ideas are meaningful in context with our class, "What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic...there is nothing quite so modern as a page of any of the pre-Socratic physicists, where science and poetry are still the same thing and where the modern mind feels a kinship it no longer has with Aquinas or even Newton." I also liked "Our age is unlike any other in that its greatest works of art were constructed in one age and received in another." "The Geography of the Imagination" for anyone interested, is published in Davenport's Forty Essays, but was originally given at the Distinguished Preofessor Lecture @ the University of Kentucky in 1978.Returning to visit Nietzsche was not like visiting an old friend, I hadn't cared for him much when I met him in a Philosophy class. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, proposed a solution to the
origins of Greek tragedy, focusing on Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aeschylus. He said the Chorus is the interpreter of Being which plays with appearances, and that music is the language of Being, of the will hidden within individuals. I like this - especially after our discussion on the importance of music in Friday's lecture. The idea of time being not linear, but cyclical, the eternal recurrence or return, says that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in a self-similar form an infinite number of times. Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science in 1882,"What if some day day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more,' would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine' ?" Thinking of Bill Murray in Groundhog's Day, learning to become more sensitive, less self-absorbed, and he eventually got Andie McDowell at the end of the movie, when his lessons had been learned. A pertinent quote from the Bible is Ecclesiastes 1:19-20 "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said,"See, this is new?' It has been already in the ages before us."
Reading in Steiner's Antigones, the conflict between youth and old age, Antigone and Creon, to me is even more personally relevant than conflict between the sexes. Much of my view of the world and my place in it was determined by the decade in which I was an adolescent - the 1960's the "battle" between the young and idealistic and the elders and those who refused to consider any but the traditional ideas. The truth of war, the cost of lives, the thought that no one over the age of 30 could remember or participate in what was new or revolutionary - movies like "Easy Rider" pitted the culture of youth against the "establishment." If I had to find a solution to the quandry of age vs youth, it would be to remember what it was like to feel the idealism of youth - to remember that the morals and guidance we try to instill in youth are often very different than how "adult" lives are lived. The age-old idea that it is wrong to kill, but necessary in wars as a current example, and for Antigone, the idea of respect for the gods and to follow their laws, can be pushed aside when it comes to the burial of Polyneices. I'd say the best plan for raising children is to remember your own youth and not to dismiss feelings and ideals of the young, it's very possible there is more wisdom and truth there than in the clouded, perhaps jaded memories of the older generation.
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