Browsing Thucydides in Greek at the Grave of Dilapidated Sapiens Sentience
Asking whether classics as a discipline is dead or dying - whether from lack of sponsorship, irrelevance, or naturally, as per selective adaptation, because our population isn’t capable of declensioning and memorizing - is no way to break new ground. Talk of attic Greek being revitalized by a resurgence of manufactured interest from faux serious people is the same song sung at a different pitch as talk of the hip new cache of Catholicism. But maybe we need Herodotus and Archilochos, just as we need Seth Bernadete and Bernard Williams, to help navigate into a non-brute future by means other than instrument blind intuition. A non brute future may be illusory given the bare life mean we already have, but for the sake of argument, we continue . . .
Classics are a loaded pill or loaded dice or a loaded gun, depending on your favored neoliberal trope. Better to sneak up on the idea through esoteric takes on a different subject matter expertise that is more marginal, even lower stakes, and of relative negative utility today other than status mongering and tax dodging E.g., better to think about how we might not crater our third of the civilizational Rubik’s cube and use up all hegemonic capital in the meantime by thinking about paint and canvas and how the only way out is through.
What was Impressionism and what does it show about how to see what is being looked at? Or what does it tell about how seeing is looking at or (perhaps, with any puffery and brio and panache) how seeing is different than looking?
The mirror is the lamp is the poet-self understanding that the lens through which the world is viewed very much is the province of the poet-self. Enlightenment reason can put God back into a text and the sun not the earth in the center of a giant freezing cold black abyss but it doesn’t account for all these big feelings I have about being inconsequential meat made from stardust. And it doesn’t harness the Alps and the sense of placedness being in the lakes confers, as an antidote to being thrown into the world, semi bereft.
And so the easel out there in plein aire also has a story to tell. Looking hard enough to show what is being seen and how looking hard can reveal what seeing is - an exhausting task that does not exhaust the representational modes but adds one to the repertoire. Painting not out of faith and ecclesiastical alignment (fra Angelica), not of skepticism and the portraiture of the high born preterite elite from whom Europe is being born (Rembrandt and Goya), but out of the inside of these new eyes to which the new unbounded self is beholden if not bound.
Forget about the guilds and the academies and the art-in-institutions . . . Embrace and love penury, hobo bohemian flaneuring, the worshipful need embedded in egg white priming on a freshly stretched canvas, and whatever wild license you grant yourself to take. Not yet free enough to return to the archaic or to be chaste channelers of the real dialect of the erotic, but certainly free enough to make a new language that will refuse to relitigate the marginal bounds of the figurative and will take it as the imperative to push them further still.
