Life – Page 65 – Achilles & Aristotle

Competitive Dad

Competitive Dad
Get your fleece off honey!
Competitive Dad
Get your hands in the air!
Competitive Mum
Get in tighter!
Competitive Mum
Get your hands in there!
Bemused Daughter
Alright, alright!
Bemused Daughter
Would you both stand over there.

Our standard position is “We’re not really competitive people in our house”. But the missus and my behaviour yesterday put a dent in that theory. I found myself the only adult shouting at my daughter’s end of term school netball completion, except for… my other half.

It’s the first time in my life I’ve attended a competitive team sporting fixture in which my daughter was playing. And what an extraordinary experience that is. I was rooting for her, so much I couldn’t stand still and certainly couldn’t help trying to catch her eye and shouting advice at her.

I need to learn from my own Dad: arrive without fanfare, be present, then quietly disappear.

Life, Philosophy, Science

Amor Fati

This week, my mind was briefly boggled by this most detailed ever picture from a space telescope. It purports to show 200,000 galaxies.

Our nearest star – on the most optimistic estimates – would take some 10,000 years to visit. And that’s one star, in the billion, in one galaxy, of the 200,000, you can see in this picture. Make you feel just a little insignificant.

On the same day into my inbox dropped a relevant entry, in the self-styled ‘Intellectual Devotional’ I get by email from dailylit.com. Duff title but there is the odd cracker in there.

‘Transcendent Significance’ is a good one. We all like to think our lives have a transcendent significance. Hence narcissism, religion, artistry, poetry, politics… and Nietzsche.

Why Nietzsche? Because one answer to transcendent significance according to the Intellectual Devotional is:

The doctrine of “eternal recurrence”, which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur ad infinitum, in a self-similar form. Rooted in Indian and Egyptian philosophy, and taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics, with the fall of antiquity and the spread of Christianity, the concept of was gradually lost.

Enter Nietzsche who gave “eternal recurrence” a second chance, as a reason to affirm life in the face of a world without God:

“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it… but to love it.”

I’m not sure I can go the whole hog on Nietzsche – and want nothing different in all eternity. But I can have a decent crack at wanting nothing different in the here and now.

Is there a better place in those 200,000 galaxies? Maybe, but probably not. Has there been a better time to live in human history? Almost certainly not. Healthy happy middle age on planet earth in the 21st century has its compensations. Amor fati – what’s not to like?

Aristotle, Art, Life, Poetry

Lost in Translation

As I read and write more, I come to enjoy the turns of phrase of past times. I’m not arguing for Chaucer in the original – life’s too short. But the thundering prose of the King James Bible or a decent translation of Aristotle, for example.

Having learnt that ‘plot’ is everything in poetry, I largely fell for Aristotle’s Poetics based on one line:

The getting-up of the spectacle is more a matter for the costumier than the poet.

I’ve quoted this at work a few times to point out the job at hand – substance not spin. And I found myself quoting it to the missus last night having watched ‘The Immortals’, which I found a big disappointment.

I do enjoy a good ‘sword and sandals’ epic, and I really wanted to like it. But ‘The Immortals’ managed to make very little of the ‘plot’ of Theseus, whilst expending far too much effort on the costumes and CGI. They even ripped off Maximus’s helmet from ‘Gladiator’ for an all too boyish Zeus (see above).

Ridley Scott knows, as Aristotle said, that: the first essential – the life and soul of Tragedy – is the Plot. I fear the Director of last night’s disappointing fayre, was reading the more leaden modern translation of my favourite ‘Poetics’ quote, from the duff version I bought on my Kindle:

The production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.*

Too much stage-machinist and not enough poet in ‘The Immortals’ for me. Had Aristotle seen it, he’d be gently shaking his head – more in sadness than in anger. Theseus, the founding myth of Ancient Greece, was very much lost in translation.

*So if you’re buying Aristotle’s Poetics, I’d buy Ingram Bywater’s 1920 OUP translation, which you can get for free on dailylit.com.

Art, Life, Odysseus, Science

Daubing

I read a while ago that physicists were arguing over the wisdom of analysing the complete dataset from the latest probe which is measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Why? Because from it we will soon have all the data it is possible for us to have on the origins of the universe. And if we analyse it all, we will have closed the book of history on our ultimate origins – there will be nothing more for future generations of physicists to know.

I was reminded of this by a lively conversation on the history of Western Art the other day. I’ve recently bought myself a primer which takes you from cave paintings to cubism and contemporary modern art.

In the early pages, just how small the sliver is, of what survives from antiquity, becomes obvious. There are no paintings, often no original statues and incredibly few fragments from entire cities, kingdoms and civilisations. The ‘cosmic background radiation’ of western culture is largely mapped. What we have is probably all there is.

But although only a fragment, it has been a treasure trove down the centuries. In the writings of Montaigne, his many references to Plutarch, Seneca, Horace et al were the ‘classical education’ which in his time (or in fact slightly before it as he lamented) were the gold standard. A Renaissance man who knew his ‘Greats’, knew everything that was worth knowing.

Paraphrasing Wikipedia, perhaps there is still something to be said for ‘Philo’s Rule’ of ‘classical education’: preserving those words and ideas which impart intellectual and aesthetic appreciation of “the best, which has been thought and said in the world”.

For the polymath, history is the easiest framework on which to hang intellectual curiosity. The past is finite. But, unlike the cosmic background radiation, the arrow of time for the living is forwards – at least for a few decades.

So, I think there’s a balance to strike between a good investment in “the best” that has been thought, said and painted, and keeping abreast of the ephemera of today. History has winnowed and filtered, but it has also carelessly and randomly mulched, ignored and forgotten.

Time marches on. And who knows which of today’s ‘cave paintings’ will be remembered 10,000 years from now. Daubing is as important as appreciating the daubing of others.

Life, Odysseus, Poetry

Botch Job

Garden fencing
Ageing woodwork
Down comes the fence post
On a cold winter’s day
Sent out to repair it
With red hands
And blue notes
Patched up
Lashed up
Botched-up repairs

Cats promenading
Balancing on my fence post
Off comes the trellis
From my botched-up repairs

First day of sunshine
Sent to have another go
Drill bits
Rawl plugs
New screws and old
Ugly repair job
Patched up
Lashed up
Botched-up repairs

Were he still alive, my Dad’s Dad would have been proud of this one. A notorious botcher, he fashioned the ideal (for him) lifestyle accompaniment from an orange box, plywood, screws and nails.

A footstool-cum-occasional-table, its four sides held his betting slips, racing tips, pools coupons and newspaper as well as being a handy place to rest a cuppa. Splinters and gaudy fruit trademarks were the real drawbacks. But he was happy with it.

I can’t really say the same for my botch job – 8 different screw types, restraining stays which neither match nor fit and none of which are quite true. The old man’s genes have reached through time. But he’d have a good chuckle at a proper botch job.