Who is Killing Homer?

I was looking for another title, but the only book of Victor Davis Hanson's in the library was Who Killed Homer? So I read that book instead, and was glad I did, although most of the material was familiar to me in a general sense. Or maybe I should say I'm sorry I read it because it was another sad tale of the decline of our intellectual life.
More specifically it was about the decline of classics departments in American universities and the abandonment of Greek and Latin language studies. No facet of our culture is immune from the Lilliputians who swarm over anyone of sufficient stature to highlight their inadequacies. He makes the case of why Latin and Greek literature should be read today and in the original languages. I need no convincing. I have always regretted my lack of Greek and Latin, and my feeble attempts to self-teach myself have gone nowhere. It's been a problem. Oftentimes I wonder if the obscurity of some sections of Plato would be cleared up if I could read the Greek.
Most people don't even try, it doesn't even occur to them to try to learn to read Greek, and I suppose wanting to makes me abnormal and odd. But the ideas expressed in the Greek language, from Homer to Plato, to the New Testament are so fundamental to how we understand the universe that nobody can be really knowledgeable without reading the original authors. These are not old, outmoded ideas, but perennial, constantly shifting, multifaceted ideas that must be asked again by each new generation. Besides, they are absorbing and intriguing, even fun. And the Greeks are the best of guides, the most provocative, the most exasperating.
Mr. Hanson is best known as a military historian and he can be pretty provocative, too. The attacks he makes on the academic establishment are telling, and at the same time ominous for those of us who treasure our western heritage. Behind the ivy covered walls a war for domination of young minds has been going on since the infamous '60's and now all the tenured positions of influence have been usurped by individuals who are determined to undermine everything the Greeks taught, and everything that has been learned since.
These were lessons painfully learned, examined thoroughly by serious and intelligent men, commented and elaborated upon by subsequent generations. When classical civilization collapsed (more from internal rot than anything else- as ours shows signs of doing) it left a vacuum that was filled by German tribal groups. They didn't want so much to conquer the Roman world as join it. They wanted to get in on all the wealth of the civilized world, not destroy it. But because they knew nothing about the thought and knowledge that underpinned it, they did destroy it. Most of them were illiterate, skilled at warfare and tribal politics, but without the least idea of running an urban society. So virtually all the intellectual capital of Greece and Rome was lost in Western Europe...with the surprising exception of Ireland which was never subdued by the Romans in the first place. But the Irish had adopted Christianity and preserved the knowledge of both Latin and Greek, which they carried with them as they evangelized on the continent in those centuries known as the Dark Ages.
Are we seeing a return to another Dark Age? It certainly seems that the people who have taken control of our educational facilities are determined to bring it on. Is it on purpose or are they just clueless, like the barbarian Goths of late antiquity? Or are they worse, because the Goths in their kingdoms wanted to retain the glory of the Empire. Like the Goths, the new PC academics want to retain the trappings of prestige and reputation of scholarship, but all they can do is spout the kind of gibberish Davis quotes from their published (but unread) works.
It's all very well for writers like Hanson and others to call our attention to this problem, but what do we do about it? The Lilliputians keep cloning themselves through the brainwashing factories the universities have become and sending them on to teach children, run bureaucracies and write for newspapers. Something has to be done to stop them before they wreck everything. They're extremely industrious, like an army of termites nibbling at the house framing. Lift off any wall section and they will fall out in the hundreds. I hate to say it, but an exterminator is needed.

The end of her line

A story is circulating in the media regarding one Toni Vernelli, a 27 year old British woman, who had herself sterilized because she didn't want to burden the earth with another despicable human being. This followed an abortion she had because she thought it would be unfair- to the child or the world, I'm not sure. How sad that the brainwashing she has received through her school years, and the unrelenting propaganda barrage from the media has led not only to the death of an innocent child but to the extinction of her line. Remember, we are all directly connected in an unbroken line to the original life forms to appear on the earth some billions of years ago. And if Fred Hoyle's theory of panspermia is right (and I believe it is- someday I want to do a piece on this theory) then the universe is as much a creation of life than the other way around. I doubt if she is the first to take this step in the name of the envirocult. There are probably many, many more who have not made the news, but just quietly did the deed. This is where the logic leads. Ultimately environmentalism as it has been invented is part of a greater culture of death, and it's silly women like the now neutered Vernelli who are paying the price. Only one more step needs be taken: suicide. If David Suzuki really believed the stuff he spouts he should have offed himself years ago. And I'm not sure the world wouldn't be better for it. He, and his venomous creed, is the pollutant that kills, and would kill many more given the opportunity. As he opined once, "I guess there will have to be a massive die off." Perhaps it's unfair to focus on Suzuki as a source for this miasma, but somebody has to serve as an icon and he has applied for the job. Rachel Carson would also be a good candidate. Her grossly inadequate book, Silent Spring, was taken as gospel. DDT was banned. Up until that point, malaria was on the decrease all over the world. Since then there has been a resurgence, especially in parts of the world unable to combat the mosquito with other means. The result has been millions of deaths, mostly children, and mostly in poor countries. But perhaps the desexed Vernelli would think that's a good thing.

The government money spigot

I should never read our local paper in the morning before my nerve endings are toughened up a little. Of course I already know what the topics of interest are to the poor newspaper folk. Not only are they stuck in a dying trade, the Willie Lomans of our day, but they are stuck in the little Victoria backwater, their dreams of being a star reporter for the New Duranty Times turning to ashes in their mouths.
So what was the lead story today? The plight of the homeless? That was the front page news in the free newspaper, something about cutbacks in 'victim services.' Oh, no. That class of parasites which depends on drug addicts for its grant proposals is being cut off? If so, our government (at which level I don't know) is showing a little common sense.
Wel, how about the dastardly George Bush and his misguided persecution of murderous tyrants? No, nothing about Bush today.
Ah. Smoking. In cars. With children. This nefarious practice is now banned in Nova Scotia, and the usual list of suspects, the cancer society, the provincial public health officer, the minister of health, all promise to take into consideration the possibility that we might follow that example. And probably there is a committee somewhere trying to figure out if there is any aspect of life the government hasn't stuck its nose into. I would suggest something be done about all the drug users at large who discard their government supplied needles after shooting up drugs purchased with their government supplied welfare checks, but that would be considered 'blaming the victim,' as all right thinking people would loudly proclaim.
But the big article today is, "BC sets out tough targets for emissions." I don't suppose this means they are going to shut their cake holes for a while. Imagine the blessed silence! How silly. The announcement coincided with "...yesterday's unveiling of the 22-member Climate Action Team." Wait a minute. Isn't a big confab on carbon dioxide emissions due to take place in Bali next month? Bali! In December! I wonder if the reservations have already been placed. And I wonder how many asses had to be kissed, palms greased, who you had to be related to, to get appointed to the committee. There are always unemployed politicians and operatives lurking near the money spigot. Say, what about those victims' services people. One scam is as good as another, and there's a lot more money in the global warming swindle than homelessness nowadays. Might be time for a career change.
How I yearn for a real conservative party in BC. Not that any of the conservative governments anywhere in the world have made any lasting impression. They have cranked up economies everywhere they have been, but in the end all that extra wealth gets appropriated by their neo-socialist successors, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. "The fools voted for us! The gravy train has arrived! Let's all get aboard, boys and girls."
I guess it's too much to hope for a return to sanity in public affairs, and I have enough to do keeping my own sanity when I read the papers.

Sunshine and raindrops

The sun is just barely up when I start my morning walk to work and it's almost down when I walk home in the late afternoon. Pretty soon it will be completely dark both ways. And today a small cloud scattered it's load of moisture on me as I crossed the Blue Bridge while the sun was shining all around. Just a friendly, puppy dog lick, no need to bother with an umbrella.
On Monday the weather gods were not so benign. I couldn't hold my camera steady enough for a good picture of the waves threatening to put Clover Point awash so this one will have to do. All day the wind pounded the coasts, downing power lines, canceling ferry sailings and so forth. Just a normal November preview of wintry days to come. Last year we had already had our first snow. We don't get very much snow in Victoria and that's a good thing because we are never prepared for it. Although we don't get much snow here (usually two or three spells in the course of a winter) the snow we do get is nasty stuff because it melts during the day- but not completely- and then freezes at night. That makes our streets and roads quite treacherous.
The storm was on Monday but by Tuesday the sun was out again, the winds had slacked off, and the sky was darkened by the odd stray cloud. It was a beautiful day. So I took a little spin around the peninsula in my little car and took a few pictures. The one of Prospect Lake was taken from the Observatory hill. Take a good look at all the green. You are looking at forests that have been logged more than once- clear cut. The trees grow back. The meadows and glades support healthy populations of deer, and the deer support the cougars. Vancouver Island, of which the Victoria area is one tiny corner, has the largest population of cougars in the world. Or so I have read. I've never seen one myself. Bears, yes, black bears, no grizzlies. Vancouver Island is mountainous and heavily forested these days, unlike the situation 10,000 years ago when it was under a mile of ice and only the highest peaks protruded above the glaciers. Isn't global warming wonderful? I wonder how it happened. As one irreverent soul joked, maybe the wooly mammoths were driving SUVs.
Although most of Vancouver Island is covered with coniferous forests of diverse types- cedar, hemlock, fir, spruce, and others depending on soil, elevation and other factors, Victoria and southeastern Vancouver Island have a special ecosystem known as Garry Oak Meadow. The arbutus with its peeling red bark is a favourite tree of mine. It is classified as a broadleaf evergreen and shed its leaves throughout the year. The wood is very hard and will burn well and very hot even when green. I heated a cabin for a couple of winters with arbutus I scavenged from road building crews. That was when I was trying to be a back-to-the-land hippie. I'm too old for those silly games now, but I remember those days with fondness.

The soul of a people

If by some chance you've been following my maundering prose and have missed it these several weeks past, I apologize. I was going through one of those phases when the fact that I really don't know anything rose up and bit me. What, then, is the point of blathering away on the internet, a place that makes me think of Yeats' line about the 'bee-loud glade.' Is there anything more to it than the buzzing of bees, an inbred, introspective noise signifying nothing? After all, and here are the big questions, will anything we do or think matter a billion years from now, does anything we think or do matter in another galaxy, or even on our nearest inhabitable planetary neighbor? How about our non-human cohabitors on this earth. Does a Beethoven symphony mean anything to a garden snail?
According to certain shapers of modern opinion it doesn't. This is the lesson humanity has ultimately (wrongly, I think) gleaned from Galileo, a lesson that is expressed very succinctly in the phrase 'dead white males..' Because if there is no significance to the thoughts, beliefs or actions we leave behind, then life consists solely of the me and the now. That's it. But if that's the case why do we humans, all humans, have the nagging compulsion to bequeath a legacy to future generations? Even those who reject the contributions of those nefarious dead white males seem passionately committed to propagating that belief- but not children, who often turn out to be men. Personally, as a future dead white male, I am not so much offended by that bit of spitefulness as saddened by the paltry, dreary mentality that utters it.
Not only do we humans want our achievements to persevere after the death of the body, we also yearn to endow the products of our industry with beauty and grace be it as exalted as the Great Pyramid or as humble as a doily on the back of an easy chair. We are tireless composers of tunes and verses, we polish our cars, we clad our bodies with fashion statements, we populate our northern domiciles with captured tropical plants. The list of things we do to beautify ourselves and our surroundings is endless. And are we the only species that cares about beauty? Peacocks would beg to differ. Without a suitably colourful tail poor bachelor peacock hasn't a ghost of a chance with the discerning peahen. Darwinists twist themselves into pretzels trying vainly to fit such phenomena into their scheme of randomicity and determinism.
Scientists, philosophers and theologians argue endlessly over these issues trying to fit them into some grand scheme of things. I applaud these efforts, but when I need rescuing from the doldrums of insoluble questions I like to turn to music or poetry. Somehow the poets and composers perceive the big picture directly, not without the intellect, but the intellect illuminated by an interior kind of light without which Plato's light of pure reason is a pale and wan little candle sputtering in the dark. Sometimes I think reason operates in much the same way as natural selection. It doesn't create anything new, but it weeds out bad ideas and sorts things out into their proper places.
I've been struggling in the last few years with certain texts, especially the Semitic Bible and the Greek thinkers, both of which have molded our civilization beyond any reckoning. But we of the northern European races had a vital cultural life before the Roman law, legions and road-builders spread the cross and Plato into Gaul and Britain. There is something about the poor remnants of that older heritage which thrills me in ways that the new-fangled stuff doesn't. Introduced to us a mere 2000 years ago, the desert patriarchs and the Aegean poleis in many ways still seem as foreign and alien as ever. Indelible images abound in the few remaining muddled Celtic and Germanic texts which hint at a lost literature of vast proportions. Hard now to fit them with any context, our lives so much different now, and so all the more remarkable how striking those images are, even when translated into a language that didn't even exist when they were current.
Take for example the picture painted in "Pwyll Lord of Dyved" of the King, Pwyll, at a feast. (found in the Welsh Mabinogion) After the meal he decides to get away from the festivities and go for a walk to Gorsedd Arberth (a mound, possibly identified with Glastonbury) where he sits down with his retinue. He is in no way discouraged when he is informed that anyone who sits on the gorsedd will either be badly beaten or he will witness a Wonder. Spared the beating, the Wonder takes the form of a young woman clad in gold silk riding by on the road below. Curious about who this apparition might be, Pwyll orders a lackey to run after her and ask who she is. But although the lady is only traveling at a leisurely trot, and the lackey runs as fast as he can, she recedes further and further into the mist. The next night Pwyll comes back, bringing a lackey with a fast horse. Yet as fast as the lackey rides after her when she reappears, he cannot catch her in spite of her leisurely pace. The next night Pwyll decides to take on the job himself, bringing his fastest horse. And yet as fast as he rides, it is not enough. He cannot catch up with her. As the distance widens, he calls out to her: Lady, for the sake of the man you love the best, stop for me! I will gladly, she replied and it would have been better for your horse if you had asked me that sooner. I am doing my errands and I am glad to see you. I welcome you, said Pwyll, for it seemed to him that the beauty of every woman and girl he had ever seen was as nothing compared to the beauty of Rhiannon.
As the story progresses we become aware that Pwyll has entered another world. It may be he was originally sacrificed, as the prechristian celtic rituals were quite bloodthirsty, if the descriptions of Roman witnesses are to be believed. But I can't help comparing the Welsh vision of the other world with the sad view of Hades as depicted by Homer.
By comparison to the dreaminess of the Welsh stories, the Scandinavian counterparts seem blunter, coarser, more fatalistic. Heroism is a matter of stoic endurance, a defiance of death and suffering, but for all that, life is preferable. Hjalmar and his brother defeated twelve Goths in an island duel, but in the end:

"My armour is split, I have sixteen wounds,
I cannot see, my sight is darkened,
My heart was pierced by Angantyr's sword,
The steel-edge, steeped in venom.

"The farms I posessed were five in all,
But no joy have I known from these,
Bereft of life, I must lie down,
Sword-wounded on Samsey's shore.

The Norse poems are also more concerned with everyday practical matters. In one of Gudrun's songs she is forced by family pressure and international diplomacy to marry Atli the Hun. Gifted with the ability to foresee the tragic outcome, as the daughter of one king and the widow of another she may not escape her duty. On her way from her home she crosses the continent to meet her new husband:

The brave ones mounted the backs of horses,
But the Gaulish women in wagons rode,
Seven days were carried through cold land,
Seven more sailed on the waves,
Rode seven more through mountain country.


(From Norse Poems, as rendered by W.H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, Faber and Faber, 1983)
There is much in the Norse literature that is vivid and sharp. You can be reading along and then all of a sudden you can see in your mind's eye the scene portrayed as if you had witnessed it yourself. But rarely is there humour, or the imagery of love and beauty one finds in the celtic sources.

'The burial of the poet, dead for love' contains these sentiments: My bright shaped girl, with the brow like the lily, under your web of golden hair, I have loved you with a strong and enduring love... (From a Celtic Miscellany, Penguin Classics, 1971)
Gory scenes of battle are common in these stories, but there always seems to be at least a hint of mirth. A man's end is not so much a matter of inescapable fate as it is of his own foolish actions, and as often as not resembles a pratfall more than anything else. But what I love best about the celtic stories is the irrepressible sense of wonder they all convey. The world, whether this one or the other one, not so easily distinguished from each other, and the boundaries easily traversed, are marvels to be wondered at. Life in either realm has more to it than mere accumulation of goods- though the celts were well-known in the ancient world for their love of gold. In the story called Branwen, daughter of Llyr, Bran a champion of the Isle of the Mighty leads a host to an invasion of Ireland. They win the battle, but Bran, like Achilles before Troy, is fatally wounded in the foot. Homer fails to see the humour and very grimly lectures us on the topic of eternal fame vs a long but ordinary life. Before Bran dies he tells his men to cut off his head, take it to London and bury it facing France. But on the way they may stop for seven years of feasting in Harddlech, "...with the birds of Rhiannon singing for you, and my head will be as good a companion as it ever was. After that you will spend eighty years at Gwales in Penvro, and as long as you do not open the door to the Bristol Channel on the side facing Cornwall you may stay there and the head will not decay." The men do as he instructs but even the bravest warriors will get bored after eighty years of carousing. "One day Heilyn, son of Gwynn said, 'Shame on my beard if I do not open this door to see if what is said about it is true.'" As soon as he did he and all his companions "...became as conscious of every loss they had suffered, of every friend and relative they had lost, of every ill that had ever befallen them, as if it had just happened."
Strange. As I read this passage I'm reminded of the story of Adam and Eve. A door of knowledge instead of a tree of knowledge, but still an act of will that loses them paradise, and sends them down into a world of sorrows. But how much differently it is played out, without the moralizing and the punitiveness.
Of course there are similarities among the literary outputs of these different peoples, the Hebrews, the Hellenes, the Norse, the British, but at the same time there are clear distinctions, and the distinctions are important...vitally important. The misnamed multicultural crowd advocates a flattening of distinctions and would have us believe everyone is the same. But we are not. Multicultural theorists, most of whom are of North European descent, are not lovers of any culture, and in particular seem to hate their own. That's why they are so determined to suppress public symbols like crosses and Christmas trees. They are really statists who want to substitute the state in place of family, country, homeland, history. And what is this state they so assiduously serve? They have turned into an army of mice nibbling away at the store of wealth amassed in the chambers built by their ancestors, not comprehending the damage they do. There is an adage which says if you don't love yourself you can't love anybody else. I'm not sure if that's true when applied to an individual, but when applied to a heritage, I'm certain that if you don't love your own you can't possibly love another's. This is what they have in common with Islamists. But the Islamists are more fully aware that they are on a mission to destroy what they see.
But can the soul of a people really be destroyed? Or maybe it's the genius of place that accounts for the retention of characteristics by a people which predate a massive transformation of culture and language. For instance, the Persians. Islamic, yes, but Semitic definitely not. And how much of that literature we call Celtic originated from a preCeltic substratum in Britain? Very hard to know for sure, or at least to prove in a scientific sense. But when I respond in my heart the way I do to these ancient stories I believe it. My ancestry is American (in the broad sense) for hundreds of years and yet I still think I belong to certain parts of the Old Country in ways I don't belong in the Americas. Highly irrational.