A Dozen Days Later

When I first heard about the explosions at the Boston Marathon, I scoured the internet till I found a live feed and called my wife.  “What!? WHAT?!”  We were both horrified.  “This was part of the reason we moved to rural Tennessee,” she reminded me, “to escape awful things like this.”  We had moved to Sewanee only a few months after 9/11.  Monitoring the scattershot information coming out of Boston that afternoon, it was hard to think much about the wisdom of the move.  It was hard to think of anything, really, except fear.

***

Late that Monday night, my sister reached me.  She’s a nurse at Mass General, not in the ER, but she knows a lot of people who work there. “They were all set up for dehydration, hypothermia, the sort of things marathon runners suffer from,” she told me. “They spent the day removing  ball bearings and re-attaching legs instead.” She began to cry. “It was so bloody.” If she hadn’t been scheduled to work, she probably would have been downtown at the finish line, as she had done in years past.

***

As an eighth-grader, I recall, the first place in downtown I really began to explore on my own was Copley Square. My friend John and I would meet at the Public Library and go on walkabout for hours in the building, marveling at the intricacies of the McKim-Mead-White architecture, and then go off into surrounding areas.  John was from South Boston, and I was from West Roxbury–we knew each other from school.  At the end of the day, we would return to the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth to catch the different trains home.  This corner is where the finish line of the Marathon was set up each April.

***

Like everybody elese in Boston in the 70s, I loathed the Yankees, and would vigorously chant “Reggie sucks” when they played the Sox at Fenway. Much as I hated New York as a boy, though, it came nowhere near the detestation I felt for the Canadiens. When the Bruins were playing in Montreal, there was a different national anthem and nobody spoke English. Most of the fun in watching sports in those days was having clearly-defined enemies.

***

On Marathon Day, there’s nobody to hate.  Wherever you stand to watch the runners, there is a crowd of happy people cheering on everyone who comes by.  Some wear shirts with the names of local colleges on them, and you yell out the name of the school. Others wear their names and, even if you have no idea who Jerry is, at the top of your lungs you yell out, Go Jerry!  On one occasion, I have had the honor of watch Dick Hoyt pushing his son Rick in a wheelchair pass by. Rick, who was born with cerebral palsy, told his father that when he pushed him quickly in his chair, he didn’t feel handicapped, and so at the age of 37, Dick took up marathoning.

***

At Boston College, where I used to teach before coming to Sewanee, we used to get an awful lot of the month of April off.  Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Monday usually fell in April, and were all official university holidays. BC was also closed on Patriots’ Day, as was most of the city, because that was the day of the Marathon, and the course went right alongside campus.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

So writes Longfellow. My entire life I have been struck by the irony that, while Paul Revere had gone out of the city to spread the alarm to every Middlesex village and farm, the Boston Marathon actually reversed the direction of the ride. That is, the runners were making their way into the city, the way the redcoats had done in ’75.

***

My brother has been a janitor for the Boston Police Department for over twenty-five years.  He works at headquarters, downtown.  Throughout the week, he told me, “there were cops from everywhere down there, state troopers, FBI, military, the place was a zoo. Pizza boxes all over the place.”  The door closest to the dumpster out back had been locked, and all traffic in and out routed through the front entrance. “By the time I have one bag filled up and dumped, there’s another one that needs to go out.”  On Friday, like everyone else in town, he sheltered in place, and  was glad to hear from his boss that he wouldn’t be docked a sick day for the lock-down. Still, he worried about the state of headquarters when he got back. “It’s gonna be a mess.”

***

After the bombings, the lights were dimmed at Bell Centre in Montreal in commemoration of the victims, and at Yankee Stadium, they played “Sweet Caroline.” On The Daily Show, John Stewart noted of the competition between New York and Boston, It is in situations like this that we realize that it is clearly a sibling rivalry. We are your brothers and sisters in these types of events.”  All of this was moving, to my mind.

***

The legend goes that, after the Greek victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the runner Pheidippides ran 26 miles to Athens to announce the victory, and then died.  This is not the story that Herodotus tells.  According to the Histories, Pheidippides was sent by the Athenians to Sparta, 140 miles away, to request aid from their sister city against the invading Persians. He made it in three days. For religious reasons, the Spartans had to delay sending help, so the Athenians faced the Persians, and beat them, on their own.

***

You can decide which ancient story is better. Neither is likely to be true, of course, though the mighty Persian army was in fact defeated by a far smaller force.  If there is a defining moment that sets the West against the East, it would be the Battle of Marathon.  How Pheidippides fits into it is hard to say.

***

It was a week after the bombings and just a few days after the man-hunt, and I was sitting in the coffee shop on campus, where my friend Katherine came up to me. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. “More than about the people I know who live in Boston now.”  We talked about the surreal nature of the events, the explosions and an entire city on lock-down. She grew up here in Sewanee, but spent part of her life in Connecticut, in Newtowne, in fact.  The massacre there was only a few months ago. “You might be the only person who will understand this,” she tells me, “but do you feel guilty that you weren’t there?”  Until she’s said it out loud, I hadn’t realized that that was precisely how I felt.

***

I was in touch with a student on campus from Boston whom I knew to have relatives in Watertown.  “Is everything OK back home?” I e-mailed him, and it was, more or less. He is involved in the Cinema Guild, and thought it might make sense collect money for relief efforts at a special showing of a film that week.  He was thinking of The Departed, which struck me as way too violent to be appropriate. Good Will Hunting came to my mind, but the fact that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon both went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had graduated, bothered me, admittedly for no good reason.

***

A day or so later, I was in the gym, and somebody I don’t know very well asked  if I had any family who’d been affected by the events in Boston. He then went on to use phrases like “mercenaries at the finish line,” “markings on the backpacks don’t match,” “CIA,” “Mossad,” “counter-espionage,” “mainstream media,” “Saudi national was Bin Laden’s son,” and “we’ll never know the real story.” The conversation left me a little rattled.  Interestingly, this guy’s remarks were utterly divorced from contemporary politics. Obama, Bush, nobody was mentioned, no liberal or conservative agenda was blamed. There was a paranoid Illuminati-Protocols of the Elders of Zion-Trilateral Commission aspect to all of it, this idea that there’s a secret cabal at work whose intentions are murky and inscrutable.

***

In the 90s, I published an article while I was still at Boston College on the topic, broadly, of witchcraft in Greco-Roman culture. It contained the following paragraph: “In a traditional society, figures such as witches and demons are not the problem but rather the solution to the still more disturbing problem of chance. Deaths without any apparent cause can readily be explained in terms of witchcraft. …Where visible causes for specific misfortunes are lacking, hidden agents (whether divine or human) are assumed: witchcraft, which operates outside the parameters of normal life, thus provides the rationale for misfortunes that would be otherwise inexplicable.”

***

On the day of the bombings, I wanted to know who had done it. I wanted there to be an enemy who was clearly-defined. I thought of the Minutemen at Concord, and of the Athenians at Marathon.  I thought especially of the playwright Aeschylus, who wrote several masterpieces, and had the following lines engraved on his tombstone:

This memorial hides Aeschylus, the Athenian, son of Euphorion
Who died in wheat-bearing Gela.
The precinct of Marathon and the long-haired Mede,
Who knows it well, may tell of his great valor.

I thought about posting that as my status line on Facebook, but worried it might seem racist–after all, who could say if Medes were involved? After the Oklahoma City bombings, various Iranians were held as suspects for no reason at all but paranoia.  In turns out in Boston not to have been Medes but Caucasians, one of the peoples north of Persia, who set off the bombs in Copley Square. One of them did have long hair, as it happened.

***

Aeschylus was proud to have fought at Marathon, but his greatest works are monuments dedicated to the idea of Justice as opposed to Vengeance. Forty-five years ago this month, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Tennessee, and Bobby Kennedy quoted Aeschylus to an upset crowd:

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”  What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another …

***

Herodotus says that, while Pheidippides was running to Sparta from Athens, he encountered the god Pan.  The Athenians built a temple to Pan after the invasion, to commemorate his help in the ensuing battle, since the god had brought a blind fear upon the Persians–panic, named for the god.  At Marathon, the Athenians won as the Persians undid themselves with irrational fear.

The Color-blind Knight

A few miles from my house here in Franklin County, Tennessee, there is a roadside marker I’ve driven by a thousand times and never bothered to look at until recently. Entitled “The Blind Knight,” it reads as follows:

4-½ mi. S.E., near Liberty, Francis Joseph Campbell lived as a boy. Blinded in 1836, when 4 years old, he was educated in the first class of the State School for the Blind, later in Boston and Europe. Settling in England, his success in educating the blind and making them self-reliant earned him knighthood. He died in 1914.

Francis Joseph Campbell is the second person I know of from Franklin County to be knighted; the other is Sir John Templeton.  Campbell’s achievements are worth mentioning more fully–from Tennessee, he went on to teach at the Wisconson School for the Blind, the Perkins Institute outside Boston, where he taught music.  Some years later, Campbell moved to England, where he helped to found the Royal Normal College for the Blind in London (later the Royal National College), which focused on vocational as well as general education, and prided itself on its careful job placement program.  A devout believer in physical education, Campbell was the first blind person to climb Mont Blanc, a feat he considered the crowning achievement of his life.  In recognition of his services to the blind, Campbell was knighted by King Edward VII in 1909.

In addition to his work on behalf of the disabled, this native Southerner was a dedicated anti-slavery advocate.  A letter he wrote in 1899 to Booker T. Washington, whom he had heard lecture in England, contains the following post-script:

I think it will interest you to know that I am a native of Tennessee, and lived there until 1856 when I was driven away, first because I taught coloured people to read, and next because I refused to vote for Buchanan; further, an anti-slavery paper was sent me from Boston, which was seized in the post office. In the first instance, I was to be hanged, but was afterwards ordered to leave and never return.

The “Blind Knight” was, evidently, a color-blind knight as well.  Campbell relates elsewhere that the roots of his abolitionist position lay in a childhood memory pre-dating his loss of sight (from “Light in Darkness,” Good Words 23 [1882] p. 51):

One vivid recollection just before I became quite blind influenced my whole life.  Wheat threshing was going on. I sat playing in the straw. Our old coloured nurse, Aunt Maria, Somehow got into disgrace. I heard the stern order, “Bring the cow hide!” I saw and shall never forget the instrument of torture, and poor aunt Maria kneeling before it, begging for mercy. I have been an abolitionist ever since, thank God!

Game Animals

This past February, the toy manufacturer Hasbro announced that it was introducing a new token for Monopoly, the board game it acquired from Parker Brothers. The Scottie dog now has a counterpart.  As they had asked folks to vote on Facebook about what the new piece should be, there’s no surprise that it’s a cat.  I can’t imagine that a cat would really care about getting control of utilities or railroads, though it might be interested in napping in the Community Chest.

Speaking of such “game animals,” there was a fascinating post in yesterday’s Smithsonian blog about the development of the Staunton chess set. While they are now the standard, it was not until the 1840′s that the chess pieces took on their canonical appearance.  According to the post, the designer Nathan Cook drew his inspiration for the look of his pieces from the neo-classical architecture of the Victorian London in which he lived.  A row of Staunton pawns evokes Italian balustrades enclosing of stairways and balconies, the post reads.

More significantly for me, as a classicist, however, is this statement: The Staunton Knight was likely inspired by a sculpture on the east pediment of the Parthenon depicting horses drawing the chariot of Selene, the Moon Goddess.  Wow!  The carved horse head from the so-called Elgin Marbles in the British Museum is, arguably, the most beautiful piece of art from classical antiquity.  With the graceful arc of its mane and expressive face, Selene’s horse presses an abstract geometric form into the service of a powerfully-felt portrait.

Now the Elgin Marbles themselves summon up powerful emotions, strongly expressed all last summer when the Olympics were being held in London.  Should these masterpieces of ancient Greek sculptures be returned to the Acropolis?  Or is there an ironic sort of justice at work in that these artworks, themselves paid for by Athens’ confiscation of moneys from the Delian League, now belong to another naval empire, also now passed its prime?

As a boy, I always enjoyed Monopoly, and would make a mad dash for the Scottie dog if the race-car wasn’t available.  To make one’s way around the board, securing properties by dubious means, was the height of family fun.  But to think that, throughout my childhood playing of chess, I was gripping in my hand a version of a classical masterpiece, one that symbolized the struggle over the ownership of antiquity and the claims of Empire?  Now that is a move I had not anticipated.

Tiresias, Throbbing Between Two Lives

Next week, I will be teaching the story of Tiresias in my Mythology class here in Sewanee.  Two recent items of local connection will be informing my lecture–a documentary and discussion at St. Andrew’s-Sewanee school, and an op-ed in today’s New York Times by my friend, David Haskell.  All of this is unfolding within the context of a nation-wide conversation about same sex rights, interestingly enough.  Time and again, classical myth proves to be timely.

Tiresias’s story is one of gender-bending, and I’ve made reference to it before in an earlier post.  As told by Ovid in the first century AD, the story goes as follows (and if you don’t recognize the Latin original, perhaps you know it from the footnotes to The Waste Land):

Forte Iovem memorant diffusum nectare curas
seposuisse graves vacuaque agitasse remissos
cum Iunone iocos et ‘maior vestra profecto est,             
quam quae contingit maribus’ dixisse ‘voluptas.’
illa negat. placuit quae sit sententia docti
quaerere Tiresiae: Venus huic erat utraque nota.

As it happens, they say, Jupiter one time, a little tipsy from wine, had put off his cares and was idly joking with Juno.  “There is no doubt,” said he, “that you women enjoy greater pleasure than their husbands do.” She denied it.  They decided to seek the opinion of the learned Tiresias, for Venus either way was known to him.

Hermaphroditus, in Liverpool’s Lady Lever Museum

The story’s preposterous, of course.  Tiresias, as a man, had struck a pair of copulating snakes with his walking stick and been turned into a woman; seven years later, she saw the snakes again, struck them again, and was turned back.  When pressed by the gods, Tiresias agrees with Jupiter that women enjoy sex more. For this, Juno blinds him but Jupiter rewards him with the gift of prophecy.  Tiresias’ androgyny is not simultaneous, of course.  There are other classical figures, however, whose intersexuality is still clearer–Hermaphroditus, for instance, the off-spring of Venus and Mercury (right).

Ovid’s tale is comic in tone, but nonetheless “of great anthropological interest,” as T.S. Eliot says. As it happens, I went to see a screening earlier this week at St. Andrew’s-Sewanee school of “Two Spirits,” a documentary about Fred Martinez, “a male-bodied person with a feminine nature, a special gift according to his ancient Navajo culture” (trailer below).  In 2002, Fred was brutally murdered at the age of sixteen, one of the youngest hate-crime victims of contemporary times.

The film tells Fred’s story, but also looks back at the traditional Navajo belief that there are four human genders: feminine woman, masculine man, male-bodied person with a feminine essence (nádleehí) and female-bodied person with a masculine essence (dilbaa’).  The Navajo are not the only Native American culture to make this recognition.  Among the Lakota, transgendered persons are called winkte, many of whom can foretell the future, according to Lame Deer’s book, Seeker of Visions.  The parallel with Tiresias seems quite clear.

After the screening, St. Andrew’s chaplain, Bude Van Dyke, led a group discussion about the film and related issues of sexuality. He asked a simple question. “By whose authority do you decide matters of gender?”  Sometimes simple questions are the most thought-provoking, and the conversation that ensued was far-ranging and informative.

I’m not sure that many of our lawmakers or judges have bothered to ask themselves this simple question, and instead rely upon unexamined assertions about nature.  As I noted above, David Haskell has a brilliant op-ed in today’s New York Times, entitled “Nature’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage”, which should be required reading for all interested in the matter.  Haskell urges us to look at the natural world as it actually is, not constricted and rigidly-defined, but instead rich in sexual diversity. Among many other fine points, David notes,

Downstream from the Mall, at the outlet of the Potomac, marine snails called slipper shells add yet another twist: they begin life as males, before maturing into females.

The snails on the trees graze on fungi that further enrich the Mall’s sexual diversity. … Some of these fungal cells — like the slipper shells — can’t resist the itch to switch types.

… Human biology joins in this rejection of binary claims of male and female. There is controversy in the scientific literature about how many people are intersex, but some estimates put the figure at up to 2 percent.

What to make of all this?  Simply put, it seems that Nature does not play by the rules we devise, but rather it is we who are constantly playing catch up, as we try to understand even the snails and fungi.  Human nature, too, is hard to grasp, though perhaps we might make recourse to ancient myth and belief for guidance in this area.

From T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest.

Stations of the Cross

It’s Good Friday, and in Sewanee that means that at noon a large cross will be slowly carried from the School of Theology to All Saints’ Chapel by various members of the university and community.  Following the Way of the Cross will be many people I know and admire, some of whom have provided me with spiritual solace at troubled times in my life.  Sometimes I go out to watch the procession. Other times I cringe at the public display of piety and remain in my office. Once or twice over the years I’ve joined in.

“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” Julian Barnes famously remarked in a 2008 New York Times editorial. This statement might well be called the creed of Christian atheism, a concept I first heard about this summer at Oxford when I happened to be seated for dinner next to Brian Mountford, Vicar of the University Church in Oxford, who had written a recent book on the topic, Christian Atheist: Belonging Without Believing.  The book explores “the challenges that reason, science, doubt, and modernity throw at orthodox belief,” according to Mountford’s website.

I appreciate the honesty of Mountford’s engagement, and understand implicitly what Barnes means by missing God, the loss of context.  My son goes to a school where there is mandatory chapel, and my other son will join him there next year.  It will be up to them to decide if they believe, but I at least want them to miss God if they do not.  The religious service is simply a part of my son’s schooling, as is athletics.  He talks more about the latter, but I know he is paying attention to the former.

Yesterday , my son’s soccer team was playing an away game, and so I hopped into my car after work to go watch. I didn’t play soccer as a boy, nor did anybody I know, but I love watching him play.  It was an hour’s drive away through the Tennessee country, and my various radio presets had all begun to fade out the further I got from home. A spin around the dial wasn’t turning up much–some Bon Jovi here, a drippy country ballad there, nothing worth listening to.  It’s at times like this that I switch to AM radio.

When I was little, my father listened constantly to AM radio in the car, and the static in the reception was a part of the listening experience. There was always a sports talk-show on, and guys with heavy accents would be complaining about the latest atrocity.  On the weekends, there was Irish music.  Lots of the Irish Rovers, the Clancy Brothers, or Frank Patterson.  It all seems a long time ago, in some distant place.  When I was young, I tell my students sometimes, I never knew a Protestant.  Everybody in Boston, it seemed, was either Irish, Italian, Jewish, or Greek.  Our shared culture was the Red Sox, and we were all very devout about that. But to my students or my children, the local teams, the Irish music, the fuzzy reception–none of it makes much sense.

As I’m driving on the backroads, it’s nothing but static on the AM dial. Static, and preachers. Bible quotes jump out between bursts of surface noise. Crackle crackle so loved the world  crackle crackle the way, the truth and the crackle crackle kingdom of God. It’s Holy Week, and there is a sense of urgency and enthusiasm in the preachers’ voices.  I did not grow up around Evangelicals and the booming confidence of their testimony has always been foreign to me, though I’ve lived in the South for a long time now. Through the white noise, I strain to make out what they’re talking about. I flip around these stations of the cross, but each one sounds the same. I make my way down the road, to bold proclamations of truth, obscured by static. Crackle crackle, Who do you say that I am?

Sea and Stars

In my musings about the nighttime sky, underwater archaeology usually does not play much of a part, but two reports this week offer a lot for a backyard astronomer like myself to consider.

For starters, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reported just a few days ago that a large-scale marine archeology project he has been funding recovered the enormous F-1 engines that dropped off from Apollo 11 as it took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969. On the seabed three miles down, Bezos blogged, “We found so much. We’ve seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program.”

F-1 Thrust Chamber on ocean floor. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

It was also reported this week that divers had returned to Antikythera, a small Aegean island off the coast of which an ancient shipwreck had been found in 1901.  Numerous artefacts of tremendous interest were uncovered, including the Antikythera Ephebe (left), and hopes are high something as intriguing as the so-called Antikythera Mechanism (right) will also come to light.  Not understood at the time of its discovery, the mechanism, which dates to the 1st century BC was revealed over the course of several decades to be a form of analog computer that could calculate hundreds of astronomical positions.  In essence, it is a prototype of the astrolabe, the sort of thing that Archimedes is supposed to have constructed, according to Cicero (De Republica 1.21).   The Nature Video Chanel has a pretty good report about the device below.  Who knows what other secrets of the cosmos are hidden in the deep?

Considering Caesar

To consider is, according to a likely etymology, “to observe the stars.”  Today is the Ides of March, and tonight Comet PANSTARRS can be seen in the sky.  It’s a good time to consider Caesar, I guess.

Photo of Comet PanSTARRS taken by Ken Christison from North Carolina after sunset on March 14, 2013. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4547173729792&set=o.36709031852&type=1&theater

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings, Cassius famously declares early on in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Astral symbolism runs throughout the play, of course. But I am as constant as the Northern star, Caesar tells his wife in Act 3, Of whose true fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.  For her part, she tells him the night before his assassination, When beggars die there are no comets seen. / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.  

The reference to stars are literary devices on Shakespeare’s part, but the comet that marked Caesar’s actual death is historically attested.  “He died in the fifty-sixth year of his age,” writes the historian Suetonius in his Life of Julius Caesar (chap. 88), “and was ranked amongst the Gods, not only by a formal decree, but in the belief of the vulgar. For during the first games which Augustus, his heir, consecrated to his memory, a comet blazed for seven days together, rising always about eleven o’clock; and it was supposed to be the soul of Caesar, now received into heaven.”  Augustus issued coins with his own face on one side and Caesar’s comet on the other, as can be seen below, as a way of commemorating his own meteoric rise to power.