Heraclitus' GPS

February 18, 2014

Heraclitus’ GPS

Bombast Ÿ cotton or other material used to pad garments.

Pretentious pomposerosity.

          It’s what happens when anyone less than Shakespeare or Sophocles starts elaborating what he thinks is a tragic premise. We end up with The Sorrows of Young Werther, which von Eichendorff wisely turned into the picaresque Life of a Good-for-nothing (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts).

Picaresque Ÿ pertaining to or characteristic of the episodic
adventures of a rapscallion on the road.

          When you’ve got too much time on your hands − and especially on your poor aching heart − it's best to get out of the house and wander into trouble. Better to run than to hide. Better to fall down under some gate-toothed wench from Bath than to pine for your lost Berner Mädchen. Better to sleep in a storm sewer like Diogenes wondering where your next meal is coming from than in your own bed, wrapped up in your own weeping heart.

          If you can’t get out of the house, read von Eichendorff or Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or look through road maps as if they were icons.

          (Speaking of Diogenes:) Take lessons from your idiot dog, how he spurns tragedy and lives dogmerry even on his leash, eating anything he can snatch off the ground on his morning and evening walks − hamburger wrappers, chicken bones, twigs, dirt, cat and rabbit turds.

          Your nose, your tongue, your fingers are more reliable than your heart which is even less reliable than your memory.

There are two kinds of people (that old saw):

1.    Those that think we’ve left captivity and are heading toward the Promised Land; and

2.    Those that think we’ve left home and are on our way to Hell in a hand-basket.

But there is a third way:

3.    We’re wandering in the wilderness; we’re shifting from place to place, bobbing and weaving, but we’re getting nowhere wherever we think we’re headed.

Get lost, be lost. Especially, don’t worry about finding the way back, because − Heraclitus is right − there is no back.

          Put off the mask of tragedy. Be merry. Live in your senses not in your soul.  Especially, forget becoming a tragic hero. Did you want to be Macbeth or Polycarp, that in love with power or piety? Polycarp’s last thought before the spear piercing his side allowed the fire to lick empty his brain − the martyr’s last thought was how good this was going to look on his résumé.

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Live in your senses.  Note on Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and Brueghel's paintings below.*

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Notes:

*More than one commentator has wanted to associate Auden’s description of “the dreadful martyrdom” running its untidy course while dogs play and horses scratch with Brueghel’s The Massacre of the Innocents.  But it’s an association, which, besides the painting’s playing dogs and numerous horses (none scratching his behind), has little to recommend it.  Commentators have been drawn to The Massacre for two reasons, it seems to me.  First, the painting is in a series with The Numbering of the People at Bethlehem.  (One hesitates to suggest that scholars were “turned on” to The Massacre, because there was only one page to turn over from The Numbering in their art books; but there it is.  Second, the painting—filled as it is with occupying Spanish soldiers killing the children of Dutch peasants—allows for the possibility of all kinds of political commentary (particularly on World War II), even political allegory.  Fair enough, but the deaths of the innocents, however horrible, are not martyrs’ deaths.

                The word (“martyr”) has an interesting history, which as good a classical scholar as Auden would have known.  It comes from the Greek martys (martuV) meaning, literally (and simply), “witness.”  But it came in the life of the early church to mean one who refused to renounce his or her faith whatever the torture, even when it led, inevitably, to death.  In fact, one of the earliest church documents preserved, other than Scripture, is the so-called “Martyrdom of Polycarp,” which describes in simultaneously laconic and lurid detail the death of a bishop of Smyrna who refused to bow down to Caesar and renounce Christ.  As a result, he was thrown to lions who declined to harm him, burned though the fire would only encircle him, and finally pierced with a spear—at which point there came forth not only blood sufficient to quench the fire but a dove.  This death of Polycarp, however bizarre, is in “The Martyrdom” likened to Christ’s, for he (Christ) is the first martyr.  (See Hebrews 12.)

                Indeed, if “the miraculous birth” refers to Christ’s birth, then “the dreadful martyrdom” almost certainly refers to his death.  So, if Auden has a specific Brueghel painting in mind, as he writes these lines, it is most likely The Procession to Calvary in which the “dreadful martyrdom” will “run its course/ Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot.”  Again, the central figures—Jesus falling beneath the weight of his cross, Simon of Cyrene seeking to help over his wife’s physical objections—are almost lost in the crowd that fills the painting’s middle ground.  The site of the crucifixion itself is relegated to so far a “corner” (literally) of the painting the viewer wonders how Christ will ever get to it.  But people—and their horses and their dogs—are already gathering there for the spectacle to come.

                Not that either horses or dogs care.  The dogs do “go on with their doggy life.”  It’s a strikingly colloquial turn of phrase, almost childlike—in the sense that nursery rhymes are childlike.  Look closely at what Auden is about here, at the level of words.  On the one hand, there is “the dreadful martyrdom.”  If not a starchy phrase, it is a formal one.  Like “the miraculous birth,” “the dreadful martyrdom” has a kind of high-church, book-of-not-so-common-prayer sound.  But “the dreadful martyrdom” will “run its course”—the language becomes increasingly less formal—“anyhow in a corner”—colloquial, even common: “where dogs go on with their doggy life.”

                And where “the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”  The language falls, from formal to common, then begins to rise again—a bit anyway.  They were pretty much any old dogs getting on with their “doggy life,” but it is not any old horse scratching his “behind on a tree.”  (Incidentally, this particular “event” does not appear in any of Brueghel’s paintings to my knowledge.)  It is “the torturer’s horse.”  It’s an interesting choice of words, not only for the sound the phrase makes—all those r’s rolling around together creating all that internal rhyme: tor- with horse, -tur- with -er’s, -er’s with -orse—but for the sense, and tone it gives this second picture.  

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