“Clear verse about dark matters”: Thoughts on Book 1 of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius

Fools have more love and admiration, always
For things their blindness sees in hidden meanings;
They base their truths on what can sometimes tickle
Their ears, or what is soaked in sweetish sound. (p. 38)*

Lucretius really lays into fans of Heraclitus in the preceding lines for the folly of believing that all things are made of fire rather than of a mixture of matter and void. Lucretius: If things are made of fire, then why don’t they get hotter the denser they are? You just got served.

**********General context************

Around the time of the fall of the Roman Republic, Lucretius the philosopher/scientist/poet must have stumbled upon the philosophy of the Greek stoic, Epicurus, and thought it offered the most coherent and simple explanation there was for the behavior of observable reality. So he turned that philosophical system into an epic sort of poem. I’ve just finished the first of six books, and thought I’d share a few thoughts.

So instead of being filled with high drama, heroes, reversals of fortune, vicissitudes of fate, etc., The Way Things Are sings of scientific proofs, like: that nothing comes from nothing, that matter is indestructible, things are composed of matter and void, that matter resists motion and void makes way for movement, and that atoms must not be infinitely small but rather must be indivisible.

Frankly, I get why someone might find it boring. If you’re not an historian of science, the plainly didactic content of the poem is a pretty dry lesson. Much of Book 1 consists of Lucretius refuting the arguments of competing theories of nature. (The one refutation that got me to laugh out loud a bit concerned the idea that when a log is set on fire, then fire must have already been contained within the log before igniting. Lucretius basically asks, “then why, when we grind corn, doesn’t blood pour out? We eat the corn and it sustains us, so the blood must already be in the corn, but where’s the blood?”)

**********Critique of Religion************

Much more interesting to me is the critique of religion and superstition throughout the poem. Lucretius, true to the epic form, opens his verse with an invocation of Venus. However, his invocation, perhaps more than petitioning the goddess for inspiration, is primarily a request for Love to neutralize War, and give the human race some time and space to calmly think.

Ah, goddess, pour yourself around [War], bend
With all your body’s holiness, above
His supine meekness, drown him in persuasion,
Imploring, for the Romans, blessed peace. (20)

An anti-invocation, perhaps? Later Lucretius refers to that “grim Religion” that once forced human life to grovel until Epicurus dared “raise his mortal eyes / Bravely against this menace” (21), and he describes priests as fear-mongers, offering nothing but terrifying fantasies “to overturn your sense / Of logic” (22).

Plain about his intentions, Lucretius describes the purpose of the poem thus:

                                     I teach great things,
I try to loose men’s spirit from the ties,
Tight-knotted, which religion binds around them. (46)

So perhaps then, after all, there is something of high epic drama about The Way Things Are in the way Lucretius configures himself in opposition to the gods, as a liberator of human life from the foul tyranny of capricious overlords, except—you know—the gods are just bullshit, so no Krakens get released, no committees of elves and hobbits need forming, no cosmic battle require mythical weaponry, or anything like that.

**********Poetry as Sweetener************

Such epic framing, and yet when it comes down to it, the action of the poem is basically Lucretius saying: “Have a seat and make yourself comfortable. Let me tell you about these things called atoms. Now some guys are going to tell you that you can just keep cutting stuff in half forever, but those guys are idiots! Obviously….”

In fact, looking again at the epigraph at the top of this post equating “sweetish sound” with junk science, I wonder whether the choice of poetic form doesn’t overly-adulterate and thereby undermine the lesson. The Way Things Are is “edu-tainment,” and Lucretius admits as much:

Just as when doctors try to give to children
A bitter medicine, they rim the cup
With honey’s sweetness, honey’s golden flavor,
To fool the silly little things, as far
As the lips at least, so that they’ll take the bitter
Dosage, and swallow it down, fooled, but not swindled,
But brought to health again through double-dealing,
So now do I, because this doctrine seems
Too grim for those who never yet have tried it,
So grim that people shrink from it, I’ve meant
To explain the system in a sweeter music,
To rim the lesson, as it were, with honey,
Hoping, this way, to hold your mind with verses
While you are learning all that form, that pattern
Of the way things are. (46-7)

For Lucretius, obviously, the Epicurean system is true in any form, founded on clear logic and reason. The poetry merely conveys—does not corrupt, presumably because Lucretius knows his own intent is not disingenuous. But will this be the case? Will the pure and clear knowledge of ungodly nature not suffer violence from the mouth of the poet? Will the quiet serenity of the philosopher not give way to dithyrambic frenzy when aesthetic reason commands it?

___

*All quotations come from:

Lucretius, Carus Titus. The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969. Print.

which was purchased from Another Story Used Books in Allentown, PA for a buck seventy-five.

The Year of the Bible!

A friend of mine and I declared 2007 to be “The Year of the Bad Joke.” For the first few months of that year, we stopped censoring ourselves. Whatever terrible, corny pun popped into our heads, we said it. The secret, we discovered, to making a bad joke funny consisted almost entirely of getting a high-five after you told it.

Speaking of bad jokes, I was recently surprised to learn how Pennsylvania’s State Representatives quietly and unanimously adopted HR 535 declaring 2012 “The Year of the Bible” here in the Quaker state. Since then an online petition is being circulated that may result in the assembly’s reconsideration of the resolution.

Now I’m not really the type to get riled up about things, and for many reasons (chief among them being how empty and frivolous a culture war gesture like this resolution is compared to some of the really harmful things this batch of legislators has conspired on) I’m not going to get riled up about this.

Still, it wouldn’t be so bad if what they meant was “The Year of the Bible [as Literature].” Sort of like a college class I saw offered once that considered the historicity of the text, the way its form and meaning has changed over time, etc., using some combination of close reading, translation study, sociology, and book history.

It would be a positive sign of things to come. Like maybe next year would be The Year of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, or The Year of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, or The Year of The Geneology of Morals, or The Year of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Like maybe Harrisburg is outlining a broad liberal arts curriculum that promises to enrich and enlarge the solitary existences of all Pennsylvanians. Like maybe Harrisburg’s point isn’t to alienate Pennsylvania’s non-Christians nor to bolster the unhistorical conceit that the United States of America is the true Christian nation whose laws are God’s laws rather than the accreted trials, failures, prejudices, hopes and whims of generations of human beans working in both good and bad faith.

The Way: watch it alone so no one will see you cry. [Movie Review]

Charlie Sheen has been kicking up a lot of dust lately.  He’s done some really excellent work in the past and I enjoyed him on Two and a Half Men, but the ratio of attention-paid to his public breakdown over the attention-that-should-be-paid seems way out of whack, so beyond that I’ll leave the personal judgments to addiction specialists and tabloid parasites.

It would be nice if Sheen could divert at least a small fraction of that attention towards The Way (2010), an extremely small-budget film project written and directed by Emilio Estevez and starring their father Martin.

The Way is about an ophthalmologist (Martin Sheen) with an only son (played in flashbacks and hallucinations by Emilio Estevez himself) who, after quitting a doctoral program at Berkeley to travel and find himself, dies suddenly while hiking in the Pyrenees.

The father, Tom, learns that his son was just beginning El Camino de Santiago, a walking pilgrimage through northern Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where Catholics maintain the relics of the apostle St. James are interred. 

Expecting only to retrieve Daniel’s corpse and return home, Tom decides on impulse to complete the pilgrimage instead.  A lapsed Catholic about whom his friends joke on the golf course that he lacks a soul, Tom is broken by the news of his son’s death.  Daniel’s cremated remains symbolize the weight of his guilt and failure as a father. 

As he walks the nearly 800km westward journey, Tom periodically lightens his load, both figuratively and literally, sprinkling ashes by the small handful at notable sites.

Not only those ashes keep him company.  Three other pilgrims join him one after another, each broken in their separate ways, strangely mirroring Dorothy’s companions from The Wizard of Oz.  First he meets the Dutchman, who cuts a comic figure, though of all the characters, the precise history of his sadness remains to us obscure (ostensibly he walks the Camino to lose weight, though we also learn that he is married and that he may love her more than she loves him).  The next to join is a morose Canadian, whose heart has been hardened by an abusive ex-husband and an abortion.  The last is the cowardly Irishman, a travel book writer haunted by the real book he could never write, hiding from his publishers on the Camino.

 The Way is a small film in many ways, filmed with a skeleton crew of less than 50 according to IMDB.  Like Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the filming of the pilgrimage required that the crew become pilgrims themselves, but The Way is no Aguirre.  Though people have died as the character Daniel died in the mountains, the film captures little in the way of peril.  Estevez’s camera captures odd moments, strangeness perhaps, but never the sublime.  Quiet pain and reconciliation dominate the mood.

The most similar comparison to my mind is that weird little movie David Lynch produced with Disney Studios, The Straight Story, about an old man who rides a lawnmower through the American Midwest to see his brother once more before he dies.  Both films will have you in tears if you’re not made of stone.

Quote of the Day: Affiliation

Look: I got nothing against God. I mean, I go to church on Sunday.  But any time a group of individuals likes the same thing, I don't like that.  It could be romantic comedies. It could be Oreo cookies. If they're all liking it together, I want that broken up.

—“Boston” Rob Mariano, Survivor: Redemption Island, Ep. 8, “This Game Respects Big Moves," 4/6/11