Ancient. One of the interesting features of studying the past is that you can see patterns of change even in objects which claim to be unchanging. A famous passage of the Greek historian, Thucydides, expresses horror at the fact that political crisis changed the very meaning of words themselves: καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them” (Histories 3.82). During the reign of Augustus (27 BCE – 14 CE), this phenomenon is perceptible in a number of ways. Augustus, who claimed to restore the republic, changed the course of Roman political life forever, inaugurating a monarchy which did not name itself so. In the Metropolitan Museum in New York there is a famous Egyptian temple honouring the goddess, Isis, as well as Pedesi and Pihor, deified sons of the local Nubian chieftain. This temple is noteworthy in a number of respects, one of which is the fact that the ruler of Egypt depicted making sacrifices to divinities in its reliefs is the Roman princeps, Augustus himself. Augustus is there represented in the traditional regalia of the Egyptian pharaoh. An example of a deep difference consciously hidden underneath traditional forms.
Incidentally, I can’t think about the Temple of Dendur without also thinking about this scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), filmed right in front of it.
Modern. Last Friday, we made the trek to Cambridge (crossing the Charles is no joke) to hear Lindy West speak at an event organized by the Harvard Book Store as part of the book tour for her newly released The Witches are Coming. I heard West at the MFA last summer, giving a version of what would be the book’s first chapter; that lecture was deliberately arranged as a counterpoint to the narratives of sexual conquest on display in the MFA’s special exhibit at the time: “Casanova’s Europe.” West praised the curators of the exhibit for their explicit acknowledgement that, while Casanova’s memoirs provide a rich document of the 18th c., it also described “behaviors toward women that today would be criminal.” A praiseworthy effort to make visitors to the museum consider that the objects on display do not uncomplicatedly manifest beauty and wisdom of the past (there are other indications of this throughout the MFA). That our interaction with these artefacts is not simply one of aesthetic appreciation, but one which creates meaning by contextualizing the object within an understanding of the culture which produced it.
The reading from The Witches are Coming took place in a church, which I thought was somewhat fitting. The audience was 99% women. After her reading, audience members asked her questions which were heartbreakingly moving. Over the week that followed, one which was unusually busy, I found snatches of time here and there to read the book itself. Day-to-day life in modern America is filled with noise and fury and rhetoric, and bad faith arguments. West, with characteristic wit, manages to cut through that noise.
Internet.
- Lauren Mary Barnett — simple, not plain.
- Hallie Bates on work and fun.
- The moving keynote speech by Marquis McCray at the BU grad student conference, Agency through the Ancients (#AncientAgency) live tweeted by Alicia Matz.
- I’m really enjoying dansg08’s youtube playthrough of Death Stranding.
Excerpt. Josephine Balmer, Papyrus Trace (Papyrological Institute, Florence, 1953) in The Paths of Survival (2017):
“trapped in the scent of lavender, musk;
letters from a lost world, seeping back
to black, etched in breath-blown dust:
…speak out… …dissent… …enough…:
a few precious words of Aeschylus
we’d all believed had gone forever —
the fragment found at Oxyrhynchus
then lost again in an Allied raid
by this second miracle returned to us,
late violets trembling above a grave.”
Daily Life. This week, we had a Greece vs. Rome debate at BU. My colleague, Sasha Nikolaev, made us some ostraka for the vote — I heard him hammering the pot through the wall. It ended in a tie!
o pietas animi 