He lived way up there. That guy everybody avoided. For all sorts of reasons. There were rumors, of course. That there were more than just him up there in that little cave just past all the big rocks. But that's all they were, rumors.
When one of Dum Dum's successors saw the same old pattern of theft-war-aftermath evolving and had just had enough of it -- he decided to go up there. Go up there and talk to the Fool on the Hill.
Dum deDum (i know, sorry) came back a changed man. He didn't look much different. But his attachment to his historic role and to the tribe in general had dramatically changed.
He knew how to alter the course of history, for one thing. The tide had to establish itself first, but he could change its course once it did. If it truly mattered. And with seemingly little effort.
Dum deDum could make his own poems -- and I mean really compose them. He didn't just cleave to the same old same old, either. He could make it all very different, but somehow without departing from tradition too much. They also were very satisfying to hear. (That was the strangest part.)
He didn't hate the smug and smelly Tribe Over There (more or less distance, this time). He didn't love his own tribe any more or any less for it, either.
The people who had pretty much had Dum deDum all figured out didn't any more. It frustrated them, and they went looking for the Fool on the Hill because of it. He was gone.
Other people began watching Dum deDum -- and I mean in every little detail. Followed him everywhere, too -- making note of his every move. Some imitated everything he did, obsessively. Others just stared, their mouths agape. How could he do those things? What made him so different all of a sudden? Just who did this guy think he was, anyway? They all stood, perplexed.
Dum deDum didn't seem to care. He also wasn't particularly impressed with himself, which just infuriated everyone else all the more.
But the tribe's leaders -- particularly Ug the 27th (just to pick a number) -- listened to Dum deDum. They weren't as distracted by his mannerisms (or lack of them) or peculiarly insulting statements and questions as the rest were. The leaders seemed to be able to make something of things he said and did.
The tribe began to grow. Develop something we now call "civility" -- the start of "civil-ization". As a result, there was another kidnapping -- this time a ring of People Who Turned Out to be Not What They Seemed got Dum deDum. But this time, Dum deDum just rode with it, despite being constantly harassed and needled by the kidnapping ring. Leaving his familiar surroundings also bothered him, but he wasn't destroyed by it. In fact, he barely broke stride. Though he could be, and was at times, very uncivil.
The kidnapping failed ultimately because the ring fell apart, its members squabbling among themselves. Dum deDum just seemed to take wing and fly away.
I'm not sure what happened next. I do know this. Searching for liberation, Dum deDum had found The Light. And he carried it with him for the rest of his life.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
"This guy is just nuts!"
Some more reference work (not a lot, really) found me the more thoroughgoing source for "epic". The Greek word epos means a "word" -- "word" as in a "statement" or "utterance", rather than an individual noun, verb, adjective or adverb. It also means, by association, a tale, a story or a lay. In plural, the word refers to poetry in "heroic" verse or just plain "epic poetry".
That makes it the opposite of melei -- or lyric poetry. The singular masculine form, melos, initially referred to a "limb" -- arm or leg, not part of a tree -- and secondarily, to a song or a strain of lyric poetry. It was also used to distinguish what the chorus sang in tragic drama, as opposed to the dialogue. I had to think about "limb" overnight. Then, an idea came -- the word for one of the favorite metrical feet in Greek, the dactyl, originally meant "finger" -- one long, followed by two shorts (counting outward from the knuckle). So, maybe (this is what the scholars call a "conjecture" and the lawyers a "surmise" -- what you and I call a wild guess), a finger, then a hand, then a forearm, then the upper arm, then the shoulder -- a lyric poem! (I said it was a wild guess.)
But I'm not talking about melos here. By using "ode" and "hymn" I'm trying to recall (yeah, here we go) the state of humanity in prehistoric times. Which isn't that long ago. You can't have history without writing, so we're talking the last 7,000 years or so of the some 100,000 years of the fully human experience.
Using Greek words makes this jump more convenient. True histories didn't appear (AFAIK) until well into the beginning of civilization. But, unlike the Latin-speaking peoples, the Greeks had a fully developed epic (Illiad, Odyssey) and hymnic (the Homeric hymns) "literature" before they even had their own alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma, ... yeah, that's the word for it) to write it down with. Their odic literature came either just before or not that far after that, historically. (Tragedy may have come from the word meaning "goat song". First you get a goat-sacrifice ode, then you get a goat-sacrifice call-and-response ode, then you get someone to poetically recite the story of how the first goat got sacrificed while the call-and-response ode goes on behind you, then you get somebody to impersonate the first goat-sacrificer ... . Who plays the goat? Whoever's goat they got! Ouch.)
So, yeah, Melos and Epos are the two parts of basic Greek poetic theory. Let me repeat -- theory.
Going back to my crazy Stone Age thing, Dum-Dum (my new name for the first memorizer/reciter -- he had a verbal rhythm going, and he was too "dumb" for anything related to hunting, except to maybe conk on the head and use for mastodon bait. That possibility will improve your memory skills!) wouldn't have had the necessity or even time to write lyric poetry as we think of it. Maybe Oa had had a few starts at it, but really, when your first thought at every sunrise was "How do I survive today?", imitating bird calls in word-rhythm would just not be a priority.
You'd need you some civilization for that Melos stuff to get started. Or maybe just the ghastly peace that follows a long and horrible war. So Dum-Dum's understudy would maybe have cut a reed and started to blow sad bird calls through it, so he could compose him some First-Ever-Post-War Blues.
Who knows?
_____
There is critical basis for all this craziness I've set down here -- though, unfortunately, I've had to resort to my much-fractured memory (again with that!) of yet another book I gave away, the classic Epic and Romance by W.P. Ker. I may have the whole ode-hymn-epic deal ack-basswards or may be thinking of another book entirely, so I'll leave you to find this one (it's a free Google EBook) and read it for yourselves to see.
However, you'll need more than that to vett all I've written in this and the last two posts. Finding a good historical linguist (known as a "philologist" in my day, and maybe still) will be a start, or at least some background essays or books by that person or persons.
Note: If you are taking a course in something related to this, and you use my stuff here -- you risk flunking the course. I am no expert. I am just trying to get a certain discussion going again.
That makes it the opposite of melei -- or lyric poetry. The singular masculine form, melos, initially referred to a "limb" -- arm or leg, not part of a tree -- and secondarily, to a song or a strain of lyric poetry. It was also used to distinguish what the chorus sang in tragic drama, as opposed to the dialogue. I had to think about "limb" overnight. Then, an idea came -- the word for one of the favorite metrical feet in Greek, the dactyl, originally meant "finger" -- one long, followed by two shorts (counting outward from the knuckle). So, maybe (this is what the scholars call a "conjecture" and the lawyers a "surmise" -- what you and I call a wild guess), a finger, then a hand, then a forearm, then the upper arm, then the shoulder -- a lyric poem! (I said it was a wild guess.)
But I'm not talking about melos here. By using "ode" and "hymn" I'm trying to recall (yeah, here we go) the state of humanity in prehistoric times. Which isn't that long ago. You can't have history without writing, so we're talking the last 7,000 years or so of the some 100,000 years of the fully human experience.
Using Greek words makes this jump more convenient. True histories didn't appear (AFAIK) until well into the beginning of civilization. But, unlike the Latin-speaking peoples, the Greeks had a fully developed epic (Illiad, Odyssey) and hymnic (the Homeric hymns) "literature" before they even had their own alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma, ... yeah, that's the word for it) to write it down with. Their odic literature came either just before or not that far after that, historically. (Tragedy may have come from the word meaning "goat song". First you get a goat-sacrifice ode, then you get a goat-sacrifice call-and-response ode, then you get someone to poetically recite the story of how the first goat got sacrificed while the call-and-response ode goes on behind you, then you get somebody to impersonate the first goat-sacrificer ... . Who plays the goat? Whoever's goat they got! Ouch.)
So, yeah, Melos and Epos are the two parts of basic Greek poetic theory. Let me repeat -- theory.
Going back to my crazy Stone Age thing, Dum-Dum (my new name for the first memorizer/reciter -- he had a verbal rhythm going, and he was too "dumb" for anything related to hunting, except to maybe conk on the head and use for mastodon bait. That possibility will improve your memory skills!) wouldn't have had the necessity or even time to write lyric poetry as we think of it. Maybe Oa had had a few starts at it, but really, when your first thought at every sunrise was "How do I survive today?", imitating bird calls in word-rhythm would just not be a priority.
You'd need you some civilization for that Melos stuff to get started. Or maybe just the ghastly peace that follows a long and horrible war. So Dum-Dum's understudy would maybe have cut a reed and started to blow sad bird calls through it, so he could compose him some First-Ever-Post-War Blues.
Who knows?
_____
There is critical basis for all this craziness I've set down here -- though, unfortunately, I've had to resort to my much-fractured memory (again with that!) of yet another book I gave away, the classic Epic and Romance by W.P. Ker. I may have the whole ode-hymn-epic deal ack-basswards or may be thinking of another book entirely, so I'll leave you to find this one (it's a free Google EBook) and read it for yourselves to see.
However, you'll need more than that to vett all I've written in this and the last two posts. Finding a good historical linguist (known as a "philologist" in my day, and maybe still) will be a start, or at least some background essays or books by that person or persons.
Note: If you are taking a course in something related to this, and you use my stuff here -- you risk flunking the course. I am no expert. I am just trying to get a certain discussion going again.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
In Memory
Let's say you are Ug's poetry memorizer/reciter.
You keep in memory the Great Hunt Exploit (jogged by your meditative viewing of the Great Hunt Painted on the Cave Wall), you hold in mind his own hymn "The Day I Made the Lightning Mine" (Ug has an ego, folks).
Plus, you keep the tribe's hymns, chants and seasonal odes Oa has composed ready to recite. (She keeps the lullabyes, berry-gathering lays and open-pit-cooking songs to her own store.)
Then, something terrible happens. The tribe two hills over has decided your tribe has a good thing going and has also decided it's time to make it theirs. This tribe decided that (a) asking your tribe to teach them would be too much work (that learning and memorizing stuff is hard) (b) making war on your tribe would be too expensive (plus, their tribe might lose) so (c) kidnapping you is their best bet.
You don't notice those smug-and-smelly evildoers over there by the bushes as you take a break to take care of your business. And -bang- before you know it, they've got that animal skinbag over your head, and off you go to the really smug-and-smelly-bad tribe two hills over. (They're smelly because they don't believe in baths, and they're smug because they believe this personal choice makes them the superior animal.)
Nestled in them thar hills is a lotta bad stuff gettin' hid from plain sight. And you couldn't help but notice -- as you are forced to teach the smug and the smelly your language, which they didn't want to learn in the first place -- they have Ug's pretty cousin thought eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger actually tied up over in Cave 3a where the s'n's boys 'r makin' her make them some babies, and Ug's medicine man's long-lost brother over down in the Cave With No Number makin' him do spells for the Two Hills Over Tribe.
And you know what's coming. War.
And war comes. And it's a long one. It does to both tribes what war has done ever since. You, the memorizer/reciter, survive -- barely.
And, years later, you decide you're going to make your Last Stand composing a poem that links all the elements you've so carefully shepherded all your life. It will call together all your narrative, hymnic and lyric skills to pull off. Plus, your memories of happier days. And your memories of ones less so.
Once you get started, you have to make sure your apprentice (another bare survivor) gets it all down, because this is the Long Poem About the Good Tribe that Was. And how its members had to Go Bad to Get What Was Theirs Back. And how one son of Ug got through it all and lived to carry on.
We now call those poems "epic". The Greek word is one for "word" or "song". Your epic becomes the basis for all learning the tribe experiences henceforth, as it struggles toward a form of organization intended to prevent warfare (and, inevitably it seems, fails) called "civilization".
Epics have changed over the centuries. They have dealt with all sorts of struggles -- ethical, spiritual and even philosophical (see, again, The Top Ten {April 14, 2010} for more). But those changes haven't diminished human society's need for them.
I'm not sure epic poems are necessary nowadays solely to help schoolchildren develop good memory skills (along with the good reading, writing and overall learning skills that accompany a good memory). But knowledge of what epics are probably is needed for composing the poems of the future that will help make whatever they learn more meaningful.
You keep in memory the Great Hunt Exploit (jogged by your meditative viewing of the Great Hunt Painted on the Cave Wall), you hold in mind his own hymn "The Day I Made the Lightning Mine" (Ug has an ego, folks).
Plus, you keep the tribe's hymns, chants and seasonal odes Oa has composed ready to recite. (She keeps the lullabyes, berry-gathering lays and open-pit-cooking songs to her own store.)
Then, something terrible happens. The tribe two hills over has decided your tribe has a good thing going and has also decided it's time to make it theirs. This tribe decided that (a) asking your tribe to teach them would be too much work (that learning and memorizing stuff is hard) (b) making war on your tribe would be too expensive (plus, their tribe might lose) so (c) kidnapping you is their best bet.
You don't notice those smug-and-smelly evildoers over there by the bushes as you take a break to take care of your business. And -bang- before you know it, they've got that animal skinbag over your head, and off you go to the really smug-and-smelly-bad tribe two hills over. (They're smelly because they don't believe in baths, and they're smug because they believe this personal choice makes them the superior animal.)
Nestled in them thar hills is a lotta bad stuff gettin' hid from plain sight. And you couldn't help but notice -- as you are forced to teach the smug and the smelly your language, which they didn't want to learn in the first place -- they have Ug's pretty cousin thought eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger actually tied up over in Cave 3a where the s'n's boys 'r makin' her make them some babies, and Ug's medicine man's long-lost brother over down in the Cave With No Number makin' him do spells for the Two Hills Over Tribe.
And you know what's coming. War.
And war comes. And it's a long one. It does to both tribes what war has done ever since. You, the memorizer/reciter, survive -- barely.
And, years later, you decide you're going to make your Last Stand composing a poem that links all the elements you've so carefully shepherded all your life. It will call together all your narrative, hymnic and lyric skills to pull off. Plus, your memories of happier days. And your memories of ones less so.
Once you get started, you have to make sure your apprentice (another bare survivor) gets it all down, because this is the Long Poem About the Good Tribe that Was. And how its members had to Go Bad to Get What Was Theirs Back. And how one son of Ug got through it all and lived to carry on.
We now call those poems "epic". The Greek word is one for "word" or "song". Your epic becomes the basis for all learning the tribe experiences henceforth, as it struggles toward a form of organization intended to prevent warfare (and, inevitably it seems, fails) called "civilization".
Epics have changed over the centuries. They have dealt with all sorts of struggles -- ethical, spiritual and even philosophical (see, again, The Top Ten {April 14, 2010} for more). But those changes haven't diminished human society's need for them.
I'm not sure epic poems are necessary nowadays solely to help schoolchildren develop good memory skills (along with the good reading, writing and overall learning skills that accompany a good memory). But knowledge of what epics are probably is needed for composing the poems of the future that will help make whatever they learn more meaningful.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Knee MON Icks
There has been some debate lately (*runs to check latest*) across The Pond over whether schoolchildren should be required to recite poetry from memory.
It has given some there the mental image of a squirming 10-year-old boy in knickers (in the US, those are short trousers for boys) struggling to get passing marks from his scowling schoolmaster as the child stumbles over a selection from "The Lady of Shallot" (Tennyson's poem that eventually led him to write The Idylls of the King [see The Top Ten in my archive {April 14, 2010}]).
I can testify to this: they made us when I was 11 or 12 do Leigh Hunt's much easier "Abou ben Adhem" -- and it calls to my mind memories of me howling with laughter to one poor girl's minor fumbles, only to have me make a complete ass of myself with the same thing a few weeks later (it was a one-student-per-week attempt -- you got to volunteer which week).
I have always been bad at rote memorization. The students who were good at it back then also were the ones who got straight As in every other subject and ended up going to Ivy League or other high-quality private colleges in later years. I don't know if there's a connection to be made with that or not. My Abou ben Adam humiliation was 45 years ago.
Things have changed since then. Substantially (except for me being humiliated).
Here is what I can offer (and, since this blog has been about renewing traditional poetry, I feel I should): the words in Greek for memory (there, of course, are more than one) stem from "mnaomai", which means "to be mindful of a person or thing". We get from that "mneimonikos", which means "of or for remembrance", or "memory". Another word that means the same thing is "mnemosunei" (The "u" is usually transliterated as a "y", and the "ei" in my transliteration is spelled in Greek with a letter than looks like a little "n" with a long tail, named "eta".).
The name for the mother of the Muses is "Mnemosyne" -- which is really just the (traditionally transliterated) proper noun form of "mnemosunei".
The first part of the last sentence is my point. The Greeks realized that memory is the "mother" of poetry, which in turn is the source for its sibling arts.
It turns out recent research shows that the cave paintings I referred to in my posts Old Long Since and What I Meant (I think) {Nov. 29 and 30, 2010} may indeed have referred to ancient lost poems. These poems would have had to have been composed mentally and preserved by memory. The paintings are some 30,000 years old. Writing dates from about 7,000 years ago and the Greek alphabet from about 3,000 years ago. My information on all that may itself be "dated". You should double-check it yourself for accuracy, because I am writing from memory. (Yep. That thing. That I'm not so good at. That I used to make my customary B grades in school. That I got from just listening in class, because I had trouble memorizing stuff I was supposed to study at home. That didn't work for math ... that -- I'll assume you get my drift here.).
Reciters of these lost "cave" poems could have used the cave paintings to jog their memories, because the poems were likely long ballads commemorating (yep) a successful long hunt for a huge beast that would have fed the whole tribe for as long as the cooked meat could have been preserved back then (i.e., not that long).
There would have been other poems written by Ug the Fire Priest (see my post Ug! Fire! {August 8, 2009} for more on him), memorializing (uh-huh) his discovery of the lightning-sourced flamey stuff his people used to preserve that mastodon meat for as long as they could. These poems would have sounded more like "hymns" -- a word that in Greek refers to a poem written "in praise of" a person or thing.
And Oa the wife of Ug may have kept a few bits he composed to her while they were wooing, called by the Greeks "odes". If you wrote one of those to be sung with a lyre, then it was a "lyric" ode. (Again, double check all this for yourself. I'm usually off-base on something or other.). Maybe she had a few odes of her own. Personal ones -- ones so personal she would have had to burn them later with some of that flamey stuff if she'd ever dared to write them down (if she'd had anything to write them down on, if there was something to write them down with, if there was writing, if ... ) -- see my post Ouch! {November 7, 2008} for more.
The balladic instinct is tribal, the hymnic is familial and the odic is individual. That's a lot to keep in mind, I admit. But it may be worth remembering. (Yeah, I know: ouch.)
Obviously, we need something more current than "The Lady of Shallot" to wrap all this in one bundle, so schoolchildren can recall (ouch) the entire poetic experience instinctually without having to read a mountain of books first, and then mull them over by themselves for decades and then somehow boil it all down in a blog and then hope somebody ... .
There have been a lot of poems written in English since "The Lady of Shallot" was published. But how many do you remember?
Line by line?
And then can get a 12-year-old to recite?
It seems there is more work to do, don't you think?
_____
I don't allow links on this blog, so I'll include back dates here in {brackets} and from now on. Also, I've since amended the "dates" for writing and Greek alphabetics -- I was thinking 5,000 BC and typing "years ago"!
It has given some there the mental image of a squirming 10-year-old boy in knickers (in the US, those are short trousers for boys) struggling to get passing marks from his scowling schoolmaster as the child stumbles over a selection from "The Lady of Shallot" (Tennyson's poem that eventually led him to write The Idylls of the King [see The Top Ten in my archive {April 14, 2010}]).
I can testify to this: they made us when I was 11 or 12 do Leigh Hunt's much easier "Abou ben Adhem" -- and it calls to my mind memories of me howling with laughter to one poor girl's minor fumbles, only to have me make a complete ass of myself with the same thing a few weeks later (it was a one-student-per-week attempt -- you got to volunteer which week).
I have always been bad at rote memorization. The students who were good at it back then also were the ones who got straight As in every other subject and ended up going to Ivy League or other high-quality private colleges in later years. I don't know if there's a connection to be made with that or not. My Abou ben Adam humiliation was 45 years ago.
Things have changed since then. Substantially (except for me being humiliated).
Here is what I can offer (and, since this blog has been about renewing traditional poetry, I feel I should): the words in Greek for memory (there, of course, are more than one) stem from "mnaomai", which means "to be mindful of a person or thing". We get from that "mneimonikos", which means "of or for remembrance", or "memory". Another word that means the same thing is "mnemosunei" (The "u" is usually transliterated as a "y", and the "ei" in my transliteration is spelled in Greek with a letter than looks like a little "n" with a long tail, named "eta".).
The name for the mother of the Muses is "Mnemosyne" -- which is really just the (traditionally transliterated) proper noun form of "mnemosunei".
The first part of the last sentence is my point. The Greeks realized that memory is the "mother" of poetry, which in turn is the source for its sibling arts.
It turns out recent research shows that the cave paintings I referred to in my posts Old Long Since and What I Meant (I think) {Nov. 29 and 30, 2010} may indeed have referred to ancient lost poems. These poems would have had to have been composed mentally and preserved by memory. The paintings are some 30,000 years old. Writing dates from about 7,000 years ago and the Greek alphabet from about 3,000 years ago. My information on all that may itself be "dated". You should double-check it yourself for accuracy, because I am writing from memory. (Yep. That thing. That I'm not so good at. That I used to make my customary B grades in school. That I got from just listening in class, because I had trouble memorizing stuff I was supposed to study at home. That didn't work for math ... that -- I'll assume you get my drift here.).
Reciters of these lost "cave" poems could have used the cave paintings to jog their memories, because the poems were likely long ballads commemorating (yep) a successful long hunt for a huge beast that would have fed the whole tribe for as long as the cooked meat could have been preserved back then (i.e., not that long).
There would have been other poems written by Ug the Fire Priest (see my post Ug! Fire! {August 8, 2009} for more on him), memorializing (uh-huh) his discovery of the lightning-sourced flamey stuff his people used to preserve that mastodon meat for as long as they could. These poems would have sounded more like "hymns" -- a word that in Greek refers to a poem written "in praise of" a person or thing.
And Oa the wife of Ug may have kept a few bits he composed to her while they were wooing, called by the Greeks "odes". If you wrote one of those to be sung with a lyre, then it was a "lyric" ode. (Again, double check all this for yourself. I'm usually off-base on something or other.). Maybe she had a few odes of her own. Personal ones -- ones so personal she would have had to burn them later with some of that flamey stuff if she'd ever dared to write them down (if she'd had anything to write them down on, if there was something to write them down with, if there was writing, if ... ) -- see my post Ouch! {November 7, 2008} for more.
The balladic instinct is tribal, the hymnic is familial and the odic is individual. That's a lot to keep in mind, I admit. But it may be worth remembering. (Yeah, I know: ouch.)
Obviously, we need something more current than "The Lady of Shallot" to wrap all this in one bundle, so schoolchildren can recall (ouch) the entire poetic experience instinctually without having to read a mountain of books first, and then mull them over by themselves for decades and then somehow boil it all down in a blog and then hope somebody ... .
There have been a lot of poems written in English since "The Lady of Shallot" was published. But how many do you remember?
Line by line?
And then can get a 12-year-old to recite?
It seems there is more work to do, don't you think?
_____
I don't allow links on this blog, so I'll include back dates here in {brackets} and from now on. Also, I've since amended the "dates" for writing and Greek alphabetics -- I was thinking 5,000 BC and typing "years ago"!
