After reading my Week 11Lecture Script -- in which I talk about "mythical symbols" as "the products of the imagination" of the Hellenic Mind -- perform the following activity:give attention to the following mythical symbols which you will find in the short excerpt (the "Chorus") for this module's reading:
a. snake
b. Heaven
c. Hellas
d. Peneus
e. Tempes
f. Cyclades
g. Argo
h. Orpheus
i. Ulysses
j. Calypso
Now pick at least 3 symbols from the list of symbols above-- all taken from our Module 11 excerpt, Shelley's "Chorus," and then tell me
- how do the symbols that you picked function to either "express," or "realize," or "compliment" or "prove" the utopian intention of Shelley's first line.. "The world's great age begins anew / The golden years return."
Shelley, in other words, is relying on symbolic language to prove the thesis of his first line. This is just a lesson in trying to read "symbolic" (versus ordinary) language.
* you might need to do a small bit of webresearch (Googling) to discover what each symbolic image/ allusion basically means.
Week 11- Topic : "We are [not] all Greek": The Absence Myth & Imagination in the Modern Mind" The English poet Percy Shelley declared in his dramatic poem Hellas, “We are all Greeks,” meaning that “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.” This lecture will involve the critical argument that – tragically -- “We are not all Greek” for reasons which will follow. In the drama, Hellas, to which these lines were prologue, Shelley had a Greek chorus look on this scene: Let there be light! said Liberty, And like a sunrise from the sea Athens arose!—Around her born, Shone like the mountains in the morn Glorious states;—and are they now Ashes, wrecks, oblivion? The former president of France, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, said in a less poetic manner than Shelley, "Europe without Greece is like a child without a birth certificate.” The former president wished to suggest that the “glorious states…around.. Athens born”--- namely the current European and Amerian states -- ”are they now ashes, wrecks, oblivion?” The naissance of the West was conceived in Greece 2½ millennia ago. We in the West have as our societal foundation the Greek mindset. The Greeks gave us the basis of all the arts like sculpture, painting, plays, and dance…and also politics and government. In addition to the arts politics, the Greeks were the basis of architecture. Medicine was born in Greece along with an understanding of democracy, education, and philosophy. But most importantly, Greek mythology, the basis of Greek religious sensibility, informed who we are and how we functioned or how we didn't function well. This was done with the mythology that includes Apollo, Oedipus Rex, Prometheus, Athena, and Icarus to mention several from the Olympian host of characters. The Golden Age of Greece (a form of Utopia known as Hellenism to many artists and scholars through the ages) was merely two centuries: from 500 to 300 BCE. And yet in those very few years, they built the foundation of all Western thought, understanding, and Weltanschauung: the German word for “worldview.” Our author this week is Percy Bysshe Shelley. He wrote a poem called Hellas. It's a title which alludes to our word Hellenism, which is that period of Greek history, a golden age, a kind of utopia (in Shelley's mind), in which ancient Athens thrived as what some modern (and some pre-modern) critics argue is the birth of European and consequently American civilization. Shelley feared, Shelley cried, Shelley opined that – to deleterious effect -- we have drifted far far apart from our Greek origins, our aboriginal Greek origins, as civilized peoples. So what after all makes Hellenism so special to some (not all) scholars.. those scholars who love to quote Shelley on the question of Hellenism? For Shelley, in a nutshell, what made Hellenism so special was that it was an age that, in a simple phrase, “managed to escape the limits imposed on thought by fact and reason.” Hellenes, more specifically, broke the bounds of the limits of fact and reason with what we now call the “imagination” but which the Hellenes understood as poiesis. Poiesis was to a Hellene a faculty of the Mind which they understood arguably as their greatest resource. Poiesis was capable of creating the sort of mythology -- a large treasury of highly symbolical dramatic stories for stage (theater) – a treasury of stories that alone gave birth to a civilization and which alone has made that civilization imperishably thrive: that is, we speak of a thriving that thrives not only in its own time, but which thrives (imperishably) into our own phase of post-Greek civilization. Tragically, for Shelley, the only thing that counted as "thought" in his time and now in our own time is facts and reason(s). "Thought," in other words, to Shelley cannot ever be reduced to facts and reason (s) without destructive social effects. For because there was to a Hellene Mind more to reality than material facts, physical- material existence. Instead, the typical Hellene, a citizen of ancient Athens - and I mean Athens at its zenith of civilizational achievement (i.e., amid “Hellenism”) - would have given primacy to what we now call "imagination" as an integral component of reason (or "mind" or "brain"). But here we should pause to remind that the word/concept of “imagination” did not exist to an ancient Hellene. A Hellene would have understood the faculty of the imagination simply as poiesis. Poiesis translates as “poetry-making” – which entails the art of making out of ordinary life something extraordinary. It implies that part of our cognitive life -- what some people call the “life of the mind” – which processes, experiences and finally names or frames the world in ways which far exceed the limits of mere empirical or rational thinking, naming, framing. And finally the products of poiesis are "myth" or "symbolism," and which really are the byproducts of any Hellenic Mind: they were a myth-making, symbol-making people. Another way of saying what I just said above is to just say that an ancient Hellene (or Athenian) would have been open to "religion and mystery" (these sorts of truths which take the imagination as an integral component of "mind" seriously)... And to a Hellenic Mind, the truths of religion and mystery would have been regarded with more seriousness than the truths of what we now in our own age know as the truths of modern science and rationalism, which are merely "material” and/or “empirical truths." Ancient "Hellenic" Greece (Hellas is Shelley's word) is in its very essence "mythic" ...and that means mythic by use of the imagination not as a peripheral but as a central component of "mind" - or "thought." Let me quote Shelley in his Preface to Hellas, for because his critique of modern society comes from the standpoint of Hellenism: The apathy of the rulers of the [modern] civilized world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilization [the ancient Greeks] .. is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shews of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But were it not for Greece, Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters.. The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions -- whose very fragments are the despair of modern art -- and [this human form and the human mind attained to a perfection] has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race. ..The modern Greek [and every modern human] is the descendant of those glorious beings [in] whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind, and he inherits [i.e., we inherit] much of their sensibility, their rapidity of conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage. If in many instances he is [we are] degraded, by moral and political slavery to the practice of the basest vices [that modern political slavery] engenders, and that below the level of ordinary degradation… [L]et us reflect that the corruption of the best produces the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a peculiar state of social institution [our rational-empirical- materialist modern institutions, which, being devoid of imagination, are devoid of mystery and religion] may be expected to cease so soon as that relation is dissolved. For Shelley, the main public artform for the ancient Greeks, namely “tragedy” (which includes “comedy” – was a kind of religious guide for living for the average Hellene, and it grounded itself in a mythic/quasi-religious idiom that brought.. ideal worlds and actions; and real worlds and actions together. In our own time, the novel (when at its best) locates itself both in reality, the actualities of life as it is lived in the concrete, and the realities of the ideal, the mystical philosophic ideas through which the world is to be over and over, more and more reconstructed… The best of our novels, in other words, are byproducts of ancient Hellenic thought processes. We speak of novelistic processes, first-rate ones, which work by two cognitive faculties at one time: First, there are the processes of rational-reasoning and which recognize “the factual actualities of life as it is lived in the concrete,” on the one hand; Secondly, there are processes of poiesis or the imagination, which recognize the realities of the ideal, ideal realities by which the world is to be reconstructed in the direction of an idea or ideal of re-enchantment, a mythical re-enchantment, on the other hand. I shall say it again: the Hellenes were to Shelley, in a nutshell, that civilization who, in harnessing and celebrating the faculties of poiesis or “imagination” for the potential outcome of an enchanted (even a magical) universal human condition, had best managed to escape the limits imposed on thought [cognition] by forms of fact and reason of a rational or empirical kind. Another poet, John Keats -- who was a contemporary of Shelley –encapsulated what I have been narrating above as typical of the Hellenic-Mind this way, with his notion of “negative capability” (which, btw, has its own Wikipedia page): I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.. This [negative capability] pursued through volumes [of literature] would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet [or artist of any kind] the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. [Next, go and see the Week 11 Discussion assignment titled “Images of the Hellenic Imagination in PB Shelley's ‘Hellas’”] Hellas: Chorus CHORUS The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star. Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies. A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore. Oh, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give. Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdu'd: Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers. Oh cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh might it die or rest at last!