The Maze of the Minotaur was Child’s Play Compared to Aeschylus

I feel like climbing a big mountain and shouting from the top. I am so happy about my homemade shower spray. My bathroom practically cleans itself. Now if I could just do something about the 9,000 hairs my body ejects onto the floor each day. Where do they come from? How is it that I still have hair left?

I literally see hairs on the floor as I’m putting the vacuum cleaner away.

It must be pretty obvious that I’m blogging in order to procrastinate, although I really am happy about the shower. The tub and shower take up 80% of bathroom cleaning time. The toilet takes five minutes, and four of those minutes are just waiting for the chemicals to work. The floor takes three minutes. The sink is quick. If you can defeat the tub and shower, the rest is cake.

It’s good that I published the above information for all the world. Blogs are so important.

In other news, The Oresteia is killing me.

I believe the book (the parts Aeschylus wrote) ends at somewhere around the 170-page mark. I am at about 120, I think. I can get through 20 pages per day without spontaneously dying. According to the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus, college students get two days to read the whole mess.

It makes me wonder: was I right to refuse to do my assigned reading when I was in college? Is it reasonable to expect a human being to do this much work for one course (especially a course about something that isn’t important)?

I have done what writers are supposed to do. I have started my essay by starting conflict and provoking thought, so I can go on to resolve things. All good writers are basically trolls.

Actually, it is fair to make people read this in two days. First of all, no college student reads it the way I’m reading it. I read one page, and then I turn to Professor Logan’s incredibly badly written, turgid, pedantic commentary. Then I go back to Aeschylus. I look stuff up on the web. I check pronunciations, which I forget by the next day. I don’t have a lecturer to explain things to me, so I refer to poor old Logan. This adds time, but I’m also avoiding spending time in class.

Of course, I also avoided spending time in class when I was in college, by choosing not to go, so I leave it to you to add things up and decide what’s right.

If I were still in college, I would read the book in two sittings (assuming I read it at all), and then I would get drunk. I would not look anything up. I would only learn what the instructor wanted me to repeat on the exam. Things would go much faster.

Logan’s commentary is really disconcerting. It reinforces all my negative feelings about liberal arts courses and intellectuals.

The man apparently knows Aeschylus-era Greek really well. Points for that. And he knows a lot about Greek literature. That’s where my admiration ends.

His writing is so stuffy and pretentious, I have a hard time understanding it, even though it’s in English. And I’m not stupid. I got a perfect score on the verbal portion of the GRE, which is probably more than Professor Logan can say.

Here’s something most people don’t understand about intellectuals: they are not particularly smart. The word “intellectual” doesn’t really mean “intelligent person,” although we have twisted it to mean that. It really means “member of a relatively small group of highly insecure academics and artists who read the same books and use the same jargon.” It describes accomplishment, interest, and affiliation, not aptitude.

Dick Cavett is an intellectual. Albert Einstein probably was not. You can have an IQ of 110 and be a perfectly sound intellectual. Universities are full of tenured people who are not smart.

Professor Logan is definitely an intellectual, because he winds his convoluted words tighter than the wire on a motor armature, and to understand one of his sentences, you have to unwind it slowly. That’s not good writing. It’s clever, but it’s not good. The purpose of explanatory prose is to make things easier to understand, not harder.

When you go to college, they beat you over the head with simplicity and concision. “Keep it brief. Use small words.” But they can’t seem to take that advice, themselves.

The commentary itself demonstrates one of my many quibbles with intellectuals. They think way too highly of what they do. It’s full of comments that are completely unnecessary. Logan skips over things that are utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader, and then he puts in fluff, like, “It is the hour also means ‘it is the crucial (or opportune) moment.’”

Okay, great. Thanks. I would never have figured that out.

If he took out the junk that adds nothing, shortened and straightened the knotted-up language, and made a better effort to explain things that actually need explaining, his book would be a whole lot better.

It does have one great virtue, however. It’s free. Or at least it’s included in my Scrib’d subscription.

As for the plays themselves…not good. I understand their historical importance, but you would have to be insane to read them for pleasure or attend a performance.

One of the things I don’t like about the plays is their thick coating of excessive emotion. To describe them accurately, we would need to coin new words for the territory beyond “melodramatic” and “maudlin.” The prose isn’t purple; it’s ultraviolet. I guess it’s not prose, since the plays are musicals. Anyway, you get the point. It’s like something a 21st-century stalker would write. Way over the top.

Here’s another problem: there is no action. Agamemnon comes home. He takes a bath. Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus stab him to death. Orestes comes home (apparently years later, with no indication that there was a gap), and he yaps for a while and then kills Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. No car chases. No sub-plots. No Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. No Touchstone. Just whining and stabbing.

Couple these issues with the fact that all the female roles are played by men, and you have a recipe for a bad evening.

I did learn a few things; had I not, I would feel pretty bummed about what I am putting myself through.

Christians have a concept called “generational curses.” The idea is that demons and fallen angels keep track of families, and they find ways to stick to us and cause us to repeat negative behaviors. This is what the trilogy is all about. Agamemnon’s ancestors committed disgusting murders. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter just so he can get a good wind to go on a completely unnecessary raid. Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus kill Agamemnon and mutilate his body. Orestes kills Clytaemnestra (his mother) and Aegisthus, fully expecting supernatural consequences to fall on him and his seed.

Throughout the plays, the characters refer to spirits that drive violent revenge. Words translated “curse” or “fate” can actually refer to these spirits. At one point, the word “daimon” (our English “demon”) is translated “fate.”

The New Testament was written in Greek. The Greek word used for “demon” was “daimonion,” which is a form of “daimon.”

It’s all very interesting, because I know that evil spirits control people who aren’t led by the Holy Spirit. A Christian who is submitted to the Holy Spirit is “Spirit-led”; he is influenced greatly, but he isn’t a slave. A person who isn’t submitted to the Holy Spirit is enslaved by spirits that destroy his free will. He can’t change much, even if he wants to.

When I was in school, they taught me that “tragedy” doesn’t mean “misfortune” or “sad story.” They taught me that it described a tale of self-destruction. A tragic character knows, or should know, that his own behavior is ruining him, but he persists. He can’t stop. The story of the House of Atreus (The Oresteia) is a tragedy, and the characters know their plight is spirit-driven.

Life still works this way. We don’t like to admit it. Nonbelievers scoff at the idea that spirits exist, and Christians think they’re too good to be infested. But if you don’t get clear of the beings that control you, you will never really serve God or walk in victory.

In the law, there is a concept called “adverse possession.” The brief version is this: if someone who hates you camps out on your property for seven years, they own it. You have a responsibility to oust them. If you don’t do it, the next time you show up, they can have you arrested for trespassing.

That’s what life is like for most of us. We are inhabited by spirits, and we don’t throw them out. We love them and serve them. We love the things they give us: lust, greed, violence, pride…whatever. We decide our demonic drives are good, so we let the demons stay. Then we lose the ability to get rid of them, and they can do whatever they want inside of us. This includes things like disease and mental illness. We want the things we think are good, but we don’t realize there is a price.

The ancient Greeks were ignorant. They didn’t know God. They worshiped demons and fallen angels. But they knew spirits were real. They had a basic understanding of how spirits shape lives. The fact that they would equate “fate” and “demon” says it all. If you have demons, they determine your fate.

Pretty wild.

I can just imagine what would have happened had I raised my hand in Lit. Hum. class and brought this up. The same academic who loved teaching about Manichaeans and Zorastrians probably would have turned purple and exploded. I may be wrong; maybe he would have found the beliefs of modern charismatic Christians interesting, from an academic standpoint. But I very much doubt it.

The characters in Greek literature are shallow, violent jerks of limited intelligence. Academics don’t seem to have problems with that, just as most don’t seem to have a problem with murderous, cruel Islam. They do get upset with Jesus, though. When they’re not claiming he was a gay vegetarian socialist who loved gun control.

I think Thucydides is next on the list, and after Aeschylus, I can’t wait. Anything is better than what I’m dealing with now.

You can’t understand Aeschylus. You can’t really understand the Greek, even if you become fluent. You can’t understand pre-technological people. You can’t understand the people who lived during the same decades as Aeschylus, because one century is not like another, even in the ancient world. You can’t understand topical references. You can’t reconstruct the music.

It must be frustrating to be a classics scholar and realize you will never get any closer to your subject than you were the day you got your Bachelor of Arts. It must be a bummer to be in a field that is impervious to progress.

Reading Logan’s book is like reading the Talmud. The Jews who wrote the Talmud didn’t know God personally, so they guessed a lot, and they contradicted each other. The scholars who study Aeschylus can never have a deep understanding of his work, so they do what the Jewish scholars did. In the end, there is no substitute for intimate firsthand knowledge.

Interesting.

At least I’ll be able to say I read this stuff. That counts for something.