Ovid Knew When to Shut it

I am going to knock Ovid off today. I’m very grateful to have a short reading assignment to kill the taste of The Aeneid and help me heal from the boredom.

I’m done with Dido’s letter to Aeneas, and I just started someone else’s letter to someone else. It doesn’t matter who wrote whom; they’re fungible. One letter is almost exactly like another. Same voice. Same whiny, neurotic, meandering style. Does Tiger Beat still exist? They probably get letters like this all the time, scarred by clove-cigarette burns, with instructions to forward them to Justin Timberlake.

“My parents don’t understand our secret love. I know you were moved by the triquetra and unicorn I drew in the dust on the side of your tour bus. I totally understand why you had your security people restrain me while you drove away. They’re not worthy to witness what we’re becoming.”

Medea. That’s who it is. Medea wrote Jason. I don’t know anything about these two, except that Jason was in one of my favorite Saturday afternoon movies when I was a kid: Jason and the Argonauts. Jason roamed around in a boat, fighting cool Ray Harryhausen monsters. I loved that stuff. We didn’t have fancy CGI back then; some crazy old coot had to build statues and move them a degree or a millimeter at a time for the cameras. I thought it was wonderful.

To be clear, it’s Medea, not Madea. If you don’t know who Madea is, good for you. It’s a Tyler Perry character. If you don’t know who Tyler Perry is, see previous.

Tyler Perry created very bad TV shows, and somehow he became extremely successful. Now he creates very bad movies. I can’t understand his popularity. He uses BET-grade actors, and the scripts are like something I would have written in the sixth grade.

Back when I was at Trinity Church, they showed a Tyler Perry movie, which I’m sure they did not pay for. It featured a big family of miserable black people having a holiday meal and discussing infidelity and VD (each other’s). The message of the film: we should all admire good-looking guys who date extremely overweight women.

My feeling on the subject is this: people like what they like. If you prefer women under 300 pounds, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. If you like them big, it doesn’t make you a good person. Maybe you’re just an Arab.

Yes, they talked about VD and adultery in church, and not in a constructive way. The decision to show the movie was typical of the Wilkerson attitude. The obvious blew right by them. Any normal preacher would have thought, “Maybe this isn’t a great thing to show kids at 9 a.m.”

Trinity was maybe 80% black, and the Wilkersons knew the movie would please the crowd. The crowd’s happiness was always job one, and it still is. Feed the beast. If you don’t feed it, you can’t milk it.

Madea is Tyler Perry in a big flowered dress. I don’t know too much about “her,” but I believe she’s an angry and somewhat carnal church lady, sort of like Lamont Sanford’s Aunt Esther. As a Christian, I’m not a big fan of drag. The Wilkersons love drag. Their son and another pastor did a video in drag.

Madea does not figure heavily in Greek mythology. I guess that’s my point.

I still don’t understand why people admire Ovid. The letters he wrote are like something Bradley Manning might write to Justin Bieber. Stalkerish. “I hope you die. Well, no I don’t. Because I want you to live long enough to suffer for abandoning me. I’m not mad at you. Please come and kill me. If you have a minute.”

Our notions of romance have changed since the 19th century. Before that, it was perfectly okay to be a stalker. We admired stalkers. You could probably get away with that lifestyle up through 1920 or so. Now, we don’t think it’s romantic to mail someone your ear or jump on a bonfire because someone left you. We think it’s sick and crazy.

It’s a little unfair. We encourage young people to read stalker literature, and then we get mad when they grow up and hack the online accounts of people who dumped them, or when they cut themselves. We don’t expect them to take the things we teach them seriously. We expect them to have the good sense to be hypocrites, like the rest of us.

I don’t recall the Greeks getting excited about stalking. Maybe it started with the Romans. The impression I have is that in the Greek stuff, people who couldn’t let go were considered pathetic.

That would make sense. The Greeks admired moderation. Even in their rape, murder, pillage, arson, and theft.

A friend told me I was the least codependent person he knew, because I was so fast to cut people off and so serious about not taking them back. It was a nice compliment, but I clung to counterproductive people in the past, and that’s how I learned that it was better to cut out the dead wood and move on. I had to make a fool of myself many times before God helped me see what I was doing wrong. However I got here, you don’t have to worry about me stalking anyone now. I wish people the best, and I hope I manage to help a few get to know God, but I think my epitaph will be “Buh-BYE.”

I seem to be immune to loneliness these days. Years ago, it was a real problem for me. When I was living in Texas, undergoing the torture of toxic ADD drugs and consistent failure at my chosen profession, I had almost no one, and I was like one of those zoo animals that develop tics and repetitive movements because of isolation. Now I’m kind of glad I don’t deal with people too much. I guess some people go the St. John route, and others go Kaczynski.

When you’re around people too much, they pressure you to be what you don’t want to be. That’s fine if you’re three. You need the guidance. It’s not so good when you’ve gotten a glimpse of God and you’re surrounded by people who think carnality is the bomb.

After today, I am done with Greeks and Romans. I move on to Augustine’s Confessions, which could be a pretty good read. Surely it will not be full of two-paragraph similes, the way Homer and Virgil were.

The next assignment is actually a combination of Luke and John, but I’ve read those three million times, so I don’t plan to go back over them.

I will continue to regale you with tales of my scholarly exploits. I’m sure someone will want to publish my sophisticated insights. I think I’ll hold my breath until I get an offer.

In any case, I’ll get a little closure and redemption. And I will know where Phrygia is.