reading and writing

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HISTORY AND NOSTALGIA The Organization of Time In the context of a university class today, the phrase the organization of time would be taken to indicate something about “time management” and its corollary “stress management” – these indications come from midlevel management – and their concept is how to use your time wisely in order to achieve your goal. The goal is to reach higher. And to help the world, of course, along the way. You, and the world, reach higher together, in the same movement, in the same managerial organization of time. But even in this “natural habitat” of our meanings the phrase the organization of time indicates a sequential continuity between past, present and future – a direction, a goal, a sense to what is now in relation to what is not now. In essence a script in which each moment in time must remind itself that it is only an actor. Much can be learned from looking at everyday phrases if they are looked at from outside of their everdayness. And this doesn’t involve insomnia, nor is it simply a matter of sleepwalking. Consider that how a person – a student – today is told to organize his or her time conveys a concept quite identical to what the creators of historical meaning have always intended to convey. “What does this event, or this moment in time mean?” The meaning of the this, or the now is found either outside of itself in the spectrum of time of which it is only an episode, or inversely, the spectrum of time is found to reside fully intact within each moment of its passing. What would the writing of history be without meaning? What else can a thesis be besides an assertion of meaning? – an assertion addressed to someone looking for lost meanings. Despite our current absorption into scientific sounding language – which is as evident in history as it is in any other discipline, for academia speaks in a single language regardless of its research thing – despite the metallic, or indeed electronic sounds of our language, the way history is written today has not changed in its fundamental axioms from how it was written, or told, or imagined in its very beginnings. Perhaps historians, among all academics, should entertain this hypothesis that change and non-change are both constants in history. The terminology in which we express history’s meaning changes (today it is difficult to distinguish between history and sociology) and the instruments we use to materialize our terminology changes (we can be digital, we must be digital), but underneath these distracting layers of clothes, the body of how history’s meaning is conceived is remarkably settled in its place, and unable to escape itself. The idea of this lesson is to present to you some of the essential ways that historical time has been organized by the poets of time, also known as historians. Perhaps you will see that historians – you – have in turn already been organized in your concepts and categories by how historical time has historically been organized for you. I am speaking of our assumptions which we are already half aware of, but which we might wonder what to do without. Please forgive me if my language seems like the verbal equivalent of the over-use of technology, or the verbal compensation for the under-use of technology. I promise to be as tolerant of your verbal vices as I am of my own. I actually believe it is more fun this way. And by breaking the parallel trance that akins the historian to the industrial worker – both of whom only have fun in designated timeslots “after hours” – we can even imagine bringing the spirit of play right into the heart of what most of the rest of the world regards as strangely boring: our beloved subject. No love is lost this way.

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So, how has historical time been enduringly organized through history? This question leads us back to myth, which is bound to offend historians’ scientific pretensions – since they appear from this point of view as nothing but pretentions. My premise is that science has not saved the world from darkness, it has only cast darkness in a different shade. Science has not abolished superstition or belief in an almighty – it has simply become an almighty superstition in its own right. So why not go to the source – mythology itself – to see where the historian, and especially the scientific, progressive, Marxist historian derives his, her, fundamental concepts? For someone this might be like a journey into the historian’s unconscious, for others it might be like a theater of the absurd for we will be “discovering” something that is clearly already here in what we already think. The first premise of mythology – any mythology, from any part of the world – is that the world itself is contained within each person’s life. If I may hijack the title of that silly song from the eighties, we are the world – and so the discovery of truth moves in two directions at once: outwardly into the world and inwardly into ourselves. Starting from this premise the world is a person (or even a vampire, since vampires are persons too), and like a person its life is measured by ages. The ages of the world are the essential categories of historical time, since history naturally concerns itself with the world (however widely or narrowly the world is geographically conceived). How is time organized in the terms of a person’s life? In between birth and death something happens, hopefully it can be called maturity. Regard nature and you see the same organization of time: fruit is the best when it is mature, is it not? And so history, or the course of the world’s time, must also follow this ubiquitous rule: from birth to death, with maturity always arriving later than desired. Infancy, childhood, the really fun years, and then old age and death, how could it be otherwise? To accept life’s rules and to organize your time in accordance with how time itself is already organized is an eternal mark of wisdom – and the study of history has always been there to make us wise, even when it makes us laugh. “History moves like a life,” says mythology, “and so by studying history you are bound to learn how to live in accordance with life.” Be aware: in this archaic formulation you the person (who now assumes the role of student) are at the center of your studies, not your finished product (your essay, your book, your career) which can easily float away from you like a balloon. The stages, or the ages, of a human life transposed onto the history of humanity, or the history of the world: this is a foundational organization of time. But then a story has to be told through the piecing together of these stages, or ages, or chapters. A story with a living idea for the living. And an idea is alive only if it is incomplete in its telling – if it leaves possibilities opened to be interpreted by the reader. Imagine for a moment that death is a part of life, and not its opposite. Life feels most alive when it forgets this part of itself, when it forgets its own death. For in death everything is settled, and there is nothing to say. A complete story, which leaves its reader only the two options of either “agreeing or disagreeing” is like a life obsessed with death – with finality, with conclusion, with resolving things, with getting it over with and getting to the point, the end. But this demands that the reader’s mind be dead, or that it fake its own death – for there is no room left to think or to imagine when being addressed by a discourse that leaves you only with preordained “options.” All good stories are incomplete because all good writers know that they are never the sole authors of what they write – their readers are their co-authors in the invisible novel written in the mind called Making Sense of What I Read.

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A story with a living idea for the living. I’ve drawn a portrait of a living idea – a knowingly incomplete idea that acknowledges the life of the reader, and that allows the reader the space to formulate her, his, own ideas in response to what’s been written. But then there is the question of the living. If life is experienced as a preordained destiny bound by immutable rules, then it is not experienced at all. Therefore life doesn’t become itself – it doesn’t realize its own ideal – if it is too aware of itself. This is why a fanatical relation to “truth” is dangerous, and usually visibly unhappy. Knowing how to forget, knowing how to lie and deny and defy, knowing that illusions complement the truth and yet nonetheless remain its opposite – all of these silly things seem quite essential to living seriously, or seriously living. Here you might notice a paradox: on the one hand historical writing and its organization of time present the reader with rules of how life is organized – in the domain of nature, in the domain of an individual’s existence, and in the domain of the world’s existence (or history): from birth to death, with a peak somewhere in the middle. But on the other hand, I have said that a living idea of the living doesn’t tell the whole story and doesn’t sound like a recitation of rules. A paradox. From the Greek παράδοξος formed of παρά (pará) meaning beyond, and δόξα (dóxa) meaning belief. Who can write beyond belief, beyond what he, she, thinks to be true is a magician, a poet. Beyond a writer. Academically written history has a strange relation to magic and poetry, but especially to magic. While on the one hand historians like to write denunciations of the historic persecution of witches and other magical practitioners, the way they write about this thing is generally devoid and utterly intolerant of any magic at all. Another paradox. Because paradoxes aren’t abolishable by the power of will or the power of law or the power of science. How did magic become just a thing? Is that not a magical operation in itself? Golden Memories All that I’ve written to you so far in this lesson about the organization of time and about stories aware of their own incompleteness is based in Hesiod’s poem, “The Five Ages of Man.” Hesiod was a Greek poet, a writer of mythology, who wrote around 700 BC, the same time as Homer. In his book Works and Days appears the poem “The Five Ages of Man” which in western civilization has provided an enduring concept of how historical time is organized. I give you the poem to read, dear historians who hate poetry. And now with art and skill I’ll summarize Another tale, which you should take to heart, Of how both gods and men began the same. The gods, who live on Mount Olympus, first Fashioned a golden race of mortal men; These lived in the reign of Kronos, king of heaven, And like the gods they lived with happy hearts Untouched by work or sorrow. Vile old age Never appeared, but always lively-limbed, Far from all ills, they feasted happily. Death came to them as sleep, and all good things Were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land Gave up her fruits unasked. Happy to be At peace, they lived with every want supplied,

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Rich in their flocks, dear to the blessed gods. And then this race was hidden in the ground. But still they live as spirits of the earth, Holy and good, guardians who keep off harm, Givers of wealth: this kingly right is theirs. The gods, who live on Mount Olympus, next Fashioned a lesser, silver race of men: Unlike the gold in stature or in mind. A child was raised at home a hundred years And played, huge baby, by his mother’s side. When they were grown and reached their prime, they lived Brief, anguished lives, from foolishness, for they Could not control themselves, but recklessly Injured each other and forsook the gods; They did not sacrifice, as all tribes must, but left The holy altars bare. And, angry, Zeus The son of Kronos, hid this race away, For they dishonored the Olympian gods. The earth then hid this second race, and they Are called the spirits of the underworld, Inferior to the gold, but honored, too. And Zeus the father made a race of bronze, Sprung from the ash tree, worse than the silver race, But strange and full of power. And they loved The groans and violence of war; they ate No bread; their hearts were flinty-hard; they were Terrible men; their strength was great, their arms And shoulders and their limbs invincible. Their weapons were of bronze, their houses bronze; Their tools were bronze: black iron was not known. They died by their own hands, and nameless, went To Hades’ chilly house. Although they were Great soldiers, they were captured by black Death, And left the shining brightness of the sun. But when this race was covered by the earth, The son of Kronos made another, fourth, Upon the fruitful land, more just and good, A godlike race of heroes, who are called The demigods – the race before our own. Foul wars and dreadful battles ruined some; Some sought the flocks of Oedipus, and died In Cadmus’ land, at seven-gated Thebes; And some, who crossed the open sea in ships,

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For fair-haired Helen’s sake, were killed at Troy. These men were covered up in death, but Zeus The son of Kronos gave the others life And homes apart from mortals, at Earth’s edge. And there they live a carefree life, beside The whirling Ocean, on the Blessed Isles. Three times a year the blooming, fertile earth Bears honeyed fruits for them, the happy ones. And Kronos is their king, far from the gods, For Zeus released him from his bonds, and these, The race of heroes, well deserve their fame. Far-seeing Zeus then made another race, The fifth, who live now on the fertile earth I wish I were not of this race, that I Had died before, or had not yet been born. This is the race of iron. Now, by day, Men work and grieve unceasingly; by night, They waste away and die. The gods will give Harsh burdens, but will mingle in some good; Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men, When babies shall be born with graying hair. Father will have no common bond with son, Neither will guest with host, nor friend with friend; The brother-love of past days will be gone. Men will dishonor parents, who grow old Too quickly, and will blame and criticize With cruel words. Wretched and godless, they Refusing to repay their bringing up, Will cheat their aged parents of their due. Men will destroy the towns of other men. The just, the good, the man who keeps his word Will be despised, but men will praise the bad And insolent. Might will be Right, and shame Will cease to be. Men will do injury To better men by speaking crooked words And adding lying oaths; and everywhere Harsh-voiced and sullen-faced and loving harm, Envy will walk along with wretched men. Last, to Olympus from the broad-pathed Earth, Hiding their loveliness in robes of white, To join the gods, abandoning mankind, Will go the spirits Righteousness and Shame. And only grievous troubles will be left For men, and no defense against our wrongs.

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Translation by Dorthea Wender You have heard of historical optimism, progressivism, positivism, promised lands, heaven, building a better future, and reaching higher – at some level it is all the same. But before civilization became so perky, it was tragic – and yet maybe for that very reason it was happier. Hesiod names his ages – which are defined by the “races” who inhabit them – according to metals which proceed in a descending order: gold, silver, bronze, then the non-metal – the heroic age inhabited by people who thing they can defy the rules of metals, and that indeed is what makes them heroic – and finally iron. The Iron Age is the present. Not just Hesiod’s present: Greece in 700 BC, but the present of anyone who reads the poem and enters its idea and then looks out at the world from within the poem’s feeling. And the Iron Age is not a happy ending. The Iron Age sucks. Why? How? Let’s look at the poem again. What made the Golden Age golden? What made it the best? “And like the gods they lived with happy hearts untouched by work or sorrow.” – The inhabitants of the Golden Age had happy hearts. This doesn’t just put the human at the center of history, it puts the heart at the center of the human. The heart, which indicates a feeling, or aura. In symbolic language the heart is always paired and contrasted to the mind. But the mind is not at the center of Hesiod’s poem – the story of the poem is not about the mind’s accumulation of knowledge, or even its loss of knowledge. The poem, taken as a whole, is about the breaking of the heart. But before we see it break, let’s see what it looked like once upon a time, in humanity’s childhood. “Untouched by work or sorrow” was the heart, implying that work and sorrow have something in common: they don’t make the heart happy. This may seem obvious – as obvious as the “tasks” we have to fulfill, the stress they cause us, and the mutilating effect they have on us when our minds are inundated with them and we can’t find the time to reconnect with our hearts anymore. “That’s just life, get use to it,” says an unhappy common sense. But who can accept so easily the argument in favor of sorrow, even when that argument is armed with all the logic in the world? “Ok, here’s a compromise: work and be sorrowful sometimes because you have to, and then in your off hours you can be happy again.” Or how about this one: “If you’re really clever you’ll learn to love your own work and sorrow, and by doing that you’ll be better at it and so then you’ll have that happiness plus the happiness that you can invent for yourself in your off hours, and then you’ll be stoked.” Both of these arguments imply a compartmentalization of life: work here according to a set of rules that you must obey, and be free over there where you can make your own rules. But what about this one, to speak politically for a moment, to speak about now: work badly, try to bring in as much as you can of play into work, since the fight for basic survival is far behind us and we don’t have a reason to be so stressed out and unhappy anymore – if not for a perverse love of sorrow itself. Observe the scene described in the Golden Age: people did not work, therefore they did not produce and possess many things. Therefore were they poor? Poor means feeling a lack. To understand the feeling of poverty all you have to do is want something very badly. Something that you don’t have and can’t convince yourself that you can possess. But in the poem “All good things were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land gave up her fruits unasked. Happy to be at peace, they lived with every want supplied.” How could these people not be poor even though they didn’t have a lot of things since they did not work? Do you think that perhaps Marx read this poem when he elaborated his theory of “primitive communism” in his scientific system of

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the procession of different “modes of production” in historical time? Note that there are five “modes of production” in Marx’s poem. And if you think that “modes of production” sounds better than “ages of man” then perhaps you also have a proclivity for techno music. And there is nothing wrong with that. Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism. Five. This is not a coincidence. And the differences are important: communism and the Iron Age are not the same thing, indeed they are opposites. But we’ll get to that later, at the end. Returning to our question: how could the inhabitants of the Golden Age not be – or not feel themselves to be – poor, despite their relative lack of products? “The fertile land gave up her fruits unasked” – this isn’t just a description of the life of hunter-gatherer societies, although some maniacal historians will tell you that it is, because for them indeed it is, because they are maniacal. Maniacal means they let their focus on ideas (and orders, which are the perfect example of ideas) blind them to the experience of life. Could it be that “the fruits of the land” are not just a basket of apples? Could it be that apples are not just food, and not just commodities with a value? Could it be, dear Karl, that use-value and exchange-value never really were the only real values in life? Do we know anymore how to be happy with what life gives us for free? “The fruits of the land” can be read as a metaphor of the things, the impressions, that life gives to us “naturally” without asking anything in return. You don’t have to “earn it,” you just have to allow yourself to experience it. Like a child. If we have lost this ability over time – over the time of history but also over the time of our personal history of growing up – it might well be because our work (the activity that separates us from the feeling of play) has not only produced more things, it has also turned everything simultaneously into a raw material (an object to be worked on) and a commodity (an object to be bought). The space to wander and to wonder about “the fruits of life” has noticeably shrunk, dear southern Californian suburbanites. And security concerns – protection against danger – have certainly contributed to this shrinking of the world. But the internet is endless! We arrive again at a paradox: the same activity that “produces wealth,” meaning work, deprives us of the ability to feel ourselves wealthy (to enjoy what is free) and it leaves very little of the world still free to be enjoyed. Perhaps this could be called our para-box. How did the inhabitants of the Golden Age treat one another? “They feasted happily.” They were “happy to be at peace.” Think about feasting the next time you eat a meal alone. Or the next time you cook alone. It is not the same food. “But what if I like eating alone because then nobody judges me?” Then you are right and I am wrong. But lets move on. Food, historically, has been a symbol of happiness, and not just nutritional survival. To eat – to feast – with other people means to share happiness with them. This concept, and this symbol, is imbedded in our language. Look at the word companion, or compañero, it is the same word. It is from Latin: cum (with) panem (bread). What is companionship? What do you do with your friends? With the people you love? Do you not share your joys? Are you not companions because you enjoy the same things and ultimately enjoy each other? The inhabitants of the Golden Age were happy to be at peace with each other, which means they didn’t fight. Maybe the only Golden Age that ever really existed in history was called a happy childhood. But isn’t that what we recreate in our small islands of communism in the world, where we don’t exploit each other, don’t dominate each other, don’t play Simon Says even in the absence of Simon, and just be? It matters. It

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matters just as much as what we read on the news, or read in history books. Even though it rarely makes its way into either one. How did things begin to change? How did they fall? What appears in the Silver Age that was not there in the Golden Age? It is strife. Strife appears. And what disappears from the Golden Age to the Silver Age is harmony. What was the cause of strife? It was wanting too much. Because want can be dangerously endless. And this is bad. Even though we might not see that it is bad, because all we see is that the thing that we want is good. In the Silver Age “a child was raised at home a hundred years and played, huge baby, by his mother’s side.” Spoiled? Under lockdown? A hundred years? Like Gabriel García Márquez’s novel A Hundred Years of Solitude. What happens when people are overindulged in their comfortable isolation from the world? Are we talking about ancient Greece here, or about American suburbia? But can you blame them? Can you blame us? An excess of love (agape – nurturing love, “by his mother’s side”) made love impossible. A paradox, a recognition that even non-love has an essential place in the world so that love may continue to find itself alive. “When they were grown and reached their prime, they lived brief, anguished lives, from foolishness, for they could not control themselves, but recklessly injured each other.” The cause of strife – living anguished lives in which they recklessly injured each other – is foolishness. And they were foolish because they could not control themselves. They couldn’t control themselves because one hundred years is too long of a time to be receiving everything you want from the person who nurtures you. But how nice it is to nurture and be nurtured! Yet once outside of the womb-like home, the “huge baby” could not understand that not everyone else loved him like his mother. And this made him upset and volatile. And ultimately bitter. Could it be that only someone who loves the world too much expects too much love from the world? More than it can give? I told you that the pre- perky world is tragic. Tragic for an excess of love. Tragic for still being the present. And so then things get worse. Strife becomes violence, and violence becomes a pleasure. Violence becomes a pleasure! Beware. This has been known to happen to people who love their work too much, because when you are in the work mindset you see the world as a layered mass of objects, and this already is violence’s form of foreplay. Getting back to the history of the heart, the inhabitants of the Bronze Age had hearts that were “flinty-hard.” Love did not disappear from the hearts of these “terrible men,” it simply found its object in another mirror: in flintiness itself: in harshness. “They loved the groans and violence of war.” They loved war. It is like saying “they loved hate.” Or they loved to hate. Moreover, they loved to see other people suffer: they loved to see their opponents groan. Maybe it made them feel strong. Anger is always righteous, but rarely is it right. Here in the third age of Hesiod’s poem the world is already unbearable. Problems prevail everywhere, and harmony is only an echo. This can’t be. There must be a way out. The Heroic Age. Very simple, some people thought that the way out of war was simply by winning. No, not very simple, very simplistic. The winner gets the spoils and can go retire “at the Earth’s edge” and enjoy them. Each man for himself, me for myself, I win, goodbye. I have seen the Earth’s edge, it is somewhere in Tustin. It is a great real estate investment, there are great schools there, even the supermarket is great. Yet if you are not great, people are unhappy to see you. You are disturbing their greatness and making it less great. But then you wonder, if greatness is so easily disturbed is it really that great? Please forgive me if you live in Tustin, I

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know that not everyone there is like that. Actually I don’t know this, but I assume this. I present you with this suburban example because it illustrates the achievement and the problem – which are the same thing – of the Heroic Age. The problem is imagining that you are not part of the larger world, and that your own happiness doesn’t intrinsically depend on the happiness of the people around you. You can pretend not to see others, or banish them from your immediate surroundings, but then you have put yourself under siege and chosen to live in a fortress of denial. The heroes of the Heroic Age live on “the Blessed Isles” – islands, the symbolic location of separation from the world. Hesiod calls them “the happy ones,” as certainly they are, but do you remember the lyrics of the David Bowie song? – “We can be heroes just for one day”? One day, one little neighborhood – looked at from the outside it doesn’t seem so heroic at all. It seems tragic at best, and pathetic at worst. The Heroic Age is an exception, even in its name, even in its concept, since heroism is by definition exceptional. It is a response to a hope – a hope to leave the general fracas. But since it was the fracas itself that gave birth to hope, hope – once it is made a value in itself – remains umbilically attached to the very problem it wishes to escape from. And in the end today appears. Hesiod’s day. And yet he wishes it did not. “I wish I were not of this race, that I had died before, or had not yet been born.” What is the Iron Age? “Now, by day, men work and grieve unceasingly; by night, they waste away and die.” They work to produce, but they are neither wealthy nor happy. Maybe this is not just because of being exploited of the fruits of their labor, but because they imagine that fruits can’t exist at all without their labor. And yet they are too tired to eat them, much less admire them as aesthetic objects. “By night they waste away and die” – does that mean that they just watch television at night because they are too tired to live, and so they console themselves with watching other people living? “Babies shall be born with graying hair.” – from the hundred-year childhood of the Silver Age now there is no childhood at all: no time of life without worries, symbolized by graying hair. Does that mean that babies are already worrying about their GPAs and which universities they’ll be accepted to? “Father will have no common bond with son, neither will guest with host, nor friend with friend; the brother-love of past days will be gone.” No family, no friends, no community. Just an ensemble of isolated, atomized “individuals” always afraid and angry with each other. It is as though Hesiod is describing a feeling in the air. Have you ever breathed that air? “Men will dishonor parents, who grow old too quickly, and will blame and criticize with cruel words. Wretched and godless, they refusing to repay their bringing up, will cheat their aged parents of their due.” Long before the industrial revolution and Marx’s “scientific” discovery that capitalism tends to reduces the family relation to just a business relation, this poem describes the very same nightmare. “Men will destroy the towns of other men.” In Greek the word translated as towns is πόλεις (pólis), which has a meaning larger than the material concept of a town or a city. Πόλεις is the root of our word politics, and política. It is also the root of our word polite, which indicates manners and behavior. To destroy other men’s πόλεις does not just mean to destroy their buildings and their “economic infrastructure,” it means to destroy their entire way of life. It means to destroy them immaterially – hence culturally and spiritually – as well as materially. In the scenario of the Iron Age, it means to make the victims of the destruction just as miserable as the perpetrators of the destruction. “The just, the good, the man who keeps his word will be despised, but men will praise the bad and insolent. Might will be Right, and shame will cease to be.” Greed is good, greed is necessary, greed is a right. Learn these lessons now, empty heart, so that you emptiness isn’t so lonely.

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And shame? Today we talk a lot about the negative attributes of shame, specifically, about the cruelty of unfairly “shaming” a person. But have we forgotten shame’s positive attributes? In the sense that there are things that I would be ashamed of doing because they are below me? A world without shame is a world without a sense of decency and decorum, a world without politeness that makes collective life in the pólis (the city) unbearable. All of life has become ugly in the Iron Age: people’s hearts and people’s relations with each other. Following the poem’s trajectory you see a linear descent, everything gets worse over time. What started off as foolishness then becomes aggression, and ends up as cruelty. Happiness disappears into fear. From being happy with simple things, free things which you need an aesthetic sensibility to enjoy, people end up miserable even though they are busy populating the world with more things through work – yet they are so consumed by working that they don’t have the time or the energy to cultivate their aesthetic sensibility. In the middle of the twentieth century the German writer Erich Fromm said something about our schools that comes very much to my mind at this moment: “Students are supposed to learn so many things that they hardly have time and energy left to think.” So therefore students are simply learning not to think. But don’t tell your GPA that, he won’t believe you. Hesiod leaves us there. Where does he leave us? He leaves us at the feeling we have after we’ve read the poem. But in order to feel a poem, or any piece of writing, you have to enter its feeling by creating it in your own imagination. You have to see yourself in it, which is another way of saying that you have to let the writing discover you. It seems to me that the entire scientific edifice which the discipline of history is so attached to is nothing but a wall built to prevent any of these important, beautiful things from happening when you read. The historian is trained to be paranoid. “But is it a fact? What are the facts behind this assertion? What are your sources? Who did you steal this from?” Nothing can be enjoyed this way except winning in a court that holds no jurisdiction over life except the amount you attribute to it. My premise, dear students, is that it does not have to be this way, despite what you have been taught, despite what your textbooks say, and despite what Barney Fife says. When I said at the beginning of this lesson that a good writer leaves his, her, work incomplete thereby allowing the reader to complete it, I was referring specifically to the place where Hesiod ends his poem. That place is not on the page (or screen), it is in your mind. How do you feel after you have experienced and not just “read” the poem? What do you do with that feeling? That which you do with the feeling is the completion of the poem in its psychic afterlife. Writing’s psychic afterlife = the reader’s real life. There is no denying this equation, not even through the tactic of willful banality. After you read Hesiod’s poem, do you not look back to the Golden Age? Do you not wonder and wish that life could be good again, considering how miserable it has become? It would seem – if you just look at the writing and remove yourself from the process of making sense – that Hesiod’s poem is “depressing.” Or pessimistic. If you reach this conclusion you have either not dreamed anything or have prohibited yourself from taking your own dreams seriously. But annihilating dreams does not make a piece of writing more “true” or more “accurate.” Quite the contrary, this act of annihilation makes writing more synthetic and lifeless, and thereby more precise in its formality. Because outward precision is a well-known symptom of internal chaos. The French writer Gaston Bachelard said, “The fullness of love’s reality cannot be grasped if illusion is not regarded as one of its integral parts.” Illusion is a part of love’s reality. But illusion is a part of all reality. Illusion is not the opposite of reality, but a component of it. It cannot go away to

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make more room for more reality. All attempts by logic to colonize and to exterminate illusion have failed miserably. We may stay up all night, but we cannot abolish the night. So, Hesiod describes the world’s ruin, but this ruin is too tragic to accept, too unbearable to ignore, too real to us (in whatever century we read the poem) to not be regarded as a mirror. So then what, dear Hesiod the Second? Are you not moved by a feeling of nostalgia? Talking about history without talking about nostalgia is like being in a relationship without love. Or like talking about art without ever considering the feeling of beauty. Nostalgia. A Greek word composed of νόστος (nóstos) meaning “homecoming,” and ἄλγος (álgos) meaning “pain.” Nostalgia means the pain of wanting to return home when you are very far from it. And home is not a place, much less a piece of real estate. Home is a relation between people. Home is love. The poet, Hesiod, creates a home – the Golden Age – and then leads you away from it down the corridor of history, but he does this in his writing so that you, dear living person, may feel the desire to find again and recreate that lost home in real life. That is the psychic afterlife of writing. Of course the magic doesn’t always work. Not everyone who reads “The Five Ages of Man” will automatically dream the same thing. There are no clearly stated instructions in the poem itself to dream this way, and this could be a very big problem for people who don’t know what to do without very clearly stated instructions because all they have ever been forced to read in their lives are pompous sounding documents full of countless pages of very clearly stated instructions. And they were afraid of not following them. Not all readings of a text are the same. They all have an equal right to exist, but that doesn’t mean they have an equal ability to interest anyone. It is usually a lack of ability that leads a person to seek approval in his, her ability to follow orders – because it doesn’t take much ability to do that. And so the givers of orders quite often try to stifle people’s abilities, because this way they create more people who need their orders as their last refuge in life. The abilities I am talking about are the abilities to feel and to dream. To experience wonder and to wander around ideas. What is the point of it? If you need to ask then the question is not for you. Don’t worry, you’ll still get an A in the class. If we want to conceptualize Hesiod’s poem in a geometric form, it would appear at first as a straight line in descent: \. In the writing things start out good and then just get worse. But as I have said, the whole meaning of the writing is not just in the writing itself, but also in what you do with it assuming that you are able, or allow yourself to do something with it. If we add this second, vital component to the writing – that component called the reader – then the geometric representation of the poem (or the poem + reader) may look like this: O. An orbit that returns to its starting point. I believe this is referred to in physics as a revolution. Oh my! Have you ever wondered, dear student of history, why only after the scientific revolution of the 17th century did tumultuous changes in government also apply to themselves the name of revolution? Do you think that there were no “revolutions” before people started naming what they were doing “revolutions.” Can you really believe that the advent of democracy in ancient Athens was not of the magnitude of a “revolution”? Modern politics appropriated the word revolution from physics. A revolution of a planet is the completion of its cycle of orbit, defined in relation to a certain point – which is arbitrary – that is forced to wear the name tag of “Beginning and End.” A revolution implies a return to a point of origin. So it would seem that the planet is “going backwards” at the same time that it is “going forward.” It is in fact going in both directions at the same time. But modern political revolutions? Don’t they want to liberate us from an oppressive, accumulated past? Aren’t they progressive and forward thinking? Aren’t they the

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opposite of conservative and reactionary? It is an insult in modern times to be called backwards, just as in ancient times it was an insult to be called left-handed. Superstitions may change, but superstition remains. Why did the people who wanted to build a new and better future for their societies in modern times call themselves revolutionaries when this term so obviously denotes a return to the most distant past of all – the beginning? Could it be that that imaginary beginning (because beginnings can only be imagined) was nature? The state of nature? And could it be that revolutionaries imagined that history was, up to their own time, a series of steps away from the laws of nature? Revolutionaries imagining that they were restoring society to its rightful, original status of harmony with nature, since nature itself was imagined as essentially harmonious. Even nature’s violence was a harmonious violence compared to the violence people had created. My point here is that the nature and the inalienable natural rights conceived of the by Enlightenment – which are expressed most vividly by Rousseau and by Jefferson – are simply another costume worn by Hesiod’s Golden Age: an idyllic beginning of humanity, an idyllic society that represents humanity’s lost nature. These are all discursive constructs, they are not “real” unless you believe in them – but then again that applies to everything you will ever read that is not armed with the pure brute force of violence. Does that mean that the only thing “real” to believe in is violence because only violence is “real” – it exists, and has a forceful effect on you, whether you believe it or not? We may probe the outer limits of human stupidity, but we don’t have to answer to them. If the only pieces of writing you can “trust” are you bank statements, the law, and essays with a lot of footnotes then crystal meth was made for you. But getting back to the Golden Age: the imaginary construct of an ideal beginning, of a lost home, in other words the sentiment of nostalgia itself has been a force in history that has propelled people into the future. And the future, in its conceptual meaning, is not just a lifeless passage of time – another number on the calendar – the future is a different reality than the present. Reconstructing an imaginary past we construct a real future. But before we construct anything we have to imagine. Déjà vu in Heaven Now, perhaps many of you have not heard of Hesiod’s “Five Ages of Man” before reading this lesson. Perhaps many of you have not heard of the circular organization of time that I’ve described as being composed of Hesiod’s poem + the reader’s sentiment. But certainly many of you have heard of Christianity. Christianity also organizes time in a circular fashion, with a beginning that is returned to in the end. That beginning is the Garden of Eden, and that end is Heaven, which is really just the Garden of Eden elevated from the earth to the sky – like the spiral of a slinky returning to the same point but on a “higher level.” The difference we see in the Christian organization of time and Hesiod’s is that in Christianity’s the savior is materialized in the text: it is Christ, who in essence does the work of Hesiod’s imaginative reader. It is Christ who returns humanity to its befallen state of grace. The Christian, or the Christian reader, needs simply to follow this character’s conduct in her, or his real life. So Christianity is easier on the imagination than Hesiod. The instructions are clear. It says so. But there are other differences too between these two texts that are similar (The Bible and “The Five Ages of Man”). Let’s read now about the fall from the Garden of Eden from The Book of Genesis and see how it is similar and different from the passage from the Golden Age to the Silver Age in Hesiod’s poem.

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When the Lord God made the universe, there were no plants on the earth and no seeds had sprouted, because he had not sent any rain, and there was no one to cultivate the land; but water would come up from beneath the surface and water the ground. Then the Lord God took some soil from the ground and formed a man out of it; he breathed life- giving breath into his nostrils and the man began to live. Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the East, and there he put the man he had formed. He made all kinds of beautiful trees grow there and produce good fruit. In the middle of the garden stood the tree that gives life and the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad. A stream flowed in Eden and watered the garden; beyond Eden it divided into four rivers. The first river is the Pishon; it flows round the country of Havilah (pure gold is found there and also rare perfume and precious stones.) The second river is the Gihon; it flows round the country of Cush. The third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and guard it. He said to him, “You may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, except the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad. You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.” Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to live alone. I will make a suitable companion to help him.” So he took some soil from the ground and formed all the animals and all the birds. Then he brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and that is how they all got their names. So the man named all the birds and all the animals; but not one of them was a suitable companion to help him. Then the Lord God made the man fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping, he took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the flesh. He formed a woman out of the rib and brought her to him. Then the man said, “At last, here is one of my own kind — Bone taken from my bone, and flesh from my flesh. ‘Woman’ is her name because she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united with his wife, and they become one. The man and the woman were both naked, but they were not embarrassed. Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the Lord God had made. The snake asked the woman, “Did God really tell you not to eat fruit from any tree in the garden?” “We may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden,” the woman answered, “except the tree in the

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middle of it. God told us not to eat the fruit of that tree or even touch it; if we do, we will die.” The snake replied, “That's not true; you will not die. God said that, because he knows that when you eat it you will be like God and know what is good and what is bad.” The woman saw how beautiful the tree was and how good its fruit would be to eat, and she thought how wonderful it would be to become wise. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, and he also ate it. As soon as they had eaten it, they were given understanding and realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and covered themselves. That evening they heard the Lord God walking in the garden, and they hid from him among the trees. But the Lord God called out to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden; I was afraid and hid from you, because I was naked.” “Who told you that you were naked?” God asked. “Did you eat the fruit that I told you not to eat?” The man answered, “The woman you put here with me gave me the fruit, and I ate it.” The Lord God asked the woman, “Why did you do this?” She replied, “The snake tricked me into eating it.” Then the Lord God said to the snake, “You will be punished for this; you alone of all the animals must bear this curse: from now on you will crawl on your belly, and you will have to eat dust as long as you live. I will make you and the woman hate each other; her offspring and yours will always be enemies. Her offspring will crush your head, and you will bite her offspring’s heel.” And he said to the woman, “I will increase your trouble in pregnancy and your pain in giving birth. In spite of this, you will still have desire for your husband, yet you will be subject to him.” And he said to the man, “You listened to your wife and ate the fruit which I told you not to eat. Because of what you have done, the ground will be under a curse. You will have to work hard all your life to make it produce enough food for you. It will produce weeds and thorns, and you will have to eat wild plants. You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything, until you go back to the soil from which you were formed. You were made from soil, and you will become soil again.” Adam named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all human beings. And the Lord God made clothes out of animal skins for Adam and his wife, and he clothed them. Then the Lord God said, “Now the man has become like one of us and has knowledge of what is good and what is bad. He must not be allowed to take fruit from the tree that gives life, eat it, and live for ever.” So the Lord God sent him out of the Garden of Eden and made him cultivate the soil from which he had been formed. Then at the east side of the garden he put living

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creatures and a flaming sword which turned in all directions. This was to keep anyone from coming near the tree that gives life. Translation by the American Bible Society One point in common between the two texts that stands out to me now is the appearance of work as a lesser, removed state of existence from the initial harmony. Work doesn’t mean simply doing things or making things, it means a particular state of mind that excludes happiness (as in “The Five Ages of Man”) and excludes wisdom (as in The Bible). In case you haven’t understood already, I don’t want to give you work to do in this class. How do you write without making writing become work? That is the essential question of our class devoted to historical writing. Because believe it or not, good writing is never work. A notable difference between the Biblical story and Hesiod’s poem is that an excess of knowledge – or an excessive desire for knowledge – is what precipitate’s humanity’s fall from the Garden in The Bible, whereas it is exactly the opposite in “The Five Ages of Man” – foolishness is the cause of strife in the Silver Age. But then again, perhaps an excessive desire for knowledge is a form of foolishness itself. Yet that implies that the knowledge desired is useless to living well. For if it were useful to living well, then the desire for it would not be foolish. The only apparent foolishness of Eve’s desire is that it contradicts an injunction. She disobeys, which centers the story around human’s relation to authority. And this leaves us with the lasting impression that if people just all obeyed a good authority then everything would be ok. Or if people just built a good authority to obey then everything would be ok. Or if people just believed the authority they were obeying was good then everything would be ok. Authority, in any scenario, is a central character in this parable, which it is not in “The Five Ages of Man.” There the decisive events occur between people and how they treat each other. Between people who have no authority over each other as a matter of principle. Zeus creates and destroys the different ages’ races, but not in response to anything that they did. People’s fates are very much in their own hands. But let’s look again at what these two stories have in common. There is an initial state of perfect harmony among people: in “The Five Ages of Man” there are many people, a society indeed, whereas in The Bible there is a more intimate setting of only two people. There is also an initial harmony between people and the gods: in Hesiod’s poem the inhabitants of the golden age lived “like the gods” with “happy hearts,” and in The Bible everyone in the Garden is happy too, though they are not all alike. Everything is as it should be, even if the two “shoulds” of the two stories indicate realities that are different. What else is the Christian heaven except a more populated version of the Garden of Eden, imagined above the earth, and posited at the end of both life and history? Christ, the light of the world, is intended to lead humanity back to where it initially came from. And the Enlightenment revolutionaries intended themselves as doing essentially the same thing, except their Garden of Eden, or their Golden Age, was called natural law. And of course, Marxism, which made of history a religion, also intended itself as doing the same thing, except its point of departure and arrival it called communism. In “The Five Ages of Man” the poetic, nostalgic reader is left to imaginatively reconstruct the lost paradise. In The Bible the followers of Christ find their way

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back to the idyllic beginning as a reward for their obedience. In the Enlightenment the reasonable people in European civilization get back in touch with nature. And in Marxism the proletariat – which is made both obedient and reasonable though its internalization of the work ethic – is able to recreate a long lost communism in modern times. In all of these stories history is going somewhere, that is the essential thing, not even the fact that it is going back to its imagined beginning. For there are other, less interesting organizations of historical time that also establish a historical direction without reference to a lost beginning. Their geometric symbolization is linear, and usually in the ascendant direction: /. Technology and the philosophy most closely attached to it, positivism, assume this narrative. Every new App makes life better. Before Apps life sucked. There are no bends in the straight line of technology’s historical narrative, just as there are no flaws in a product as it appears in its advertising, and just as there are no problems in a totalitarian society’s representation of itself to itself. As you write a response to this lesson, I would be curious to know how you conceive of historical time. I would be curious to know how you think a concept of historical time might shape the way a single event in history is regarded by a historian. For example sometimes historians write about an event “moving history forward” or “setting it back” – and this implies a direction, a destination (what is it?) and a “getting with the program.” You don’t have to write about these things I’ve expressed a curiosity about. You can write your essay anyway you want. Please, dear students, try to have fun with this. If you don’t take it so seriously, I will bet you that you will “learn more” that way and certainly write better that way. If your way of having fun is by taking things very seriously and driving yourself crazy in order to achieve “perfection,” then do that. But you don’t have to do that. After writing about time, its organization and its defiance, I thought to leave you with two paintings that can join the images you’ve already imagined about this long subject.

Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty. Pompeo Batoni, 1746. London, National Galley.

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Time Defeated by Old Age and Beauty. Simon Vouet, 1627. Madrid, Prado.

Take care, Dimitri Papandreu August 30, 2020