There is Only the Dance

This semester is shaping up to be busy as all hell, so I must consign myself to less than daily blogs, but I will attempt to write longer blogs to make up for shortage.   Let me start this entry, which has the potential to be quite long, by creating a sort of outline I have created for myself in order to keep things tidy and ensure that I get around to everything I wanted to bring up today.

1.       Carol Oates and History

2.      The idea of ‘Still point” and reflections on “Burnt Norton.”

(There were three other topics here, but this took long enough as is and those will be postponed until a later date)

If I must start somewhere, I think I should start with a short story.  I’ll try to start in a somewhat methodical fashion, addressing each story in turn, but I cannot promise that, by the end, anything I have to say will not turn into a whirl-wind of chaos.  On the top of my pile is Oates’s “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been.”  In class, we discussed the historical and mythological history of this story.  We addressed the serial killer past and the story of Demeter and Proserpine and Hades.  Now, I am forced to ask, can we separate these two forms of history?  There must be some separation between the mythological past and ‘history,’ but where, and who has the authority to draw the line?  I cannot offer any answers with confidence, but I can’t help but to feel that eventually, the myth becomes history and the history becomes myth until at some point the two are undecipherable.  If we are to look at an example of this that is clearer (and older) than Oates’s story, we need only turn to a historical event which has been passed down through history and myth both independently and co-dependently.   In the past years, the Battle of Thermopylae has been brought into the public eye with the release of the film “300.”  In the film, King Leonidas of Sparta takes 300 men and those men hold off the entirety of the Persian army, numbering into the millions, and manage to do so quite successfully until they are betrayed.  If we now look to the historians and modern scholars, the actually numbers are about 7,000 Greeks against 100,000 to 150,000 Persians.   Then, after Leonidas realizes that he has been betrayed, and is being outflanked, he sends all but 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans away from the battle so that the entire Greek force is not decimated.  (I can thank Wikipedia for these statistics).  Not only have these numbers been greatly exaggerated (even accounting for cinematic liberties) as the story was passed on, but it was also believed that the leader of the Greek forces, the King of Sparta, Leonidas, was a descendant of Heracles himself.  So now, not only are the numbers being blown-up to mythic proportions, but the characters themselves who were, in fact, real people are being intermingled with the gods. 

            Perhaps I need not say anything more about the facts above.  Placing them next to each other sheds light on exactly how convoluted history and mythology can, and has, become.  I think it would be foolish to not ask ourselves, how else has this happened? and when has it happened and we weren’t aware of it?  

At the still pint of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.  And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.  Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.  Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

My next topic, the idea of ‘Still point” and reflections on “Burnt Norton,” might seem to take things a step too far, but it is something that has passed through my mind, and now seems as good a time as any to sit down and expound on some of these ideas.  I would like to start with the idea of a ‘still point’ as used in the passage above.  For some reason, this idea brought to mind the image of circles, more specifically, circles spinning like a record or CD or a dancer.  Since we are dealing with Time, I think it is fair to turn to one of the leading novels (though that word seems insufficient) with regards to Time: Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.  In this novel, if I may be a little reductive, Proust would like us to imagine time as circle on an infinite loop with infinite sub-loops which may take one who is experiencing the time in question back to a certain time and then just as suddenly be transported back to the ‘present.’  If I were to take this circular concept of time, and find a ‘still point’ in it, I would have to point right in the middle.  The center of a spinning disk will not move.  It will spin of course, but it will not travel like points on the disk out until the edge, and if the disk is large enough, (especially if it extends into infinity, while maintaining a fixed center) the center of the disk will not spin at all, or if we are working with a finite disk, will spin considerably slower than the edge of the disk.  (This is a bunch of messy rotating disk physics which I didn’t not understand on my first go; and the theoretical extrapolation into infinity is my own reasoning and some might disagree with me, but I’m not trying to split hairs, here).  Either way, the center, or midpoint, will always spin slower, and spin only in a single place.  This concept of midpoint, or ‘midway,’ brings us back to the discussion Dante where the first sentence of the Inferno is, “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself/ In dark woods, the right road lost.”  This ‘still point’ becomes the starting point of one of the epics that merges the mythology of the Greeks into the Christian tradition—not trying to reconcile the two by any means, but placing the two hand in hand as we encounter many characters and figures from Greek Myth in the Inferno.  And, if I am going to take an even further leap and link this back to the idea of a “Eureka” moment.  Archimedes has been credited with shouting “Eureka!” as he witnessed the displacement of water in his bathtub allowing him to calculate how much gold was used to make the king’s crown (another case where there might be some mythological embellishments).

  Another phrase attributed to Archimedes is, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth with [a lever].” (The engraving above is a representation of Archimedes ‘moving the earth’).   The combination of still points and midpoints brought me to this realization that as a spinning disk or circle has a still point, so does a lever.  The lever, at the fulcrum, will have a point that moves “neither from not towards” and will “Neither ascent or decline.” Here, successfully bringing us back to Eliot and “Burnt Norton.”  But since we are talking about levers, I cannot help but to recall reading an essay by Frederick Turner wherein he discusses the nature of levers and how “the weightless thoughts of man can effectively control the massive universe itself.”  This occurs because of the nature of levers and something called the “law of levers” whereby “a lesser weight balances a greater across a fulcrum by means of a proportionate difference in the length of the beam ends.”  Turner then proceeds to draw the matter out into abstractions and hypothetical as I did with the rotating disk of time and, by his reasoning, the Earth, or the Globe, or the entire universe can be balanced by nothing more than the thoughts of man.   He also describes “the transforming leverage of metaphorical language.”  Again: levers, fulcrums, still points, Eliot, metaphor, language. It all connects.