Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 22:50:09 -0500
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Romanticism & higher pantheism


At 09:53 PM 11/9/97 -0400, you (Stirling Newberry) wrote:
>Re: Eros - eris
>
>A broad a topic, the intertwining of the two is part of litterature in
>almost every age. Why not pick up the ball and run with it?
>

Well, I'm trying to edit something tonight, jolly fun, and only checking in
at the modemed computer occasionally. And as usual this is such a huge topic
that it could be approached from zillions of angles with gazillions of examples.

Aren't eros and eris in Hesiod already? Yes, I checked: Theogony 120 is Eros
who is handsomest and defeats all gods and mortals, and Theogony 225 is Eris
who is the offspring of Night, as likewise Nemesis, Deception, Old Age, etc.
Eris in turn gave birth to Hardship, Fortgetfulness, Starvation, Pains,
Battles, Quarrels, Murders, Manslaughters, Grievances, Stories (who are
liars), Disputations, Lawlessness, Ruin, and Oath.

I'd stick with eros as much as possible...

though (to do a little allegorical mythopoiesis of my own) Eros and Eris
were originally the same entity, split in half by the gods in jealous of
that Eros/Eris creature's power. To put it psychologically rather than
mythically, interpersonal relationships involve both mutual overlap and
mutual divergence. You can only try to maximize the one while minimizing the
other, but both (why not be mythical?) need libations. Or, as a soul song
from the early 70s put it, It's a thin line between love and hate.

The ancients got all this, though I don't know if they or we see the
conceptual and practical consequences of this intertwining all that well a
lot of the time. Often the most important things to focus on are the
unacknowledged and therefore uninternalized corollaries of basic statements
that everyone sees as obvious or even disprizes as trite. An example of an
ancient who treats love and hate together (there are tons of ancients and
recents who could be sworn in on the cultural witness-stand on this topic):
Theokritos, whose idyllia contain love-relationships of all kind from
(pardon the expression) idyllic to unrequited and painful and downright
embarrassing, and lots of bickering. All these became parts of a pastoral
genre or mode that many of the most powerful literary figures used as a
proiving ground early in the careers (as well as in other ways). 

Since you were talking about Goethe when I came in, there's his Hermann und
Dorothea, a Romanticized version of the idyll filtered through
eighteenth-century sentimental pastoral.

Back to editing....

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing-AT-nyu.edu or downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu



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