I.D. Greeks 0009

Dear Jud,

Thanks for the encouragement! I am fundamentally trying to change my ways of thinking of things and approaching life in general, ridiculous as that may seem at my age when my opinions are supposed to be fixed. I thought I could get away from the pretentiousness and egotism of writing. But unless I write, I cannot think. This is just empirical. Maybe I can get away from it. But for now i cannot. I am trying to take thinking into the pure world of play which, following the path of Abhinavagupta -- religion, philosophy, literature -- would be the next authentic step. And real children do not try to 'preserve' their games. And in true traditional oral poetic culture law, morality, religion, and philosophy were mere aspects and element of play-acting, performance. Maybe in the fully oral stages of the ILIAD, the ODYSSEY and the Indian MAHABHARATA, which Gregory Nagy -- a truly magnificent intellect in many ways superior to Heidegger -- and his heroes Emile Benveniste and Georges Dumezil constantly compare, the absolute aspect of play as a superior value to religion, morality, philosophy, and the high-caste status of 'literature' that became fixed as such in writing -- or to express it better, the absolute aspect of play in performance show such mere things to be tools and skills of the performing bard. This is obviously a bedrock difference of evaluation as such between oral and written culture. In early Greek culture, the conflict between these two opposite and violently antagonistic ways of thinking is obvious in the totally unsynthesizable values of "Nothing in excess" and the hubris so valued by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War (best exemplified by "the Melos Dialogue" in Thucydides) and Alexander the Great who literally worshipped the written text of the ILIAD and its hero of total excess Achilles, an excess called out and defined by his competition with fate and death. In Aristotle, "the golden mean" reflects the first value from oral culture while his incredible desire to comprehend absolutely everything reflects an unrelenting hubris. However, the motives and the meaning of Aristotle's 'hubris' are worth a deeper examination because it is not a simple desire for earned immortality. And one must also keep in mind the play aspect throughout Plato's dialogues that is so confusing to us in a fully written culture, and also remember when he died they found a copy of the plays of Aristophanes underneath his pillow.

All of this I am slowly discovering in learning more about Navajo and other so-called American 'indian' cultures (there are no such things as indians -- a Navajo thinks such a concept a product of the "belaanga," the naive white man, but that can be turned around as I may discuss in the future). The point is, just as the magnificence and grandeur of the ILIAD and MAHABHARATA (their huge lengths preserved in segments actually, but segments that fit together) could be preserved in memory, a memory intended purely for performance and NOT reproduction, as well as -- to a large degree -- the early lyric poets and so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers, so Navajo culture has also preserved a huge 'literature' in memory with clearly present philosophical structures I am just beginning to learn about. But, unlike the Greeks who had their own independent and relatively isolated culture, they have had no desire to put things down in writing because writing is purely a white man's 'thing.' And their culture is not independent like the Greeks because it has become formed in many ways by continuous conflict with the white man. Even the illiterate 'bards' of the Navajo are constantly conscious of the white man's way of thinking and naming things that intrudes unwelcome into their culture, but is a fact of life they have to live with. THAT THEY LIVE WITH IT, though, is a specific aspect of Navajo philosophy. Other 'indian' cultures like the Pueblos utterly reject as far as they can outside influence. Anthropologists are relatively well welcomed by the Navajo but the anthropologist's desire to "preserve" their culture is met with ambiguous feelings by the Navajo, running the range from complete co-operation to total non-co-operation based on the philosophy, "If our culture as it really is, is going to die without being preserved in the white man's way instead of the Navajo way by memory and oral performance, then it should die." Whereas an anthropologist approaching the Pueblos, I'm sure with some exceptions, is relatively lucky to be noticed enough to be told to go away instead of being regarded as totally invisible. This is reflected in a great many books on Navajo literature AND PHILOSOPHY, all written by white people, whereas only a few books have been written about the same subjects about the Zuni pueblo people and, as far as my near total ignorance can find, none about the Pueblo culture as such. And, of course even in the United States, all these books are almost totally ignored by 'serious' literary and philosophical scholars for much the same reason Gregory Nagy complains bitterly about the unwillingness of classical scholars to seriously study the results of linguistic, anthropological, and archeological results pertinent to the culture they supposedly value.

Now, in all of this are immense gaps of total ignorance, incorrect judgments, and serious misinterpretations. I realize I am trying to cover far too much that I have little to no real knowledge of. But then no one else seems to be doing it. It is not, though, a simple minded denunciation of Western white’s mans’ arrogance and overweening power. It seems everyone else in the world desperately desires this part or that part of “the white man’s way” while thinking that, in the main, they can still preserve the core of their own culture. But this way of thinking is still fundamentally defined by the supreme value of “success” and its always wanting even more than “success,” that accomplished success is old and useless history since we desperately need new successes, that only unattained success is the only necessary value and goal. It is the difference between wanting only what is sufficient – which can actually turn into a thinking of wanting less and less – versus wanting the maximum possible which is open ended and limitless. As Tony Hillerman has two of his characters say:

City Navajo: “I don’t want to live in poverty.”

Reservation Navajo: “What you mean by poverty?”

Poverty is a white man’s concept, and on the reservation where “indian lovers” and “liberals” think Navajos live in desperate and unacceptable poverty, the reservation Navajo thinks they live in “hozo,” harmony in the midst of overwhelming beauty outside their front door. In this they are fundamentally different from the Pueblos they live next to and have borrowed culturally from to some extent because, as opposed to the Pueblos that lived all closely packed together in a thorough going community in some ways resembling socialism, the Navajo is extremely solitary, sometimes living with just their most immediate family, many times living totally by themselves in what we would call the middle of nowhere. That is extremely simplistic and it is much more complicated that that. However, such a structure is real, in place, and working in its broad outlines that makes “Indian Affairs” people and those who want to ‘improve’ their condition tear out their hair and in general freak out and eventually say they are just stupid Indians, walk away and leave them to their unenviable fate. Which, of course, is exactly what the want – or they would leave the reservation. They do have a clear choice which is clearly and repeatedly offered them time and time again so one might actually suppose they know exactly what they are doing.