I have begun my morning by finishing the mounting of my Kyrgyz stamps, a strange monument to both beauty and fantasy as well as the total folly of any human endeavor and, amidst this utter folly, the constant pressure, often attaining the shove of physical force, of others trying to get one to think and do and value the same things as they do. In the midst of reading your letter, the vast and utter absurdity occurred to me of all the monuments to World War II that many of these ex-soviet republics memorialize in their stamps. The thought popped into my head,


      This was not even their war in any sense to many of them, and to those who were directly involved, it would have not even occurred were it not for the clash of personal egos disguised as world ordering ideologies. But the Kyrgyz? I once saw a picture of Tannu Tuvans, culturally and racially related if that really has a meaning, newly drafted into the Soviet Army when their country was noiselessly absorbed into the USSR in 1944. They looked extraordinarily miserable. I remembered the tales of travelers in the USSR that Russians never smiled, but these expressions were not of an everyday disagreement with life. They were tragic in the true sense of the word, forced to fight thousands of miles from their pastoral homeland of beautiful lakes and mountains and fabulous horses.

      And yet they too, the Tuvans, memorialized WWII in their stamps. And worse, like the Kazahks and Kyrgyz and Turkmens and Uzbeks and Tadjiks, they had their heroes they lauded still in their stamps of the great patriotic war. I am talking about great passionate commitment to a cause which one sacrificed one's life to, and yet that cause had nothing to do with them. Even if they were dedicated Communists, which I doubt considering Stalin’s policy toward nationalities (he exiled the Crimean Tartars and the Chechnyans to Central Asia and exterminated the Volga Germans), they were still fighting for someone else’s cause for no other reason than they were told to, forced to, just like we do every day. And this was not just a ‘going along with the whole deal’, this was done passionately and the heroic actions done with deliberate heroism.


         Nothing could more clearly illustrate Sartre’s dictum in B&N that ‘Man is a futile passion’, that hits the point so perfectly, despite the fact Heidegger despised glibness, bon mots, and Sartre as such. If such great effort and sacrifice is utterly futile, leaving nothing enduringly good behind at all  (if fact bringing in the existence of ‘good’), did Aeschylus view Orestes the same way, he who was punished justly by the gods for doing justice? One gets into a bind doing things like this. But that is also what Aeschylus did. He saw the bind and described it. Are the Tuvan dead less worthy to be memorialized for participating in an utterly pointless war? That makes me think of Achilles, simply at Troy since he too was drafted, fighting for a petty tyrant and greedy king, the cause of the war sordid. He was concerned with deciding between a long life or glory. He decided for the victory of hatred and despair, despite finding a common humanity in the grief of his enemy Priam. In one sense it was all for nothing. But in another sense it was all for nothing. I feel a difference but I do not understand one.

Richard:

I am not sure that the tragic hero has an overwhelming, even irrational passion to understand what the truth is, what he should do, and why he should do it, unless the *truth* is a metaphor for whatever quest the hero is on. Saving Private Ryan is a great example of a modern day myth, but using the same archetypal structure used by Homer and the authors of the Bible and Morte d’Arthur – namely the calling, the quest, the failure, the redemption, or similar stages of heroic activity. The Captain, Tom Hanks, was given the calling, one that he did not wish, but was compelled to follow. His success was rewarded by his own death, and that success is overwhelmed by his own tragedy – IMO. It is called sacrifice, and called that independent of the personal feelings of the Capitan; his actions were paramount, not his personal feelings in the matter. The myth would not be powerful had the Capitan lived and returned to his family and his life after the war. Today we see attempts on the part of those in power to create such myths when there is no evidenced of them at all. The young female solider, Jessica Lynch, who was alledgedly *rescued* from the Iraqi *insurgents* was called a hero. The football star, Pat Tillman, was called a hero before we found out that he was killed by friendly fire, and IMO he actually became a hero, or at least a tragic figure, because he was killed by friendly fire! Ancient myths had great longevity and, as Joseph Campbell so eloquently points out, they were truly universal across all cultures, because they were not created by a single voice, but grew out of human experience over time. I am not convinced that it is TRUTH that is the quest, but rather the acquiescence to a principle that may or may not be understood by the conscious mind.

Today mythology is no longer one of guiding forces of our lives. The moral fabric that was attached to the great myths of the past is frayed and weakened by the current God: science. The god filled heavens have been pierced by the telescope and the theories dealing with cosmic behavior. The morality supplied by the gods is now the morality of the individual human – at least in the secular West. As Joseph Campbell says: The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. Perhaps this economic-political organization appears to many of us as a depressing phenomenon because it has not satisfactorily replaced the sure-fire answers that myth and the gods supplied – and we have only ourselves in which to find meaning and value and only ourselves to blame for the direction of our lives – Pallas Athena can no long give us guidance.