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It is a long standing tradition that writers and the melancholy -and the two are often combined in the same human- turn to literature in times of mournful need. I know that I certainly do it, and if my preferred depression-times reading features rather more graphic novels than pretentious poetry, the works of Pratchett instead of Wordsworth, the point is still the same. Human creative endeavour has a way of easing the most painful of periods.
Except. Except when one’s mood, one’s sad song of oneself, is not created by the events of life, but instead by tiny monsters in the brain. One can read as many adventures of first-Sergeant-later-Captain-later-Duke Vimes as one wishes, but disease is a twisted, horrible thing that no amount of escapism can cure.
I generally avoid this sort of personal blather on For I Have tasted the Fruit, as it is generally more suited to the emocracy of Livejournalstan. Yet I wish to speak about it here. Here, I discuss everyone’s favourite medieval period, and regularly -well, back when my posts were regular- translate medieval and occasionally classical poetry. And the sentiments expressed in many of my favourite Anglo-Saxon pieces are, one would think, perfectly suited to this sort of mood.
The murnende mod of the woman in Wulf and Eadwacer; the weeping poet who laments the fall of the great past in The Ruin; the sea-weary soul of The Seafarer, with his ice-and-rain-soaked birds of prey: these are powerful images, powerful pieces of poetry, and one would think, expect, that reading them would make one’s own problems seem distant or petty- or, at the least, offer the consolation that such emotions are part of the broad spectrum of human experience.
I am sure that they do. Perhaps bound editions of the more misery-wracked of our period’s poetry could be bound and offered to depressives in psych wards. Read The Wanderer and appreciate loneliness, or Wulf and Eadwacer to help cope with abusive, ambiguous relationships. Unfortunately, when a key source of one’s stress is the very act of studying the period, one can stare at these carefully constructed words all day… and all one gets in return is a sense of growing unease.
I have not been able to write in months. I cannot remember the last time I set fingers to keys for anything longer than a status update- this post is approaching four hundred words, and the effort required to write it is exhausting. I am posting it today, a Monday, because the theme is so very medieval. I constantly find myself wondering- did Bede feel this kind of exhausted despair? Did Boethius? Is one of the much-vaunted ‘consolations’ of philosophy that it keeps one focused and energised? Because I have to say, as much as I try, my own scholarly efforts make me feel weak and inept, not focused and sharp.
Perhaps it is the summer. For all the misery some of the old English poets expressed, for all the hardship the icy-feathered eagle must endure, at least they did not have to survive the heat of Australia’s most hateful season.
The northern half of my country seems to be under water. For the first few days of the crisis, I thought it was fairly minor- maybe the basement of the house my mother and step-father own was under water, or a friend couldn’t get to the airport to get home from his holiday. Annoying and expensive, but nothing that concerned me.
Then I found out that towns I knew as a kid were under water. That the area in which my friend was had less fresh food daily.
Then yesterday, the city in which I spent six and a half years was flooding- worse than it had for a very, very long time. Friends of mine were mostly alright, although a woman I love dearly has been evacuated and other friends are isolated in their homes or have their suburbs cut off from the rest of Brisbane. That sort of thing is damn painful to deal with, even if everyone seems to be fine.
But it’s all okay! Because Justin Bieber is on the case- he mentioned Queensland in passing to the Almighty. ‘Sall gonna be good, now!
Dozens are dead, more are missing, and there are millions of dollars in damages and shattered lives- but some pre-teen kid has told his invisible friend about it. Awesome.
If anyone would like to do something helpful, the Queensland government has a page full o’ links right here.
This is another retroactive post, written from the future. I really need to stop doing this. I am writing just before one am on the seventh of June, but this post is destined for the fourth. While I am here, I really ought to come clean: I have had writer’s block. I have a plan, and have been percolating this paper in my head for a solid week now- and yet I cannot write. I sit down to write, and nothing comes forth. I scrawl plans and make notes and then stare at the blank page and sigh, and mutter about doing it tomorrow, and watch television on my computer. I do not blog, because if I can blog, I can write, and then I feel guilty about two things, and then it piles and piles and leans and–
enough. I think you understand why I missed today’s post. Not to worry, because it is here now.
I was poking around the internet trying to look up the poem intended for this coming Wednesday (9/6), and stumbled upon the Linguistics Research Centre at the University of Texas. Not only did I find the text I was looking for -and a reference to an edition I preferred- but it also turns out that the LRC has several online courses for early Indo-European languages! Such joy I felt!
There are texts for Old Irish, and Old English, Old French, Latin, Classical and New Testament Greek. Oh, it is wonderful. University quality teaching, for free, online, with easy access for all. I wish I had found this site earlier. Even more exciting, the texts are not limited to those I just listed, oh no. One can find online tutorials for Latin or Classical Greek or Old Norse all over the internet.
No, the best aspect about this site are the languages no-one ever expects to see on the internet: Tocharian, the easternmost of all Indo-European languages. I had not even heard of this until I studied Old Irish last year. Old Church Slavonic! It takes all my willpower not to try learning this immediately. Hittite- again, until last year I had assumed that Hittite was an Semitic language. There are several others as well, if your language interests are better met by other distant cousins on the Indo-European family tree.
I could only be happier if Classical Hebrew and Finnish were on the site as well, but they are not IE languages- and besides, we must not be greedy. Not with all this treasure heaped before us, ready for an intellectual feast. The site includes the beginnings of an Indo-European Lexicon for those of you who (like myself) love to know the origins of things.
I wish I were able to be more coherent in this post, to say something insightful. Yet all I can do is stare at this website, and mutter about essays which are due, a thesis still to research and write, and languages I am already studying to understand. “Here,” I say instead, “share my pleasure in the dead tongues spoken by extinct cultures.”
In the past few weeks, I have touched on why I am not a member of various religions. I imagine it is a theme to which I will return over time, as there are an awful lot of religions and I only looked at a small handful in detail before deciding to call myself an atheist. Problem is, everyone to whom the term is mentioned seems to have a different opinion as to what that entails. Some seem under the impression that ‘atheist’ means ‘one who knows with certainty that there is no God, or gods’. Others take it to mean ‘one who does not worship any gods’, or ‘does not believe in’ the aforementioned. [Those are two different things, as I hope you see.] Some appear to think ‘atheist’ means only ravening creatures bent on destroying all civilisation- starting with churches, and ending with political and social institutions. The possible interpretations go on.
It’s an impossible sell for me to define a single definition to which we can all agree. Dawkins attempts it in The God Delusion, but many critics of the affirmative atheist movement have not even read the book to disagree with his actual definition. Instead, they choose to voice their complaints against whichever definition for the word is constructed between their temples. So the discussion below should be taken as limited to conversations here, with the understanding that debate may alter certain nuances. Words are fluid things.
1) Atheism refers to an absence of ‘theism’, believe in one or more gods. ‘God’ is itself poorly defined, but here we may as well stick with something like this: ‘a god is a being which exists in a posited state beyond or above the reach of natural laws (supernatural), usually personified, but not always.’ A theist believes in one or more of these. An atheist does not.
2) Certainly there are probably atheists who will state that there is absolutely not, and could never be one or more gods, no doubt about it. I have yet to meet one. Dawkins notes a scale of 1-7, with 1 being absolute certainty there are god/s, and 7 being absolute certainty there are not. He places himself at something approaching 6.9; I would do the same.
In short, there is always a small possibility that we are wrong. The simple matter is that the possibility is something close to the odds that there are Mars Bar farms growing under the Antarctic ice. Not worth worrying about.
2a) ‘God’ is often used as a shorthand for ‘supernatural bollocks.’ I am not particularly an exception to that, and I include other supernatural phenomena in the definition. A belief in spellcraft, a soul, the ability to read minds, or what have you, can replace every instance of ‘god’ or ‘gods’ in the above. One need not be a theist to believe such things, of course. There are undoubtedly many who do not worship god/s who still believe in the ability to change the world with a magic wand.
My point is this: an ‘atheist’ is someone who would place any such supernatural phenomena on the 6.9 of their belief scale.
Tower of Babel Depiction, 14thC
3) So far this means we have defined an atheist as someone who a) does not believe in god/s but b) still has room for doubt. What then is the difference between ‘atheism’ and ‘agnosticism’? This is trickier. Technically speaking, the definition offered thus far actually is agnosticism. This has been pointed out to me before.
So far as I am concerned, the difference is a matter of degrees. Those who proclaim themselves agnostic tend to have a substantial amount of room for doubt, coming somewhere on a 5 or 6 on the scale mentioned above. They do not actively believe in god/s, but are not as generally skeptical as someone who calls herself an atheist.
This is certainly not always the case. I have encountered agnostics who would probably agree with me regarding deities, but prefer to be more linguistically and philosophically exact. I have absolutely no problem with that, and being technically correct wins you awards in my book. Good for you.
When I use the term in this blog, I shall probably be referring to those around a 5 or 6 on the god-belief scale. Self-proclaimed agnostics who use the term to be philosophically pure have my respect.
5) Probably one of the more important things to note is that not all atheists are activists. I rather imagine that there are a lot of people out there who have long since stopped believing in gods, that priests can turn wine into blood, or that charms cure snakebite. Not all of them blog, or harass the letters staff of newspapers, or march in protests against the pope.
One side effect of the affirmative atheist movement has been to paint the term ‘atheist’ with a brush that says ‘likes to argue about religion’. I know that is true for me, because I do like to argue about religion, very much. Yet it in no way is true about all -or necessarily many- atheists. This is something that needs to be addressed, to encourage more of us to publicly admit we do not believe in gods or saints or superstition. One can not believe without having to make a fuss about it.
So, how is this for a definition for now?
An atheist is one who doubts the existence of a god, or gods, or any such supernatural creature or power, to such an extent that it merits effectively no concern in her daily life. If given a 7-point scale of unbelief, where 1 is certainty of such supernatural things, and 7 is certainty of none she would place herself at 6.9 or higher, with 7 being extremely rare. An atheist need not be an anti-religious activist.
For the purposes of this definition, ‘supernatural’ is defined as being beyond or above the reach of natural laws. God/s are beings which exist in such a state, and are usually personified.
Criticism is not only welcomed, but mandatory.
