Was definitely up for the taking but I would not get involved with someone who checked herself in and out of a mental hospital even though she was the sexiest, most perfectly alabaster skinned redhead, with everything about her looks drawing perfectly rendering images of the fragile, perfect dawn. If I could resist that, I could resist anything. And now I’m thinking through Scylla and Charybdis to Odysseus to Aeneas to Virgil to why I can’t tell if Virgil could write well or not because I never trusted my Latin well enough to develop my own sense of style, and thus can’t rank the writers. Let’s see if I can’t construct an image of my Latin preferences as I was unable to accept them those many years ago. I preferred Caesar’s bluntness because that was the appropriate style, but I found Virgil’s metaphors to be similarly blunt and that doesn’t fit poetry to me. The voices did come through: Catullus read ‘aesthete’, which I assume meant gay as it has through the centuries, while Horace read soberly moralistic without being moralistic at all because he knows you can’t furl your sails when the favoring wind blows too strong, without setting to sea, that you can’t moderate yourself without trying, and yes the highest tree is more likely to be hit by lightning but it grew as a tree grows. This is something I found almost unique to Roman culture: the idea that you owe a duty to become what you can become, both for your benefit and for the benefit of Rome, because you are what you are and you must be what you are. A full Roman life achieves balance by being mens sana in corpore sano, which is Juvenal, so you aren’t either too in love with luxury or too in love with self-denial.
The question is whether this comes from Judaism or entered Judaism from Rome. Hard question because I have to think about when this characteristic entered Judaism: was it in there all along or did it arise? Or did both come out of the common ancestor which teaches ‘don’t kill your children’ to one people and, oh, the other comes out of the Iphingenia bifurcation, where some versions have goddess Artemis substituting a deer so it becomes the female side of the Abraham/Isaac story. The Artemis version roots creation in nature, so the goddess nature substitutes the sacrifice. The Abraham version abstracts this to an angel of the un-nameable God who represents the father stepping through the mother to the son. The other count is harder: Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are the parents but the actor is Agamemnon and it makes explicit the notion that others impose on you the belief you must sacrifice a child. In the Abraham story, this abstracts to a voice. The comparison makes clear that Abraham hears the same voices and he believes them, so he is prepared to sacrifice though it is bleeping horrible – the story ramps up the horror by having this be the only child of theirs AND he sent away his other son with Hagar so this would be punishing Sarah for having removed Ishmael, meaning somehow that removing Isaac would punish Sarah for what she made Abraham do to Hagar and Ishmael, as though that makes sense. It should not make sense because its way worse than cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
This suggests to me the unbifurcated stories are older or deeper, but it’s possible they combine two threads that pre-existed and appear to be the source but are instead a later synthesis. Don’t know. I also think that means there appears to be a bifurcation at Abraham, meaning I’m unaware of the idealization of the name containing human sacrifice so I think the name idea comes out at that general time in story. This resolves pretty well if I think of the Iphigenia dies story and the Isaac dies story as connecting except the Isaac dies story isn’t told because the Abraham tradition starts a new story line as it ties to the un-nameable God concept and the abstraction away from the female and nature metaphors.
I’m having trouble identifying a spot where the male and female diverged. I can see the Vedic equivalent – same era? – in Shatapatha Brahmana 13.6.2, which tells the story of human sacrifice being interrupted by a voice. The connection between Judaism and Hinduism is really deep, which may sound odd because Hinduism names everything, but it names them multiple ways over so one begins with a label and chases it around and around, like I described with Thali. Judaism has trouble seeing the similarity even though all the stories about God are a bunch of labels chasing around in different contexts. They seem to me to be the most universal in reach.
jomi: playing with perception 