Book XVI of the Iliad ended with the death of Patroclus; Book XVIII will begin with Achilles’s learning of the death. Book XVII gives us the fight over the body.
Dogs in the shade on the beach in the waning summer
Why is a body so important? I can only observe that a belief in its importance is something that keeps warriors fighting.
It is the story of Icarus. A man gets wings, flies too high, and is burned. Icarus is Patroclus, the wings are Achilles’s armaments, and flying too high is assaulting the very walls of Troy.
Kocabey Mosque, Şavşat, Artvin
That is the simple story of Book XVI of the Iliad. The book also contains a puzzle: why does Achilles let Patroclus to fight in his place?
After a year, I return to reading the Iliad on the Asian mainland of Turkey. I am opposite Lesbos, south of Mount Ida, where in the last episode, Juno seduced Jove, so that he would not see Neptune’s interference on behalf of the Greeks, in the war down at Troy.
We were here in July, but my mind then was on mathematics, including mathematics coming out of my April post here, “Elliptical Affinity.” I went on to speak of this mathematics in two other countries, one of these the homeland of Medea. In the other one, I was moved to write a blog post concerning the book I had already written a lot about here in Altınova, Ayvalık, Balıkesir. Now Ayşe and other Peace Academics are being cleared of charges, our fall semester does not begin till October, and we can spend time at the beach.
Twelve Apostles, a former Armenian church, now a mosque, in Kars
This concludes the series that began with “An Indictment” and continued with “A Defense.”
Ayşe and Meriç her lawyer
A human being was once a man. A female of the species was a wife; a male, a were. The latter appeared in werewolf, but also were-eld, which became our world. Our woman comes from wife-man.
That is roughly the history, which I shall review later in a bit more detail. It would be a fallacy to think the history told us how we must use the words “woman” and “man” today. The history does suggest what may happen again: in a world dominated by men, a word like “person,” intended for any human being, may come to have its own meaning dominated by men. Yet again, this is no reason not to try to make our language better.
We may speculate, and it is interesting that we do speculate, because I think the questions do not ultimately make sense—not the sense that seems to be intended anyway, whereby something can be got for nothing.
View from Şavşat
“Some theorists have equated causality with manipulability,” according to the Wikipedia article on the former subject. Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics (1940) is one of four cited sources; a fifth, by James Woodward, is cited later. Woodward himself cites the same five sources in his article “Causation and Manipulability” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Collingwood’s Essay is the earliest of these sources.
“We are beginning an inquiry into civilization,” writes Collingwood, “and the revolt against it which is the most conspicuous thing going on at the present time.” The time is the early 1940s.
After Descartes gave geometry the power of algebra in 1637, a purely geometrical theorem of Apollonius that is both useful and beautiful was forgotten. This is what I conclude from looking at texts from the seventeenth century on.
This is a preliminary report on two recent films:
The report is preliminary, not because there is going to be another, but because I have seen each film only once, and I may see one of them again. I remember that François Truffaut liked to see films at least twice. I would guess that I read this in The Washington Post, in an appreciation published when Truffaut died; however, he died on October 21, 1984, during the first semester of my sophomore year in Santa Fe, when I would not have been reading the Post. While in college, I did enjoy seeing some films twice, or a second time; Truffaut’s own 400 Coups was an example, a French teacher having shown it to us in high school.
The two films that I am reviewing concern young adults trying to find their own way in the world, in defiance of their elders. We all have to do this. In every generation, some will do it more defiantly than others. Heraclitus can be defiant, he of Ephesus and thus one of the Ionian philosophers, whose spirit I imagine to haunt the Nesin Mathematics Village. A further reason to bring up Heraclitus will be—gold.
Eva Brann, The Logos of Heraclitus, on Marmara Island, July, 2012
