Onlycarrion - Only The

Lily Gatins

Rare photos of the Capital of Palestine in 1920 which is 28 years before the born of the Israeli occupation

To restate it–my general theory of history (ok, it’s more like my general hunch of history)–is that all apparent social progress is made as our civilization gets better at processing its trauma, bc cycles of violence/trauma/childrearing (and the normalization of these things) largely explain why the past so often seems so inhumanly violent to us–public executions, chattel slavery, massacres, etc, etc.

And there are people in this day and age who nonetheless glorify those days–the thing that got me reading acoup’s series on Sparta was his series on the Fremen Mirage, the illusion (delusion?) so often received in pop-history and in books like Starship Troopers that there’s this distinction between ““““decadent”““ non-militarized, peaceful societies and “morally pure” societies (militarily strong societies, i.e., societies that have value bc they are good at generating and exporting violence)

And–and I’m just spitballing here, I have very little evidence to back this up–I suspect that if you scratch contemporary subcultures where that kind of idolization of a militarized past occurs, where the atrocities–not even the atrocities in service of some cause, just the senseless, pointless, stupid violence–of societies like Rome and Sparta get brushed under the rug, you will find subcultures where people are much more traumatized than elsewhere by abusive, authoritarian, and outright violent upbringings, where the correlation of “authority figure” and “source of shame and pain” is much, much tighter.

Because if you are raised in, or still live in, a shitty, abusive environment, there are two ways you can deal with this: either you can say, this is awful, this is monstrous, no one should have to live like this (and if you do, so much the worse if the whole world is like that, or if it feels like the whole world is like that, because it is painful indeed to look at the world and think ‘oh my, it is full of pain and injustice and there is nothing I can do about it’), or “well, there’s a reason for all this misery.” The reason is ‘because it makes us stronger.’ Or the reason is ‘because it makes us more morally pure.’ Or the reason is ‘because God (or Lycurgus, or Odin, or the Emperor) commanded it.’ Sometimes–at least for some people–the worst possible outcome is that your suffering would have no meaning. It’s not just “well, I had to endure this, so why shouldn’t they?” Or rather, it is, but the core of that sentiment is, “how come I had to suffer?” and the desperate hope that, well, as long as other people are suffering, too, your suffering must have some kind of meaning. That’s Just The Way The World Is, After All. What’s the other possibility? You got fucked over, for no reason?

Sometimes when I’m reading about history, especially in its grimmer parts, I have this momentary feeling–not much more than a fleeting mental image, really. It’s an image of every human being since the dawn of time, as the tiny child we all once were at some stage, groping desperately in the dark for a way to understand the world we were dumped into. But we’re all, in one way or another, still one of those tiny children, with all that entails: a deep deficiency of understanding, a certain inescapable impatience and hotheadedness, cooperative creatures which nonetheless have a terrible fear of pain. In such a world, it feels like the only reasonable response is to try to cultivate a neverending source of compassion within oneself, to try to be as patient as possible with others, who are often just as alone and afraid as we are. After all, it’s what I hope they would do for me.

ibã huni kuin + ronaldo fraga in art in fashion: masp renner (2024)

Michaela Stark by Raga Munecas

- 2024

stalled

Sculpture by Ryo Arai

Where would you suggest someone begins looking in order to fully understand the scope and breadth of Milton's Paradise Lost? I've started pursuing the bible, and some classical texts (Ovid, Virgil, Homer & Hesiod), but I feel like I'm still missing the mark with it. It is such a beautiful and rich text, and I would love to be able to enjoy it fully, so any help pointing me in the right direction would be very greatly appreciated.

yeah Paradise Lost is a strange thing (strange and unorthodox even in its day) and it takes some time and work—you’re not going to grasp all of it immediately. 

first, you need to understand Milton’s politics: this is the era of the English Civil War (see Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire (ebook) or Purkiss’, The English Civil War: A People’s History), and Milton is a public writer with powerful republican convictions, knee-deep in pamphlet wars and controversy. when Milton begins to write PL, it’s nine years after an English king was executed by his subjects, and a Commonwealth declared. Milton agrees to support that “republic”, even though the rule of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, contradicts his beliefs. but the republic collapses—in 1660, the son of the executed king is restored to the throne, and Milton goes into hiding. readers have endlessly debated what kind of shadow this casts over PL—whether God is a tyrant and Satan a republican revolutionary (e.g. Bryson’s The Tyranny of Heaven), or God the only legitimate monarch there could ever be and Satan a pretender to His throne (Achinstein’s Literature and Dissent).

also, Milton’s theology is strange and nuanced, sometimes unorthodox and heretical, and indivisible from his politics. the vitality of freedom, free will and thought and action, goes through all his work—the chapter on Milton’s theodicy in the Cambridge Companion to Milton (pdf) is good on this. (it’s helpful to have Genesis of the KJV open side-by-side with it, because Milton is constantly echoing/adapting/transforming its words and verses).

as for the poetry itself—on the page it can look daunting, because Milton’s compound sentences seem to reach on forever, but it’s written in very clear iambic pentameter, blank verse—the same stuff as Shakespeare—and the five-beat rhythm goes through its lines like a blood-beat, it’s wonderful spoken aloud (like this, Satan’s speech from Book I). you want a good edition with comprehensive footnotes (like the Norton Critical Edition or Longman Annotated), and you have to take it slowly—it’s beautiful beautiful poetry, but it’s so dense, it’s doing so much all at once. pay attention to the texture of it, the alliterative and consonant and assonant sounds (because those are also joining characters and ideas together). 

there’s a gigantic critical tradition, and you can wade into that as much or as little as you like. the “Satanic” controversy is something you’ll have to wrestle with by book IX (to me, Romantic views of Satan as tragic hero are bad and should feel bad because they fall for what Milton was doing with the devil hook line and sinker and don’t know it). you could look at Kolbrener’s Milton’s Warring Angels, Rumrich’s MIlton Unbound, Fish’s Surprised By Sin, Raymond’s Milton’s Angels, Martin’s Milton and Gender and The Ruins of Allegory, Purkiss’ Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War, Leonard’s Naming in Paradise. darkness visible is also a brilliant resource.