LUCRETIUS, SAGE OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM, by Charles Carreon
I encountered Lucretius quite by accident one day, when I was killing time in opposing counsel's waiting room in a Portland high rise. Very fancy firm with a pale skinned, raven-tressed, black-Irish type gal with length in the legs and arms and hands posted behind the phone. Classy reading material, too. "The Roman Philosophers." Not to be paralyzed by the receptionist, I went to work reading this stuff by Lucretius, about how blood is life, and when you bleed you die, and how therefore your life substance is one with your blood. Good thinking, I thinks to myself, and puts the guy's name away at the back of my head. Years later, I get me a copy of Lucretius, and the guy's no disappointment. Check out the way he gets going, after doing the usual ass-kissing to the sovereign, the then-current Caesar, urging him to speed past the objections of Roman scribes and embrace freedom of thought:
"One thing that worries me is the fear that you may fancy yourself embarking on an impious course, setting your feet on the path of sin. Far from it. More often it is this very superstition that is the mother of sinful and impious deeds. Remember how at Aulis the altar of the Virgin Goddess was foully stained with the blood of Iphigineia by the leaders of the Greeks, the patterns of chivalry. The headband was bound about her virgin tresses and hung down evenly over both her cheeks. Suddenly, she caught sight of her father, standing sadly in front of the altar, the attendants beside him hiding the knife and her people bursting into tears when they saw her. Struck dumb with terror, she sank on her knees to the ground. Poor girl, at such a moment it did not help her that she had been first to give the name of father to a king. Raised by the hands of men, she was led trembling to the altar. Not for her the sacrament of marriage and the loud chant of Hymen. It was her fate in the very hour of marriage to fall a sinless victim to a sinful rite, slaughtered to her greater grief by a father's hand, so that a fleet might sail under happy auspices. Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by superstition."
As I read these words, I wanted to stand up and cheer, and also to avenge the blood of all the uselessly slaughtered virgins of humanity. So from small intentions do we undertake greater works. Lucretius is the prophet of good sense.
What sense, man, to torment yourself with thoughts of the afterlife when then you'll be dead, insensible, restored to the silence of earthly clay? Death, you idiot, is what we should look forward to when our daily troubles torment us. Someday this will end! It will be over, finished, done. So, on the other hand, you should enjoy what you can, because someday it will end. He grasps this ambivalence of good and bad, pleasure and pain, directly by the horns and does away with none of it. The best a guy can hope to do is clear all the dysfunctional, inhibiting, non-productive bullshit out of his skull. Then he can sit around with Lucretius and ask himself questions about how the hell physical images of reality can fly around in space and stick to your eyeball. (Lucretius versus modern knowledge of optical phenomena is not a pretty sight, but on the other hand, he hacks through with manful attitude.)
According to this here Penguin edition, translated very smoothly by Ronald Latham, Lucretius "must have been born soon after 100 B.C., and was probably already dead when his poem was given to the world in 55 B.C. Almost nothing is known about his life. He was a Roman citizen and a friend of Gaius Memmius, an eminent Roman statesman, and his poem was read and admired by Cicero. It is doubtful if there is any truth in the story preserved by St. Jerome and immortalized by Tennyson that he died by his own hand after being driven mad by a love philtre."
Starting off with a virgin sacrifice wasn't good enough for my man Lucretius, not by a sight. He's got to deal with some serious opposition, because Romans were the original heretic-hunters, you will recall all the unpleasantness with the Christians and the lions, well, with Jesus himself! 'Nuff said.
So he's steeling the sovereign for the blow of social disapproval:
"You yourself, if you surrender your judgment at any time to the blood-curdling declamations of the prophets, will want to desert our ranks. Only think what phantoms they can conjure up to overturn the tenor of your life and wreck your happiness with fear. And not without cause. For, if men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets. As it is, they have no power of resistance, because they are haunted by the fear of eternal punishment after death. They know nothing of the nature of the spirit. Is it born, or is it implanted in us at birth? Does it perish with us, dissolved by death, or does it visit the murky depths and dreary sloughs of Hades? Or is it transplanted by divine power into other creatures, as described in the poems of our own Ennius, who first gathered on the delectable slopes of Helicon an evergreen garland destined to win renown among the nations of Italy? Ennius indeed in his immortal verses proclaims that there is also a Hell, which is people not by our actual spirits or bodies but only by shadowy images, ghastly pale. It is from this realm that he pictures the ghost of Homer, of unfading memory, as appearing to him, shedding salt tears and revealing the nature of the universe.
I must therefore give an account of celestial phenomena, explaining the movements of sun and moon and also the forces that determine events on earth. Next, and no less important, we must look with keen insight into the makeup of spirit and mind: we must consider those alarming phantasms that strike upon our minds when they are awake but disordered by sickness, or when they are buried in slumber, so that we seem to see and hear before us men whose dead bones lie in the embraces of the earth."
Having previously noted that the Greeks were the ones who really gave us the nugget of the scientific method with their pragmatic discoveries, he returns again to that topic:
"I am well aware that it is not easy to elucidate in Latin verse the obscure discoveries of the Greeks. The poverty of our language and the novelty of the theme compel me often to coin new words for the purpose. But your merit and the joy I hope to derive from our delightful friendship encourage me to face any task however hard. This it is that leads me to stay awake through the quiet of the night, studying how by choice of words and the poet's art I can display before your mind a clear light by which you can gaze into the heart of hidden things."
That's Hallmark card language, children. Wine-glass droppin' language. "Gaze into the heart of hidden things." That's lovely.
Very tempting to want to see into what is hidden. Part of the appeal of pornography, and astronomy. I always say there are two unperishing sources of inspiration: the landscape and the nude. Of course, into the landscape we must include the star-scape. Take note that Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse, also created Omni, the first pop-sci mag that made graphics a staple. Now we've got a whole Discovery channel.
But as the inheritors of the great, articulated tradition of science, we are the pissed-off heirs who hate technology. And why not? It gave us the atom bomb, constant anxiety, an accelerating sense of white guilt, and cultural anomie. What's to be grateful for?
Well, for the excitement I felt as a kid when I walked around the great universities of the country. My Dad took me to Harvard yard when I was a kid, and to all manner of other higher education shrines. And you know what? It does rub off. I loved it. The atmosphere of freedom, of intelligence unbound, making its own rules. Sure, there's a little bit of fantasy there, too, but it's justified, for as Lucretius would exult, we are pulling ourselves up by ourselves. No gods are helping. No gods can pull us down. We make ourselves by our own hands and with our own minds and words.
What is mysteriously learned by priests through arcane methods that can only be understood by the cognoscenti is suspect. By the time a person is qualified to say, "I have seen the mystic vision and it is as the tradition describes it," they have undergone so much conditioning that they are fundamentally unreliable sources of information. And when, as today , most Eastern mystics admit they don't know it for themselves, but they're sure the traditional sources must be right, what warrant of reliability is that? If we're going to believe something, shouldn't it be verifiable?
Does the Buddhist appeal to "verify it yourself" hold water? Not in my opinion. If you try and verify this yourself in the traditional way, it'll take 20 years to find out they don't know what they're talking about, and you'll be as pissed off as Ambu to have invested all that time ( your youth) in a badly-designed experiment with yourself as the guinea pig. And little time left to design a new one!
If you try and verify it in an objective, analytical fashion, I don't think you'll be any more satisfied with the results than Steven Batchelor was. I can't say for sure what he does believe, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe what he was told, translated, and promulgated for years and years. And he's a pretty smart guy, certainly a lot smarter than the half-baked bagels that put him down. If he says the stuff doesn't pencil out in the logic department, I bet he didn't just make it up because he was tired of the smell of lamb stew and tsampa. He has legitimate objections. And nobody wants to hear them within the tradition. All of his years of scholarship are like rags in the gutter. He's an apostate, a backslider, not a respected critic. Most strict Vajrayanists wouldn't let him wash their socks. Which is why the idea that the lamas urge students to "check it out themselves" has no validity. It's a joiners religion.
So back to Lucretius, why not? Back to the dark of night, the light of day, the wetness of water and the heat of flame.