Attempting to draw & instill universal, personal lessons from poetry 500, 1000, 2000 years removed from our social-economic context is a positivist habit dedicated to the idea that all of history must be accessible, individual and understandable. The Iliad etc etc is insoluble from its historical context, its 'lessons' are inseparable from structures of power long since submerged in a wine dark sea. Ignore the bourgeois lie that the primary purpose of all literature is to Teach YOU Lessons
@abraxas it's a grim neurosis. i would be glad to be rid of it
@abraxas wine-dark sea is one of my favorite epithets for many reasons...
Godddd remember that dumb theory about Mass Greek Colorblindness. Also how nobody could figure out what type of 'water' was needed for Roman Concrete when it was listed as 'literally obviously just water'
Language is such an interesting thing. Idk where I was going with this but u make gud posts and I am thinking and looking at them.
@KC that color blindness shit is so insane, the idea that applying recent diagnoses to an entire peninsula of people who lived thousands of years ago instead of just understanding that they had an entirely, materially different relationship to color and art is so insane and wild to me I hate it
@abraxas I KNOWWW its like a mass "well ackshually the dictionary says THIS word means THIS SPECIFICALLY. The DSM-69 says that you're wrong and I'm ignoring the fact that an arbitrary manual even gets updated and overwritten" as if it's the one and only eternal truth that ever was. Bourgeois braincolonizer singletrack perception brainrot.
I'm going to paint academia winedark with <redacted>
Attempting to throw literature in a blender in some attempt to extract Universal lessons, in fact, severely hampers our capacity to Enjoy the art, to Appreciate it. The power in Homer, in ancient poetry, in prose dating to the dawn of the capitalist epoch, is In their contexts, in their relationships to the masonry of history it would be foolish to pry them from. The power of images, their capacity to invoke feeling, are fundamentally wedded to (understanding) the contexts that produced them.