How Many Ships Does It Take To Get To Troy?
There is a section in the Iliad that is very easy to skim over, since for over four hundred lines of verse it simply lists the armies of the Achaeans and the armies of the Trojans. We read of the Boeotian units led by Leitus and Penelos, the men of Argos and Tiryus, the “great spearman Idomeneas,” the Cephallenians led by Odysseus; as well as Ascanius, who is “strong as a god;” Nastes, who led the wild Carians, “with barbarous tongues;” the burly-hearted Pylaemenes – you get the idea. A lot of names, some recognizable, many not. The ancients seem fascinated by these lists (sometimes called epic catalogues), a fascination which, for us, often makes for mind-numbing literature.
We can guess as to what it is about lists that appealed to the ancient mind. For one, in an oral culture a list provided a convenient way to remember those things that were considered worth remembering. A list of heroes, for example. The names above surely had a more familiar ring to the native ear. And there were probably patterns that were used recurrently that, like the pledge of allegiance, could be recited by the average schoolboy on his way to the gymnasium. As certain patterns of names and achievements became standard and renowned, these patterns may have assumed the characteristics of a baseball line-up, by which young boys could proudly show off their knowledge of the “stats.” (“You know, Heracles’ son Tlepolemus led nine ships out of Rhodes, which can be divided into three island divisions – Lindos, Ialysus, and Camirus.”)
But lists meant more to the ancients than intellectual prowess; heroes were not remembered simply to display one’s mental capacity. The reason such things were worth remembering is that they contained the founding mythologies of the culture, with which the people identified themselves and thereby found mutual ground with the others in their society. In a common culture these lists provided stability and order.
Lists are able to bring about such confidence because lists are “sure things.” There is a sense of totality in a list; it’s a package of information that can be easily grasped. When someone writes a shopping list, he or she seeks to identify every item that will be purchased at the store. The list is planned, organized, and rearranged if needed. It’s efficient and clean. There may even be bullet-points. The list-maker explores a topic with the purpose of finding completion. This tendency for order may be called Classical – an adjective with countless usages, one of which describes the habit for creating systems and models, devices for encapsulating and understanding knowledge.
Perhaps lists are out of fashion because we are now of a more Romantic sensibility: loving the boundless, the unknown, and the subjective. In general, lists have given way to sequences in our aesthetic preferences. A sequence, like a list, presents related information; yet, unlike a list, a sequence tends not to be “closed.” It is the nature of a sequence to suggest something more, because a sequence is only a part. Something came before and there is probably something after. A sequence is incomplete, and we like it that way. (Go through some emails; I wonder if the ellipsis has ever been in use as much as it is now.)
We’re hesitant to make lists and all-inclusive systems because, well, we’ve seen so many proven wrong. No matter how much aesthetic satisfaction Aristotle’s universe gives us, it was wrong. There are problems with the Medieval model, Newton’s clockwork, Darwin’s progress, and Einstein’s relativity. With so many systems failing, we’re not only afraid to do some tinkering, we’re also afraid to rebuild.
Sequences, at least, can satisfy us because they provide a nice compromise. In them we see some order, but to understand them as a sequence, we must also understand that we are not seeing the whole. There are some who would like to do away with sequences altogether because they believe that nothing is connected – rather than write sonnet sequences, they throw words in the air and let them fall randomly. But for the most part, people make do with limited knowledge and are content to be, as they say, none the wiser. This does not mean that the acceptance of limited knowledge prohibits a continual search for knowledge.
This is another aspect of the sequence: to explore a topic, as an artist might explore one scene, knowing that the sequence alone will not exhaust the topic. Cézanne painted Mont Ste.-Victoire from every angle except a God’s eye view, early indications of the subjective explorations of the Cubists. In his method, Cézanne made no pretense of seeing more than he saw, but that did not keep him from looking and trying to see as much as he could. Whatever Cézanne’s philosophical assumptions were, his approach to Mont Ste.-Victoire suggests an awareness of Faustian hubris as well as a love of what knowledge is attainable.
I do not mean to suggest that our ancient forebears were blindly audacious. On the contrary, they were certainly wary of hubris — they invented the concept. Their world was full of the unknown, so their lists provided some security. And even now that we’ve charted the globe as well as the heavens, we’ve found that some things we thought we knew were not as they first appeared. Our job, then, is to keep looking. How far we can go is for us to discover. Still, we may at times want to pursue some stability.
