Like an ancient statue of marble,
She was sitting there alone, noble;
Like a flower soaked in crimson waters,
She was drowning deep in Rivers of Fears;
Like a fairy ogled by an eager ogre so foul,
She was seeking a niche to save her soul
Chased by terrors of the repulsive with a howl
Until she cried out loud, “Artemis! Save Me!”
Then was heard no more, seen no more, but a tree
High and solitary like a statue once sitting there.
I am awake – I know I dream not,
Making every image in seeing real
The fancy of the mind I know for aught,
Riding on a train of thoughts by a mile.
When I dream – I think myself awake,
Seeing things in fantasy of the obscured mind
Buried in the vales of decaying senses at stake,
Gliding on a Flying Carpet overlooking the world.
For my dreams are impertinent when unguided
By the consciousness of reality – Law of Reason –
Pulling the reins of Rational Truth in on the mystified,
Hunting out the causes of the Revolt against Reason.
P.S: I wrote this poem upon reading “You and Your Dream” by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in which the philosopher assessed the nature of /evidence of supernatural sights and other related matters. So in a way, this is my review on his essay, which I thought would be interpreted better in poetry based on its subject matter and the impressions it evoked.
The Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece’s First Advanced Civilization by Charles River Editors
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Before Homer wrote about the fearless warriors and extraordinary heroes enshrined in the temples of the Olympians in Iliad and The Odysseys, there were a people of invincible spirits and adventurism on a par with those of the characters – The Mycenaean, the torch-bearers of a great Aegean civilization in the Pre-Classical Greece existing from 2000 to 1200 BC, whose bravery and enterprising minds inspired Homer to pay tribute to them as immortalized in the two great Classical epics in the history of western civilization. Accordingly, The Mycenaeans: The History and Culture of Ancient Greece’s First Civilization by Charles River Editors takes us to look back on the Mycenaean culture in the Pre-Classical era when these ancient ethnic Greeks ruled the Aegean Sea as the maritime power and left their indelible marks on the posterity of the Classical Greek culture.
The Mycenaeans, the first Greeks, were never unified under a central state and were a collection of several kingdoms. Influenced by the earlier Minoan civilization (2000-1450 BC) at Knossos, Crete, the Mycenaean adapted the Minoan art and religious practices and developed them to their highest expectation of militaristic and cultural ideology. For example, the Mycenaeans developed Linear B Script, which was the writing system comprising hieroglyphics, used between 1450 and 1100 BC especially in Knossos and Pylos, the corporate headquarters of the Late Bronze Mycenae. The letters were mostly written in clay tablets largely concerned with documenting economic transactions of the palace administration and various business transactions. In fact, the Linear B Script, preserved as the oldest Greek writing system, indicates that the Mycenaeans were the linguistic and ethnic ancestors of the Classical Greeks.
In addition to transcribing economic activities Linear B Script also lets us glimpse into the belief system of the Mycenaeans with the names of the deities they worshiped, such as the head of the Pantheon and Poseidon, the god o f the seas whom the Mycenaeans paid special due respect for their being sea-faring people. The Mycenaean reverence for Poseidon is worth noting because it betokens the importance of the Mycenaean as the maritime power of the Aegean Sea as well as the most of the Mediterranean Sea. They eclipsed the Minoans and their Aegean neighbors in terms of open sea trade by establishing trade routes with the islands of Sardinia and Sicily as well as the Libyan coastline and importing more goods than exporting, such as grain from Egypt and metal from Cyprus and Anatolia to make weapons.
With respect to artistic and cultural historiography of the Mycenaeans, the art of burial practices entailed the Minoan influence assimilated into the Mycenaean of their own accord, which was akin to the fashion of Hellenism, the spread of the Greek culture through enculturation by Alexander the Great centuries later. Likewise, after then conquest of Crete, the Mycenaeans continued to employ many of the Minoan artistic traditions one of which was burial practices and their beliefs in afterlife as expressed in the Hagia Triada Sarcophagus on the island of Crete. Made in a Minoan style under the rule of Mycenaeans, it depicts scenes of funereal game held in honor of a fallen warriors and dead kings, consisting of the following athletic events as part of the ritual:
In fact, the actuality of the aforesaid athletic sport events is alluded in Homer’s Iliad, suggesting a Bronze Age tradition of funerary games in Greece with vivid descriptions of the games to honor the slain Greek warrior named Patroclus, which were all coordinated by Achilles. However, contrary to the nude events of the Classical Greece Olympics, which were the offspring of the Mycenaean funereal games, the competitors in the funereal sport events wore loincloths called “zoma.”
The demise of the Mycenaean Kingdom resulted from several factors one by one in a period of times, including the invasion of the Sea Peoples and the emerging of the Dorian in the north, all of which represented the end of the Mycenaean Age, coinciding with the collapse of the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East, where the Mycenaeans played an important role as a formidable trade partner with the Egyptian. Notwithstanding the fall of the Mycenaeans as the major sea power in the ancient Bronze Age, the brilliant legacy of the Mycenaean culture still thrives in; (1) the form of Linear B Script, the oldest writing system of the Greek language before the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet system many centuries later; (2) the belief system in which Zeus and Poseidon were first recorded in the writing tablets and revered with due respect; and (3) the initiation of the sparks of the organized athletic events developed into the Olympic Games in posterity. It is this ingenuity imbued with the spirit of adventure and the policy of engagement in adopting cultural traditions of other people that exemplified themselves among other Pre-Classical peoples, which is something we in the modern time should adopt as well, so that our posterity can benefit from what their ancestors learned and experienced, for it also becomes our legacy of heritage and culture to pass it down from generation to generation.
Veiled in the ancient shrine of the mysteries,
Robed in the esoteric knowledge of Olympus,
There appeared a numinous woman on the altars
Of a great temple built by Keleos, King of Eleusis
At the instruction of Demeter, the disguised goddess
Presiding over grains and the fertility of earth in distress,
For her daughter Persephone, deflowered by Hades,
The god of the Underworld was still retained in Hades.
The tale of woes so lachrymose with her eyes so dolorous
With the tears of the goddess welled with pains of heartaches
Began as Demeter called Keleos and other priests by the altars,
All of whom were equally intoxicated by her divine humanities
Of Anguish, Despondency, Dolefulness, and even Wretchedness
And listened to the elegy of their goddess of sacred grains
Of earth where now was barren and fallow for she was without grace .
“My daughter Persephone, the apple of my eyes, Flower of Flowers
On earth was ruthlessly ravaged by Hades, that dreadful Hades,
Of the Underworld, who then abducted her to his realm of darkness
Where only shadowy spirits wander with eyes depraved of lights,
Where the shadowy spirits importune for drops of blood for prophecies
To those a few mortals of valor destined for performing heroic feats.
There, Persephone, my beautiful daughter, was bound to Hades,
Who was also a brother of Zeus, god of gods, the ruler of the Universe,
Who was also an accomplice of this great crime, this god of gods!
Alas! Where’s Justice? Where’s Nemesis? Where’s God of the Universe
When this god of gods connived at his brother’s crime and sealed the mouths
Of other gods and goddesses who were nothing but divine cowards?
Thus, I searched high and low for my dear Persephone for nine days,
And on the tenth day, Hecate, a daughter of Rhea, and the sun god Helios
Came to me, for their pangs of godly consciousness disturbed by the pathos
Of my grief and lamentation was more divine than their divine essences
To tell me the crime of Hades and where my Persephone was that was
Hard to bear, harder to believe when my divineness was betrayed in Olympus,
Where all but I, the goddess of grains and fertility on earth was left amiss!
Thereupon, I fled Olympus, the ghastly place of godly beings in idleness
Who were nothing but abductors of fair maidens, manipulators of wars,
And conspirators of jealousy, all of it was against my nature and sacred office
With righteous contempt for all of it, I left that place of lewdness,
With no regrets, but with a longing heart for my Persephone in darkness.
Into this land of Eleusis, your land of Eleusis I wandered with hopes
Of meeting my Persephone one day as an old slave woman in disguise
Named Doso and met your wife by an old well near your splendid house
Where I became a burse to your son whom I fed ambrosia at nights
For Eternal Youth and put in the center of fire for Immortality, my Graces
To your kindly family till your wife full of foolish speculations
Betrayed my sacred appreciation and divine intentions and thwarted your son’s
Gifts of Eternal Youth and Immortality, the essence of the Immortals in Olympus!
Here, you built me my temple in honor of me, to initiate the Eleusinian Mysteries,
My Persephone will also preside for her four months’ stay on earth from Hades,
Alluring her to eat four pomegranate seeds, so she can’t stay here in bliss
For ever, forever with me, when the land will abound with crops and flowers,
And when you will purify yourselves with nine days of fasting and celibacy
with a consecration of the first grain harvested first of the year for the rites
In honor of me and Persephone, the goddess of spring of blissful liveliness.
Thus was a tale of the goddess, who was the goddess of humanities in essence,
Who was the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries with full of arcane principles
Of Purity, Morality, and Humanity, sealed in ancient secret rites so mysterious,
With sacrosanct pledges of select a few mortals mystified by the Mysteries
That would elevate the excitement of the souls and the passion of the hearts
Like no other in this world and in that world, afterlife where the spirits
In bliss promenading in the Eleusinian Fields boundless into the Mystic Universe.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Many books are to be tasted or swallowed, whereas certain books are to be chewed and digested for the nourishment of our minds and souls, such as Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, the founder of Logotheraphy, the third Viennese School of Psychoanalysis, along with Freudian psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, that deserves of its recognition of being one of the books of our time for its content as well as its origin. This book is not of survival literature of the Holocaust but of a memoir of a courageous human soul that did not succumb to despondency. It is less about what he suffered and lost as a prisoner at four concentration camps during World War II than it is about the sources of his intention to live through it, attesting to the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Man’s Search for Meaning is a fruit of Frankl’s resilient soul ever resisting the existential horrors of situations that life could afford; whenever the miserable conditions of the camp suppressed the spirit, Frankl diverted such negative energy to reconstructing the manuscript which he had lost in the disinfection chamber of Auschwitz and scribbling the key words in shorthand on tiny scraps of paper. In fact, it was a way of intensifying his inner life full of intellectual resources and spiritual freedom to which he could retreat from his terrible surroundings by forcing his thoughts to turn to another subject, which made him enable to rise above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment.
In addition to the willful act of deluding anxiety and negative feelings, Frankl ensures us that a sense of humor is another of the soul’s weapon in the fight for self-preservation and can afford an aloofness and an ability to transcend any situation, for developing a sense of humor and seeing things in humorous light is a kind of trick learned while mastering “the art of living.” That is, by laughing about any sordid or callous situation, we ease our mental distress and are able to take on a different stance on the situation in a less negative way that is essentially not overwhelmingly stressful or unbearable. After all, humans are the only biological organism that can laugh, and thus this sense of humor is our prerogative as human.
It is also interesting to learn that the prisoners who did their utmost best to look good even in the sordid surrounding survived the dreadful experience because they looked “fit” for survival. This act of grooming links to will to meaning – that is, a will to live- that has physiological bases of psychic energy which rejuvenates the body and the spirit to see a why to live. On the other hand, there was a young inmate in the camp whose sudden loss of hope and courage to live affected his already typhus-stricken body so adversely that such mental condition lowered the man’s temperature and resistance against typhus, which ultimately caused his premature death. This episode shows us that what we believe becomes our truth and thus can alter our reality with another one, a virtual reality as a product of psychosomatic effect, which also links to the three sources for meaning of life as follows:
• Creative Value – Doing something meaningful, such as Frankl’s scribbling the manuscript
• Experiential Value – Appreciating beauty of the Arts or love, such as his thinking of his wife in another camp whenever he was on the verge of falling into an emotional distress; and
• Attitudinal Value – Triumphing over biological, social, and cultural inhibitions during difficult times, such as Frankl’s endless efforts to divert his thought to another object of lofty value. It is this value that gives to our sufferings meaning by the way in which we respond to.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl testifies to Nietzsche’s dictum as aforesaid that suffering can grow out of existential frustration in the sense that there is a point to sufferings, that there is a hidden meaning in the guise of suffering, as there is only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. The essence of existence, which is search for meaning of life, underlies our awareness of a possibility against the background of reality – that is, what we can do about our given situations, not depending on the happenstances. Our emotions, which are interpreted as suffering, cease to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it by applying the three sources for meaning of life. Viewed in this light, this book is a veritable guide to how to overcome the struggles of our lives and achieve demands imposed upon our daily tasks however insurmountable they seem, which gains utmost credibility against the backgrounds of his own anguish in Auschwitz.
Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When John Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Travels with Charley: In Search of America, met a young man in traveling across America in his converted camping car named Rocinante, he met a young man who longed to travel to Europe with the idealization of the continent as he had seen in magazines and books. Steinbeck, being already weary of the existential dealings on the road, advised him, “What’s the need when the world is conveniently at your fingertips in colors without all those travel-related hassles? You can see the world in books and films and still keep your ideal images of Europe.” Which is exactly why Bill Bryson, an American- born British writer renowned for his great sense of wit and superb command of the English language, decided to embark on his journey once again twenty years after he and his pal Katz backpacked across Europe. Bryson wanted to see Europe in itself with a tabula rosa and write something about the cultures that seemed at once so different and yet so oddly similar in his own eyes. The result is the touchy-feely, impetuously hilarious, and astonishingly insightful Neither Here Nor There.
Bryson’s journey began and ended in the two geographical outposts of Europe, Hammerfest and Istanbul. By virtue of his narrative both so inviting and vivid with the use of languages both colloquial and literal that are so characteristic of his writing style, readers will easily and willingly follow his train of travel through the chapters, as he first takes us to Hammerfest to watch the beautiful shimmering gossamer of Northern Lights. We find Bryson feeling not-so-attractive while sitting on a bench at a park in Copenhagen, where all people looked handsome and beautiful. Such existential estrangement became heightened in Belgium, for all along he felt homesick, reminiscing about an old diner in Iowa and its cantankerous but hearty old waitress he frequented. In Amsterdam, he was concerned about the country’s “oddly wearisome” social conventions in regard of its complacency toward untenable political stance under the banner of tolerance. We see Bryson in the streets of Stockholm disappointed in the perfect socialist country littered and defiled by wastes mindlessly thrown away anywhere by its civilized residents without a shade of shame.
And who would not but sympathize with Bryson’s pathos in Florence? Here in this City of Flowers, Bryson saw the ubiquitous Gypsies importune everyone, with their haggardly clothed little children as an instrument for orating their poverty to passers-by at which Bryson was righteously indignant. He questioned himself why the police were not making any efforts to stop the Gypsies from harassing people. Further in Austria, we feel for him as his idealization of Austria as the epitome of all things European was ungraciously punctured by unfriendly services, an irritatingly slow mode of business operation, and a lack of charming coffeehouses where he could rest his spent body and spirit for a time. What a Don Quixote-like journey full of episodes it was.
Bryson’s cultural notes of each country he visited were, however, devoid of malicious sarcasm or jingoistic ignorance of its customs or social conventions. Things that he experienced in his travel in Europe was a clash of cultures he came from – originally Iowa, The U.S. and England afterwards – and cultures he had imagined in his mind, all of which spellbound him like a Boy in Wonderland. In fact, what fascinated him in Europe was his discovery that the world could be full of variety in which there were many different ways of doing essentially identical things, such as eating and drinking and buying movie tickets. Unlike other travel writers who only write about the sunny sides of the countries and peoples in their interests, Bryson is unafraid of telling readers his observations through his experience with a certain kind of fraternal or avuncular affection added by his trademark wits wonderfully interwoven with intelligence and humanism.
The travel ended in Istanbul with his hope of seeing more of the world, his everlasting wanderlust still luring with a vision of Asia across the Bosporus Bridge. He’s all up for the unforseeable happenings awaiting for him to encounter because that’s the glory of foreign travel, a travel to a terra ingonita where anyone can become a stranger, a wanderer blissfully ignorant of almost anything. To Bryson, the whole existence of traveler is to be constructed by a series of instantaneous guesses and endless actions. Notwithstanding all the woes of a lone traveler who was culture-bound, Bryson’s travels in Europe was something of his experience in Wonderland filled with a great sense of childlike wonder and appreciation of the wonders of each country in its own colors. Neither Here Nor There is his tale of veni vidi, vici experience and entertaining accounts of the world through his eyes with amusing and telling details resembling none other than themselves.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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