Dear Recipient,

I am wondering if you have had a chance to view my recent essay, "Political
Aesthetics in The Eumenides: My Defects and the One Superpower Option." It
addresses the question of violence and reconciliation in the context of
Aeschylus's famous and excellent play.

One should also consider that the violence military action or spending has
averted will never be seen except by intellectual effort, so there's an
obligation or burden there. The issue of post-USSR vacuum is an additional
theme of the essay also mentioned in the news on 9/13/2006 by Secretary
Rice.

If you would like your text response or url to be considered for the US$400
prize fund in this year's Genius 2000 Conference, reply to this e-mail with
"Conference Submission" in the subject line. Rules and further conference
details are online at www.geocities.com/genius-2000/conf2006.html.

Please feel free to forward this message to any interested parties.

Best regards,

Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
Conference submissions OK until 9/15
www.geocities.com/genius-2000


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Political Aesthetics in The Eumenides: My Defects and the One Superpower
Option

www.geocities.com/genius-2000/PoliticalAesthetics.html

Copyright 2006 Max Herman


I think there is a need to study more an ancient play, The Eumenides.
Aeschylus wrote it in 458 B.C., showing revenge transformed to love.
It tells the story of the house of Atreus, and how Orestes killed his
mother.
I read the Richmond Lattimore translation: "Get him, get him, get him, get
him."
By voting to forgive the matricide, Athena founded the great polis.
The elder gods, the Furies also called, were not destroyed but blessed and
changed.
In this we see an early vision of art, or exosomatic evolution.
Why must forgiveness be a part of growth, and sometimes violence go
unpunished?
Perhaps because to punish all, infinitely, rains blood on blood.

The gods of art and the safety of art cannot such endless devastation
permit.
We embark now on the new century of art history, called Networkism.
"Network" is an analogue of "polis," the tragic cycle working in both.
Moreover, the monodeity of art compares to philosophy, the learning artifact
or system.
Thus we understand the blessing of "the kindly ones" is needed now.
The one superpower option, a U.S.-led War on Terror, needs it.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, please allow me to set the stage.
In nineteen-hundred and eighty-nine, cramped by Oberlin orthodoxy, I left
for Madison.
There I had the great good fortune to attend the final class of Barbara
Fowler.

She taught the Albos-Koros-Hybris-Ate cycle of tragedy, adding Dike.
She ended the course and her career by reading aloud "The Shield of
Achilles" by Auden.
That year I copied "Adonais" longhand, and read Shakespeare for two
semesters.
For Gingerich's course in Europe's history I wrote of the origins and blame
for World War One.
Avoiding my high school drinking friends, anxious to learn, Germany
reunited.
I wondered if that meant all would be roses, never a shot in anger fired.
I decided rather a vacuum might form requiring expansion (if painful) by the
West.
I assured myself a powerful presence from art could help to give the right
its might.
Walking down Bascom Hill toward my house on Gilman I felt the danger:
religious hatred.

On this conundrum I set my thoughts on heroes and cycles to work, if very
slowly.
It wasn't the anti-Allan-Bloomian talk of Oberlin I loved–I trusted
Shelley.
Medical theory in tragedy, Hamlet and murdered communication, Interferon.
On graduating I wrote a novel The Hermit, writer as artifact, art as
solitude.
What all this means I cannot rightly state, except that something was afoot.
My mathematical side was angry and wouldn't let go, so I chose to continue.
My troubled family and circle of friends assumed I was mentally ill, and
maybe I was.
I'd been labeled a genius by childhood testing, ninety-nine-plus in GRE's on
top.
So what could I have thought, except that I understood War and Peace, not
they?

I guess I made my mind up to rebel right then and there in ninety-two.
Therefore continuons, and let your mind's eye drift past a year of
housepainting and beer.
My after-Hermit stories weren't liked at Iowa, but Binghamton let me go for
pay.
I argued a lot in class with people and met the bearded guy who invented
Pomo.
One fall semester and two quite decent papers on heroism later I cut for
home.
I like it writing here on a reclaimed cemetery, now park, flies buzzing
around.
I felt bereft and socially deformed on leaving SUNY-Binghamton.
I couldn't believe that deconstruction and post-colonial theory was all
there was.
I wrote a pamphlet "Literary Change" and xeroxed it for coffee shops.

About the Second Commandment querelle, I'd say it poured the mold for G2K.
On alt.postmodern, a usegroup in green text, they mentioned Jurgen Habermas.
I checked out PPP from MPL, and then applied to schools again.
None let me in save Syracuse, an injured place, but they would pay for me.
Though mocked by professor and pupil alike, I managed to learn a few iota to
keep.
Marx was soundly off because worker control of means of production was
soviet proxy.
This was the same as capitalism with representative democracy.
Freud was the post-theistic cult of the master analyst, hence Lacan et al.
Commercial humanism and imagined communities (Pocock and Benedict) also
rated.

In fifty-three the New York Intellectuals chose not to favor Stalin.
The crux in Benjamin is where he states some violence is true and just.
Rescuing criticism, falze aufhebung, weak messianic power.
Fitzgerald said enlightened patriotism is the way, and I agreed.
Early waking and trembling I found were clinical signs of something
requiring pills.
My Thucydidean hopes for a "second Syracuse" where Athens won were false.
Beneath all this lay the tragic cycle Fowler taught, my video class and the
net.
Could I will forward my communicative hypothesis, a transitional artifact?
The answer was away from the "life" of the "mind," and schools, writing,
corrupted clergy.

Into this somewhat peaceful golden time of living plainly came the idea.
Ask people to act like a genius, or say what they thought one was, or talk
of the fin-de-siecle.
Thus Genius 2000 was born–from The Tempest, the dreadnoughts, Blake on "bad
art" and Eliot's "Talent."
What can the hero do for polis, the anointed selected speaker or "special
one"?
Words twice-spoken, Zeus without hard breath and Phoebus stop the rule of
one master.
Medawar evolves by Thrasymachus, destroyer and preserver hear.
The question endlessly complicates, nothing for sure, and this is part of
the magic.
Yet also the pain, as Aeschylus knows, ever-seeping into the learning heart.
One truth we must heed, if rage and impotence make us Eumenidean, is Zeus's
power.

Zeus is a younger god, younger than Titans, father of Apollo and Athena.
Maybe the U.S. has done wrong, or is imperfect, as Moynihan's Pandaemonium
states.
Yet maybe too Strauss and Benjamin aren't so far apart, as each knew
Scholem.
Jerusalem and Athens, Michio Kaku's planetary hominization.
Could this be built not in bridges but in the "second space" of Miloscz's
book?
May God and Heaven be literally real forms in seven or eight or ten
dimensions?
All this and more is archived in my book at quantum nineteen-ninety-two.
Why don't you curse and hound for blood from Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or anyone?
The U.S. must protect the future hopes of art so think before you curse.


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http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/eumendides.html


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