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WELCOME!
TO
ANCIENT GREECE-
EARLY AMERICA.COM
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Dedicated to the Dynamic Relevance
of Western and American Histories and Literatures
to our Lives and Communities;
and to
The Spirit, Joy, Community and Freedom
built in beauty by peoples in many times and places,
Beauty ignored in our books and schools:
A rigorous journey toward our true heritage
(Ecological Sense, Economic Justice, Egalitarian Culture),
our Future for the asking...
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This website stands in loving memory of
EVE HELENE WILKOWITZ
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born April 17, 1959
abducted and murdered in New York City
March 25, 1980
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"(She) was not a document. She was not a number or a photograph. Not an abstract idea or a madman's fantasy. She was flesh and blood," writes Susan Griffin of many powerful, alive young women in Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature (Harper & Row, 1981).
Eve was on the verge of her 21st birthday that Spring: she was a smart, strong, happy, outgoing person moving into dynamic relation with the world, through a career in social work. This young writer of 25 hoped to make her his wife before long. Eve was full of energy, intellect and humor, and loved her family, homecooked meals and stupid movies. Eve was still in grief over the recent death of her mother. Our favorite date was walking the streets of New York holding hands, and talking, talking and talking.
Then our six weeks came to an end. Eve was abducted on her way home to Bay Shore, Long Island, late Friday night March 21st. Her murderer(s) held her for 3 days, then killed and disposed of her, in what Suffolk County Homicide detectives call "a very brutal case." It has never been solved. If you can help, contact them at homicide@co.suffolk.ny.us; or call 631-852-6742.
Do you ever wonder why the abduction, rape and murder of children and young women is an everyday event in American culture? It seems to be America's favorite pastime and entertainment, from the OJ trial to fiction, from porno-news (that milks blood from our communities for money and never troubles to interconnect these atrocities) to America's fetish for "murder mysteries.”
"There is a thread in the mind of this culture," Griffin continues (253), "which ties together all these acts of violence to minds and bodies of children and young women. For the calculated use of a not yet grown woman's body [in pornographic cultures like ours] is part of culture's symbolic murder of all this is childlike in our souls. When we love a child, we love human nature before it has been reshaped by culture. This is what we mean by "innocence" and "naivete"; not that the child has no sexual feeling, but that this feeling has not yet been corrupted by culture's hatred and fear of nature, and that the child's idea of self has not been reshaped to an humiliating image...."
One of the many things you'll discover here is that Western Civilization---what became "America"---actually began with its still-longest continuous period of cultural development (over 2000 years) in the Aegean, with its leading center in "Minoan" Crete. ("Minoan" as a term is about as far from what Crete was, "named for its king," as Native America is from "GeorgeWashingtonLand.") We are rarely and very badly told about these achievements, centered around the powers, intelligence and creativity of women, because the mind of the average white male (the bearer of male-centered "Western Culture" from teacher to technocrat) is the mind and body of that culture. From it, "he" learns to be terrified of Nature, Woman, Beauty, and Change; to imagine that he must "control" it all to preserve his "identity" (that is, a self in delusionary mortal competition with all Nature and Other Selves for a supposedly-limited amount of mates and resources.)
But this is only one choice, by one culture: a choice enforced (or who in their right mind would want it?) by violent conquests in ancient Greece, across "The Third World" and into Early America, and hence daily in our lives and spirits. Until we reconfigure education from The Earth up, the average white male will not just remain a confused, terrified, violent boy who exploits and murders Life where it dares to live. He will grow more confused and terrified, as his "comforting rituals" (homicide, war, "development" that is really destruction, etc.) fail him. However big he thinks he is, Life will not go away, be tamed or silent. So he will grow more violent, and he knows it: you notice his culture's favorite story-line, sexy and if possible serial murder. As we already know from "His-Story," there is no bottom to his needless fears or his useless rage. As citizens, producers and consumers of culture, as teachers and politicians, we either help to change this by courageously confronting it where we stand, or we close our eyes and help force our own world to resemble "his" delusion.
"Does this traumatic event in this historian's personal life affect his professional practices?" Every day---and You be the judge of what Eve's life, not her death, has produced toward the recovery of a more accurate and inspiring Western History: Beauty deliberately denied us so that the predators of (Post-) Christian Capitalist Patriarchy will not be recognized for what they have been for the last (and only the last!) 4000 years. This is no New Age Utopia-website. Check out the facts. Whether we know it or not, we have not been "trading with the strong, plundering the weak," as National Geographic still "objectively celebrates," for the great majority of our past.
It would have been easy to produce a mainstream-hit of a novel featuring a sexy dead woman on page one. And that would have made it a book incapable of addressing what happened then and happens today. As it is we have mountains of "culture" built on that dead body, criminologists who reassure us that only about 150 children are taken and murdered each year in America, and professors to help us explain it to the kids: "This is an evil world" (both these views explicit on Emily Rooney's PBS news-show).
This historian believes that once you know the facts, you will begin to think and act differently; for you will cease to believe that we "have always been violent," competitive, racist, sexist and class-bound. The human, cosmopolitan worlds that actually preceded each of our main roots in Greece, Palestine, Italy and America were not Utopias. They were just what humans usually produce when their culture teaches that there is Plenty For Everybody (as there still is) on this planet. That all creatures are related and connected through our mothers beginning with The Earth ("the only God we know," as Barbara Mor says). That partnership, toleration and generosity make the world a Garden. Everywhere you look, people had to be "taught" that Earth and Woman are hostile wilderness there for the raping by "Progress."
"In these acts, we attempt to destroy Eros" (Griffin 254). "All this is erotic and erotic feeling brings one back to this state of innocence before culture teaches us to forget the knowledge of the body. To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstacy ["standing beyond yourself"], in feeling....In this world, to touch another is to express love: there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once. This is eros. Our own wholeness. Not the sensation of pleasure alone, nor the idea of love alone, but the whole experience of human love. The whole range of human capacity exists in this love."
Above all, Griffin concludes, "We have choice."
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SO TO SPEAK:
A Quick Primer
on
Language, Relativity,
"Objective Truth" and the "Collision of Cultures"
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The last thing we need is a new romanticism. Yet, the “mysteries” that surround these “mystery peoples” measure most of all our efforts so far to know them. Can we know them? If we begin in the right way...
You and I, each with our own language based in different ecological, social and historical circumstances, perceive something we each call cow in a field between us. Each person's word or symbol for the cow is equally arbitrary---it has nothing to do with the cow itself---and is as unique as any other tool you and your people have made for getting work done. Each of our "symbolic approaches" to the cow, and so to the world, is as "valid" as the other's. That is the basis of multiculturalism, sometimes called cultural relativity.
Some people these days argue that neither party, to some much-debated degree, perceives the cow (or the world) at all, because of what they call the utterly-circumscribing, self-referential "nature of language" that "always already" affects the human subject. This may be true, to some degree---although the same people never can explain either when hominids with language began to suffer these effects, or their own ability to perceive this "fact." As the uncommonly lucid Robert Scholes remarks in his excellent Textual Power, "If we are totally cut off from things [by language], language must be one of the things."
Rather, we cannot avoid the fact that hominids (early humans) have evolved five senses, a voice-box, and language itself. Nature doesn't waste energy on bells and whistles. This biological equipment would not be necessary unless we do find benefits in the ability to perceive the world around us. The cow---the natural world, and its "other peoples" each with their own human symbolic system---really are "there," the very stimulus of language and its ongoing evolutions.
We may never agree on how to name or describe something out there in the world between our unique words and symbolic systems. "Objectivity" is at best an ideal that we (almost) achieve together by weighing in all our points of view.
The point is to recognize how multicultural coexistence (the state of nature) becomes "a collision of cultures" (symbolic systems). "Collision" happens when one side tries to force its own system and agenda on another people. "Outsiders" and "Others" who stand by their own "realities" are no more answerable than a cow to another culture's agenda; or "destined" (except by force and historians in its pay) to be docile, silent or invisible in its presence.
Because in this sense "all cultures are equal," you have the right to believe in and practice your culture---even if it means pretending not to see the "cultural realities" of others. However, if and when this causes a painful collision with others, you must either come to terms with those others, or try to literally force the world to resemble your delusion that you are "alone" and the only people who "count." Hence words such as ethnocentric (bound by your culture's world-view) and monological ("only we matter").
Welcome to Western and American History.
Words such as savage and terrorist work this way. They conveniently erase the other side's point of view on what is happening. They (try to) prevent you from perceiving that you are involved in what happens in relations with other peoples and that they too have feelings and views about it. What we often call Power---the "power to define, and so dominate"---tries to convince us that its particular symbols, words and ideas are "the way it is" in nature and human nature too. The greater the desire to define and dominate, the more a simple description of the world becomes ideology---a rigid, all-insistent, constantly-defensive and other-excluding idea of the world and how it works (or should work, if you'd just toe the line).
Indeed, all cultures are equal---But they are not all equally-accurate descriptions of the world in our multicultural midst. Native Americans, for example, are not savages, and people who dislike America are not terrorists. Those word-symbols are simply politically-convenient tools of Power to prevent you from perceiving the whole story and your part in it.As you travel the worlds within this website, ask yourself how much you already knew and didn't know about its subjects. The "Minoans" were the first to face ideological words and symbols used by their conquerors (the Achaians, Myceneans or "Homeric" Greeks)---for example, "The Minotaur" itself, which was a Cretan religious symbol turned into a tyrannous monster (the "good reason" for the violence of conquest). The answers you come to will suggest the ideological shape of your education and the destiny your culture has in mind for you.
This is not to suggest that the "Minoan" world is free of ideology: no world is. The difference is in the insistence: the difference is whether you learn and internalize an ideology (a way of knowing the world) that helps you to live in contact with yourself and the world, or one that tries to shut you away from both. You certainly are entitled to your beliefs. As they begin to cause others pain, belief becomes psychosis.
Compare the simple image of a tree by a "Minoan" Cretan artist with one painted by an artist of the more familiar Homeric or Mycenean Greeks. The Cretan tree has living rhythm---it bursts from The Earth in all directions, can hardly hold up its foliage and fruit, and sways and flutters its million leaves in the breezy sunshine. It is impossible to say what the "purpose" of this tree is. It's part of all the rest. By contrast, a Mycenean tree is a stick in the background of an "heroic" scene, with a quite-unnatural-looking "lollipop" of leafage stuck on top. One archaeologist dubs them “ping-pong bats.”The question is: Who sees (and so can show the rest of us) the tree as it "really" is? Why the difference? We must ask what words and symbols shaped the artist. In the social world of the Aegean---the "post-Minoan" Cretan one, being changed by force as the Mycenean artist paints---the "heroic" mission or scenario has become "what counts." The community is forced out of its Nature-worshipping indifference to "history" (by frightened, incompetent and not surprisingly violent men) to arm itself against all other communities until "only warriors matter" in deciding affairs. (See the meticulous End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews.) What matters in art---a society's expression of itself---becomes the glory of the hero, literally instead of the glory of the natural and human worlds. To be judged a success by his masters' ideological agenda, the Mycenean artist must amplify deeds of "power" over nature and other peoples; and the consequences be damned.
We still live amid the ruins of those consequences. And we will not transcend them until we know where we really began and why we have not been told.
Not surprisingly, one of the first distinguishing acts of the Mycenean conquerors of Crete was to erect gigantic walls around their cultural centers, as if the elite knew they had everything to fear from their own subjects and from angry foreigners (whose women, horses and wealth they pillaged by boat for fun). The Mycenean world emerged from the "Minoan" as essentially a spree of self-devouring rapist appetite (which some say disgusted even Homer), and lasted all of about 200 years. Perhaps 1/10 the age of the Cretan world before it. The first achievement of patriarchal "Greece" was the conquest and rape of Crete and its allied cities, and its last the sack of Troy.
Go, by all means, to Heraklion in Crete and walk case by case through the main museum: these changes will occur before your eyes. Western art is dragged down from a sensuous, luminous record of visionary contact with Life, and becomes a delusionary shine of pseudo-importance on the boyish short-term pursuits of a cultural minority, whose own images paint them as violently selfish above all things. The great title of honor coveted by Myceneans was "Sacker of Cities": woe to the builders long there.And yet, no less than National Geographic's first "Western History" issue of 2000 would have us believe that "The West" begins with them. "The Myceneans learned many things from the Minoans, an earlier and more advanced people," they oddly tell us and don't tell us; from which you assume that "we" began with Homer.
Why not start at the beginning?
In 1620 AD, "The Pilgrims" of New England likewise came to a sophisticated, culturally-mixed, thoroughly-intermarried, and cautiously-coexisting region of many cultures both American and European. But "The Pilgrims" had indeed an ideology---JudeoChristian evangelism---that forbade them to come to terms with the peoples and place they found. Their response by 1623 was to surround themselves with needless walls and weapons, and to massacre (the famous "preemptive strike") Native people who felt angry at their changing treatment.
Utopia is the word most-often resorted to by journalists and academics who earn their bread parroting or at least saying very little in the face of Power---Nobody could have organized the world "better" than we have.
Not that they've ever bothered to really look. And in not looking, they betray their own hallowed "heroes of freedom." For men and women like you yourself do not sacrifice their lives in wars so that we can be free to produce profitable widgets. The Nazis produced excellent widgets. People give their lives so that we can have an open, alive, vibrantly-free practice of culture(s) worth belonging to.
Trash your preconceptions, knock down the walls, and see whether you agree.
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