Wrapped in the Beauty of Poetry

Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff, the Iliad

We sit, almost in silence, almost with passivity, and we watch, as though in a theatre. Disbelief and incredulity have us almost slack-jawed as we see, operating at marching tempo and in regulated order, the dismantling of what had been the world’s largest democracy dissolving like Oz’s wicked witch of the west, leaving the glittering ruby slippers with their rightful owner. But will these size five pumps be sufficient to counter the evil made manifest and led by an amorphous, orange, shape-changing, mind-changing being who would happily belly-up to Zeus, god to god, trump to putin, if he had the address. Silly, giddy and anxious: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Wizard of Oz and Homer’s the Iliad. Where to look except to a source unchanged by history, and in fact confirmed in its solidity by history’s events—here the reading of the Iliad, in War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff with an introduction by Christopher Benfey (New York Review of Books, New York, 2005). To look for guidance, to understand the nature and effects of force, to gird for resistance, to acknowledge or allow space for fate, for some kind of equitability, to valorize the existence of a soul, some ways of beauty, and, for poetry, words that aren’t vanquished and erased. What will last, Rachel Bespaloff tells us in her essay “On the Iliad,” written in 1940, was a “promise of immortality outside and beyond history, in the supreme detachment of poetry.” She tells us as well that “Homer asks no quarter, save from poetry, which repossesses beauty from death and wrests from it the secret of justice that history cannot fathom. To the darkening world poetry alone restores pride.”

Bespaloff argues her essay in chapters. She begins with “Hector,” describing him most favourably of all, as standing alone, “a man and among men, a prince.” Alone, too, in his willingness to argue with and resist destiny. The things he cares for, takes care of, are not the usually vaunted goals of triumph and wealth. Instead, he is the defender of a city, a wife, a child, what she identifies as the perishable joys. “Thetis and Achilles” follow. Thetis, the wise and calm sea-bound mother of Achilles, whose uncontrollable irritability drives him to unprovoked cruelty and, finally, wretched unhappiness. Only his mother soothes his rancour and advises him effectively. A chapter for “Helen,” tragic Helen, unhappily and eternally exiled. Bespaloff describes her as “the prisoner of the passions her beauty excited,” who still “wears an air of majesty that keeps the world at a distance and flouts old age and death.” There are no serious, unrecoverable stakes in the unfolding of events in the chapter “Comedy of the Gods.” They watch, make no judgments and own no responsibility for what transpires. They prevail and offer the unchanging chilly comfort of their own eternity. “Troy and Moscow” is Bespaloff’s drawing parallels between Helen and Anna, between Homer and Tolstoy. She tells us, “Tolstoy’s universe, like Homer’s, is what our own is from moment to moment. We don’t step into it; we are there.” The chapter “Priam and Achilles Break Bread” follows. It made me weep and I’ll attempt to show why. In this section, which was followed by “Poets and Prophets,” Bespaloff suggests we look to the Bible and to the Iliad to perhaps find truths to guide us.

Bespaloff’s comprehension of the character of Priam and Achilles, and their relationship, shows us, with great insight and subtlety, what it is to be human, just human, although Achilles is only partly mortal. Priam enters the poem an old king, age a distinguishing mantle in an epic telling where force, violence, cruelty and plunder are the key elements. He is the King of Troy. He is powerful in his position and responsibilities. In spite of his being one of two battling adversaries in this war of almost immeasurable scale, and which telling Homer constrains to 24 books, he appears, in “Priam and Achilles Break Bread,” modest and humble but nonetheless, for me, the principal figure in the Iliad. It may be the manner in which Bespaloff presents him. Certainly, he carries the qualities and wisdom we need now.

His son Hector, the most loved son of his many, is now dead at Achilles’s hand. Priam has come to his tent alone, at night, to ask for the body of his son so he can be taken home to be buried with dignity and in the proper manner. He comes to Achilles. He is a king but Bespaloff attributes to him a majesty of a different kind. He has become, as she says, “the king of the supplicants,” a position she identifies as inviolable. In this, she says, his majesty rises above injury and attains a saintliness. The only additional damage he can suffer is to have his request denied. He reminds Achilles that he, Priam, is just mortal but has suffered more than any other in that he has “put to my mouth the hand of a man who has killed my sons.” He speaks with humility; he risks enraging the volatile Achilles, but his wisdom and moral stature are clear. Unguarded, disarming in his transparency, he reaches Achilles at a centre of his being and offers him release. The effect is transformative. Bespaloff says, “The killer is a man again, burdened with childhood and death.” He encounters here the span of his life and, recognizing this, allows himself to grieve for his own father. Priam has brought to Achilles, even in his own grief, the full dignity of his being, something now, and in that nighttime camp, absent from our current world, gone where civility, too, has gone.

Achilles, thinking about his own loss—of self, and father—and Priam, recognizing the qualities that Achilles does have, could have, are able to reach one another. The Iliad records, “He took the old man’s hand and gently pushed him away. Both remembered….” Bespaloff claims this moment as one of the most beautiful silences in the poem where time is recognized as a measure both fleeting and drawn eternal.

Achilles in his cruelty and uncontrolled rage is also tinged tragic; he has beauty and is admirable and Priam does admire him. But as Bespaloff observes, Homer fails to mention any honour accompanying this admiration. With the words of his mother in his ear, Achilles has agreed to return Hector’s body and makes arrangements for this to be done. They share a meal and seem now almost at peace, or perhaps it is wariness that has dissipated. They can recognize and admire one another for their achievements and stature. Achilles is mindful of himself and his fierce temper; Priam will leave undiminished by his entreaty and successful in recovering Hector’s body.

In the sureness of his knowledge and being, Priam is both player and observer. He sees Achilles, knows his deeds, recognizes the consequences—some still to come, and “gives absolution to life in its totality.” A full view, the wisdom of distance and the entire panoply allow this. Unengaged as we are urged and encouraged to be today, a comprehensive, long view, one that accommodates contingencies, vulnerabilities and shifting needs often impossible to meet, is one we are reluctant to take. We can acknowledge, what the old king has shown, that in this minute of “ecstatic lucidity,” as Bespaloff writes, “the haggard world recomposes its features, and the horror of what is to come is abolished in suffering hearts.” For now, at least, at least something to consider. Homer even allows for the notion of tenderness, delicacy in Achilles’s treatment of Priam, who has given much to his conquering host; civility, attention and reflection are also gain.

In her essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” written in 1940, Simone Weil laments force for its inevitable reduction of the human spirit and being to that of an object, a thing. An advocate of pacifism in the early days of Hitler’s aggression, she supported the idea of negotiation and appeasement, a position she renounced when Hitler’s army entered Prague in 1939. But she continued to decry force, which, she argued, was the centre of Homer’s Iliad, the consuming hero or subject of the epic poem. As the aggressor moves forward nothing impedes his advancing, nothing slows the execution of the force he employs, nothing intervenes between the impulse to force and the deed—not even, as she wrote, “the tiny interval that is reflection.” Conscience doesn’t step in here to call halt; empathy in reflecting a similar felt experience doesn’t trigger a kindred association; memory doesn’t mirror a like experience that, in pause, might have the aggressor think, and wait. The drive to forceful action overrides the interval into which a second thought could slip. Force, that powerful agent, moves unimpeded by consideration of effect, or consequences. For the powerful there are none until, inevitably, there are. Force assumes its own momentum; control doesn’t ride as its tandem partner. It presses on until, as Simone Weil reminds, it encounters fate and “thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”

Hard in her criticism of the Iliad, Weil assesses the failure of its players and the choices they omitted to make or were unable; but criticism may be born of high expectations and the demands she needed to see met. Priam and Achilles, opposing figures, have finished a meal together, rest and contemplate each other with what might be taken for kindness, respect of a sort. Weil quotes the few lines that recount this and notes that moments of grace such as these are rare but “are enough to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again.” She describes a recurring sense of bitterness throughout the poem, “this bitterness that proceeds from tenderness and that spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight.” It is in this, she says, that the Iliad is unique. Bitterness here, I think, is regret that things are so and is a reflection of the tenderness Weil identifies and values, rather than emanating from meanness of spirit.

Interesting to read, in the present time, Weil writing that the Iliad lies under the shadow of “the greatest calamity the human race can experience—the destruction of a city.” This is the poet Homer’s lament, and think: why is this and what is it that the city represents. We wonder and the answer is ready. Human achievement, equanimity in living together in common purpose, a desire for permanence and stability, safety and the security of familiar others, the joy of gathering, the aesthetics and beauty of architecture itself and in housing its various purposes. To destroy a city is to extinguish the body who inhabits it. “Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps in poetry,” Weil wrote.

For Simone Weil the poem’s central core or subject, its hero, was force. For Rachel Bespaloff the Iliad’s true centre is the duel between Achilles and Hector, what she identifies as the tragic confrontation of the revenge-hero and the resistance-hero. It is this, she says, that governs the poem’s unity and its development. We place ourselves on the side we identify as our own centre. Do we have a reasonable choice? Still, there’s temptation even knowing, as we read, that Achilles’s violence will accelerate, his frustrations mounting in never having bested what he kills. The poem shows him as grand, even as he fails. This mischief—maybe the gods at play—or the cleverness of Homer. Bespaloff says, “Achilles’s heroism is not so breathtaking as his discontent, his marvellous ingratitude, the joys of pillage, the luxury of rage…. the glitter of empty triumphs and mad enterprises—all these things are Achilles.” The heat, the fray are seductive; the world is weak. We can do as we wish since it seems that no matter what, Weil reminds us, “Within the limits fixed by fate, the gods determine with sovereign authority victory and defeat.” Still, she cites the poem’s extraordinary equity. “This poem is a miracle,” she says. Such a thing is needed now.❚