Was Pindar a Kiss-Ass

A Short Hercules

 Ivan Ivanovitch, of the left Iliac is on form today, he feels ignored. But at least we all agree that the word orogeny, from the Greek word for mountain and the Greek word for creation, should mean a hell of a lot more than "mountains formed by the movement of tectonic plates."

 But such is the lowly status of geology as a field of study, it's not "top-tier" as they say, words like orogenic mountain range, drumlin, morraines of all kinds, cwms, do little for the poet. Erogeny and offspring, on the other hand, from the Greek for sexual desire and the Greek for born of, is up there with adult stuff that pretty much dominates at least ninety percent of entertainment and a good fifty percent of most thinking.

So let's forget France's contributions to psychoanalytic theory for a bit, talk about Pindar and ask why the subjects of his poetry, his style and manner, dominated a cultural elite for in excess of two hundred years, and then in the middle of the 1800's when the Olympic games was resurrected Pindar again influenced the tone and flavor of the Olympic Games Poem.

Most of Pindar's themes were Eros related. He was big into god's abducting maidens, the results of the Union being a demi-god usually of mixed virtue who could lift weights or do things to javelins. It was a violence softened by pleasure, and for the victim, the financial security of a dubious marriage or a stipend.

The Olympic Games did rather bring out the homo-eroticism of a slave owning society that regarded most Greek women as chattels to be traded. Pindar was no exception. He was prone to being in love and expressing his passion for beautiful, athletic, male boys, what these days we might call pederasty resulting in pedophilia, was in Pindar's day a legitimate source of inspiration.

Back then, a poetry reading included music and dance, and I guess there was an element of interpretation from the performers. They had lyres and the kithara. They had wind instruments, the double-reed auloi  and Pan pipes or the  syrinx. They had the tympanon, it was like a drum. They had the kymbala or cymbals. It was a big performance, very popular as entertainment, tickets highly sought.

Like Taliesin, Wales' own Shining Brow of bards, Pindar knew how to butter his bread. He invested well in flattery, he composed a line or two about what a wonderful human being one of Alexander the Great's uncles or cousins or something was, then when Thebes, in Greece, was leveled for having a problem with Macedonian expansion Alexander killed thousands, enslaved many more thousands but he spared Pindar's house and sanctuary in Thebes.

In another poem Pindar impressed a patron with a description of Hercules, who was considered the supreme example of heroic physique, by claiming Hercules was in fact a very short man indeed but it didn't stop him from being Hercules.

And why did Pindar do that, because his wealthy patron was, shall we say, diminutive. 

Lacan, The Real, Reality, The Other and James Joyce

Sigmund Freud's Couch.

Huffstutter 2004

 I know Baxter wants to get away from Jacques Lacan. Myself I'd like to shore up an understanding of what Lacan means by Real.

In the course of a person's lifetime, meanings gather moss as they gain shades and layers. A mind  can easily hold fast to a spot on the symbolic order, think it rather cute and pour stuff into it, imagine our world without retard, puerile and cretin, which you just can't do with sums. The thing is, in Lacan's way of looking at it, there's a distinction to be made between Reality and The Real. Far from there being two distinct words to mark the difference in a manageable way, real is all bundled into real.

In short, for Lacan, "Reality" is the world we have built using symbols and images. "The Real" is everything else. Sounds far too easy and a little pointless until you adjust the meanings a little by suggesting: "The story of reality can be changed, The Real can't." Then you might be persuaded to ask: "Does The Real care about me?" The answer to that is: "No sirree! But Reality does its best to try."

Indeed, lo and behold, all of reality has been built on the idea of making you and I happy, and if not happy, then at least constructively motivated.

Being an ambitions male with a lifestyle to maintain, Our Man Jacques Lacan quickly concluded that Freud was absolutely right, when it comes to hardcore mental imbalance, morbid unhappiness, intermittent explosive disorder or whatever you wanted to call it, there were certainly reputations to be made but there was no actual cure for the fundamental Human Condition.

But he had noticed that in the wider society we people spent an inordinate amount of time in a pursuit which because he grew up proper he might have phrased this way: "Colluding to adapt to social norms." This collusion, he ventured to observe, had its casualties, but without the moral support of other gossiping idolaters we would all become casualties of The Real and under those circumstances where would reliable help come from.

There might be no cure for those whom the Symbolic World, Reality, had failed to embrace with the sort of love and appreciation that fills the void and makes it possible to dramatically reduce contact with The Real. But in terms of symbol making, an "I" that sat alone on a bench staring at the Liffey River and listening to the ducks, might find solace in dreaming of his dressing room, hunting around for the material out of which to make symbols that better suited him.

For Lacan that would require a person to accept "The Real" as real and "Reality" as an order of symbols, some of which made no sense whatsoever. For James Joyce it was developing a writing style that was "famously experimental and complex" that would challenge the professors of the English Literature, or it was "pretentious, overly difficult, deliberately obscure and fragmented" that rescued him from losing his mind to the isolation of preferring the company of park benches to the company of people.

Love affairs with Triadic Structures

Latch

 Today, as we wait for the Spring Marsh Frogs to sing, our little group intends to poke a finger or two at the Triadic Structure. Or, if you prefer to be a folksy political type desperate for the authenticity of the roots you never had, a three legged stool.

The off putting thing about Hegel's Triadic Structure was that one of the asymmetries was prepared to die rather than be wrong. The asymmetry that would have preferred to die than submit was referred to as the master and the more magnanimous asymmetry was referred to as the slave or in more enlightened times referred to as the servant.

The third leg of this triadic structure, which eventually became called the Synthesis, was like a melding of the two asymmetries into some sort of compromise which in time would become yet another asymmetry. Not an easy compromise to make and it would have been impossible had it not been for a flaw within the asymmetry that had a death wish, he wanted his wonderfulness to be recognized, and  over the generations the master and servant were able, for mutual advantage, to recognize each other as self-conscious beings, and this produced a mutual recognition out of which, often through conflict, a synthesis, a new direction, emerged.

For Hegel, his Triadic Structure had nailed it, everyone else could go home, and in the same way that Kant's version of the Enlightenment had predicted the End of History, Hegel was confident his own Phenomenology of Spirit was actually how the End of History would happen.

Hegel probably had a point he wanted to drum home when he assigned master/servant to the two asymmetries in his triad. He wanted to have one asymmetry dominant, raw in tooth and claw, otherwise nothing would get done, no one would obey anyone else, the harvests wouldn't be harvested and so on. A closer appreciation of Hegel's meanings include the idea of union between asymmetries that included recognition and the desire to be recognized.

When Lacan attended lectures on Hegel's phenomenology in Paris, he grasped this area of desire and recognition and saw a much subtler complexity. He concluded that master and servant misidentified the forces at play. The desire for a Pork Chop on a stick might be a need for sustenance, but a desire for a chunky soled Kleman Pador Tyrolean walking shoe was a desire for recognition. It was an adornment, part of the wardrobe. And if indeed the servant had a master, his master was the wardrobe that presented his self image to the world. And here Lacan introduced his own Triadic Structure.

In Lacan's Triad, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are three interlocked rings, and all is well as long as the symbolic remains a master worth following. Then, should the imagery no longer supply the symbolic with a path through the real, bam, you got neurosis and pharmaceutical makers have 20 percent of their manufacturing capacity. There's also a chance that your whole Tyrolean wardrobe thing might be showing signs of disintegrating, your neurosis becomes a compunction which turns psychotic the next thing you got a problem with too many skeletons in the basement.

Lacan, being French, referred to these symptoms as sinthomes and while struggling through James Joyce who he judged to be a very difficult writer he concluded that Joyce wasn't writing for other people, he had no desire to impress them with a new take on the literary equivalent of Tyrolean Brocade, he was writing for his own sanity, no one else. He was scouring the floor of his dressing room, gathering bits and pieces, including his shames and his soiled underpants and through his writing he was using them to symbolically complete himself by desperately trying to keep his three rings in some sort of working order.

Jacques Lacan's Drive and Hegel's influence on tension between asymmetries.

70 F. Jan 9th, 2026 Maple Pollen? 

 To get a closer look at "noise," the real from which symbols rescue us, I'll imagine I'm a wardrobe in Jacques Lacan's vestibule, waiting to be gazed at, judged and impressed. Like everyone else I'm struggling with a "lack" of some sort, an unfilled hole that needs content.

Currently I'm very disappointed in the Scottish Breeks that arrived in the mail, which really don't suit my Tyrolean Tracht Loden and makes my boiled wool Alpine hunting hat look unconvincing. There's a color clash I think, which could respond better to the bloom of heather on a windswept moor than to a vacuumed carpet and a ticking clock.

Jacques has reminded me more than once that moments of uncomfortable noisiness are bound to be alarming. The quality of unknown in the real always is, but I was to rest assured that while my wardrobe remained wholly preoccupied with maintaining the "why" and "wherefore" of my existence, in no way was it the irreducible fact of my existence. What remained of that was littering the floor of my dressing room.

Of course I sometimes wonder whether the aesthetics in the world of my Symbolic Order leave Jacques a little mystified. Like most of his generation Lacan did his uncomfortable time with Hegel's dialectics. Came away with his two objects representing an asymmetry, the one defining the other, the resulting tension producing a direction rather than an impasse. He called this direction "Drive."

His "what about you" was the assertion that the big, bold, object, the image around which my person has been shellacked in place was waiting in his vestibule, what I wanted to be was the other little object, it was waiting upstairs where I lived on the dressing room floor.