between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I am virtuous. I have written 800 words of research paper within three hours.

(And spent the last twenty minutes clarifying a book order. This edition, not that edition. Makes difference! Really! sez I. Gah, sez I, and wanders off muttering darkly.)

The painful part starts tomorrow, of course. With the fiddly bits and the turning of [square brackets] into real accurate descriptions, rather than waffling about habitus and the grammar of godly perception.

Now I get to fumble my way through two different sorts of Greek (ancient and modern) and pretend that I don't want to go home and write fictions. Or sleep.

It's Courage and Once more unto the breach, I suppose...

Close up the walls with
those English dead -
and pretend
it makes a difference.

The more I learn, the more I need to learn.

I've marked off the most immediately necessary Greek revision from my to-do list. Now I need to start roughing out an outline for my paper, "Sensory dimensions to healing cult in the Graeco-Roman East: the Asklepieia at Pergamon and at Kos."

Of course, the contemplate sensory experience is impossible to begin to discuss in a short paper. I'll be looking at the sense-experience of entering the two sanctuaries, along the monumental road and through the propylon at Pergamon, and through the monumental entryway at Kos (concerning which the internet has not been helpful in the way of plans). I will be relying on the phenomenology of Christopher Tilley, whose quote from 1994's A Phenomenology of Landscape has proven very useful to my thinking:

"Perceptual space is the egocentric space perceived and encountered by individuals in their daily practices. The centre of such a space is grounded in individual perception of distances and directions, natural objects and cultural creations. This space is always relative and qualitative. Distance and direction are perceived as near or far, this way or that way, moving along one track or another. A perceptual space is one that links patterns of individual intentionality to bodily movement and perception. It is a space of personality, of encounter and emotional attachment. It is the constructed life-space of the individual, involving feelings and memories giving rise to a sense of awe, emotion, wonder or anguish in spatial encounters. Such a space may as often as not be felt rather than verbalised. It creates personal significances for an individual in his or her bodily routines - places remembered and places of affective importance." [p16]

Space affects. It creates in the one who experiences it both attitudes and emotions, even receptiveness to different states of being. The act of approaching a healing sanctuary becomes more affecting when the built or natural landscape induces a sense of awe. Perhaps a receptiveness to being-healed, or to thinking oneself healed.

I'm hoping to find some material in Aelius Aristides to add to my considerations. I have twenty-five minutes for the paper, so I can't really write more than 2,500 words, I don't think. (Maybe 3,000, if I talk quickly. But I'll have a powerpoint, too.) So that gives me about a thousand words of "Describe What You See," a few hundred words for AA (who should at least have some sort of perspective), and a thousand words for the use of phenomenological analysis - the why and the how and the wherefore, as opposed to the what.

This sounds like a plan for going on with. So. Starting tomorrow afternoon, I will be reading AA, and on Wednesday I should be about ready to move on to "Describe What You See." (My photocopy bill is about to go through the roof. I can tell...)

But right now, I think I'll put on some vol-au-vents for supper and watch last week's Nikita.

Snow is really quite baffling.

Hopefully there will be sufficiently little of it tomorrow that I can pop into town and collect a last couple of books from the library before the Christmas closure. (I tried yesterday. Spent 2.5 hours not getting anywhere, due to SNOW which had COMPLETELY SCREWED our public transport system. The bus turned around and went back, eventually.)

If I can get that done, and this sneezy schnoz/icky cold clears up soonish, I'll have clear decks for making a productive go of the season of joy and good cheer. It seems to be a good way to spend the darkest part of the year: settle in with a stack of academic books and try to produce a workable Chapter 1 by mid February.

I also have a bunch of Greek to do, a couple of articles that hopefully someone will pay me for (money situation: not getting better, but I am not panicking yet, because something will turn up (it damn well better)) and some fiction to write so I can pretend I still think of myself as a writer. Which I do, damnit.

And the gym reopens over the holiday period, so just as soon as I get this cold gone, I can start reclaiming the (very large) stretch of ground I've lost.

We're supposed to get a thaw for Christmas. I'm looking forward to not shivering my socks off. I do not have the clothing for constant sub-zero temperatures. (And can't afford to buy new clothes till the end of February. So not yay.)

Anyway.

The present combination of the new editions of the Oxford World's Classics and the fact that The Book Depository seems to be offering most of them for more than three euros cheaper than one might find them in the bookshop is proving a nigh unbearable temptation to me.

I can't actually afford this temptation, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

So far, I've yet to read an infelicitous prose translation in the Oxford series. And so I seem to be gradually acquiring the classical literary education I've long been at pains to avoid. I'm going to have to read the major philosophical works and get my own copies to mark up. Which should be fun, provided I can get translations of Plato as readable as the translation of Seneca.

Not to mention Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aeschines - not in the Oxford or Penguin series, sadly, but lawcourt speeches are valuable evidence. I'm probably going to have to shell out for the Loeb Isocrates, since he is the miraculously disappearing translation in the library.

There are, fortunately, a couple of translations of Celsus On Medicine on the internet, since he is next to impossible to find in print. Galen, on the other hand? Finding the majority of his titles - seriously, the man was insanely productive of treatises - is going to be deeply unfun. I might have to scrape together the money to go sit in the Bodleian or the British Library for a couple of weeks, to avoid having to interlibrary loan copious amounts of material.

What I'm doing right now is hunting for mentions of doctors and/or healing deities in the literary sources. There's not actually a whole hell of a lot of them that I've found so far: a little - famously - in Aristophanes' Wealth concerning the Asclepion at Athens; a mention of Asclepius at the end of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, the useless doctor in Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus... so far, that's it. I still have quite a lot of reading to do, of course. Pausanias, among others - including the lawcourt speeches and the rest of Cicero - still lies before me.

This moderate survey of the literary sources is to be accompanied by an attempt to get to grips with the archaeological material, primarily at Athens, Corinth, Epidauros, Cos, and Lebena - and I need to track down healing sanctuaries from Roman sites and perhaps Asia Minor, if I can find Asclepeia in those places.

The goal is to have something that resembles a plan of action by February. At which point, I need to consider my research questions - primarily the interaction of 'medicine' and 'healing' and their coexistence (?) in the social and cultural milieu - again, and see what sort of progress I'm making then.

In order to keep myself honest, I'm going to be writing about my thesis (un)progress here fairly regularly. It may get even more boring in these parts in the coming weeks. On the other hand, there may actually be cool bits of icky history. Who knows?

I'm done.

Final corrections have been made. Dangling participles have been undangled. Split infinitives have been spliced into proper formation. My supervisor says, Well structured and, You probably don't suck (I paraphrase).

File has been saved as .pdf to stop it repaginating every time I so much as think about it. There are five illustrations, sixty-one pages, and one hundred and thirty-two footnotes. And all that remains is to get three copies printed and bound.

I am done.

It's weird. When I hand this in, I will have offically completed 65% of the work required for my degree. And assuming I get a reasonable mark for it (the amount of work I put in, I damn well hope I get a II.1), I'd have to fail my exams outright not to graduate with an honours degree.

That's strangely reassuring. Because I might still fuck things up? But I have yet to actually fail an exam to which I have shown up.

It's so weird not to have a thesis to do anymore. I think I'm going to take until Thursday to get used to this, before I start fretting about the Next Thing.

If anyone ever desires to know about the cult of Isis in Greece in the Hellenistic period, I offer you an extensive bibliography.

Dunand and Bricault are probably best for an overview, as long as you can read French. Zabkar's final chapter discusses the praise hymns in some detail. Dow is fabulous on the Egyptian cults at Athens, even though the article is getting on for over seventy years old. And Mikalson is available online.

( Bibliography )

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Okay. That's it. I'm going to take myself off and play videogames or read books till Monday.

4. Hellenisation, Hybridisation, and Trends in Hellenistic Religion.

Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell, On Mythology and the Individual, [Lecture 1A, 20:42], 1997.


( Read more... )

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Now all I have to do is put in my maps and plans, and write my bibliographical essay. Or just a bibliography. We'll see how ambitious I feel.

3. The Image of Isis

The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
- Ezra Pound, "Affirmations IV: As for Imagisme," 1915

( Read more... )

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Okay. One last push. And then I can post the conclusion in the morning.

2. The Archaeological Record

History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of a half-built villa abandoned by a bankrupt builder.
- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, 1910

( Read more... )

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I've reached my Designated Halfway Rest Point. Brief stoppage, and straight on till morning. Or at least, till all the damn citations are bloody well cited.

1. The historical background and the aims of this study.

Le premier pas, mon fils, que l'on fait dans le monde, est celui dont depend le reste de nos jours.
- Voltaire, L'Indiscret, 1725.

( Read more... )

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Well, that's a small fraction done. I ain't sleeping till it's over.