In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

One theme that runs through Becoming God, though, is the one suggested in the title—that for its Greek practitioners, philosophy was a way of reaching (and not simply, as I say above, “thinking about”) the divine. Here’s a whiff of the interview:

NS: Is Heraclitus reminding us—as some might chastise—that secularity carries in it the arrogant, even dangerous aspiration to become a god?

PLM: If he is reminding us of this, then so too is nearly every other pagan Greek philosopher. Many of them saw philosophy as a quest for divinity. First, though, we have to be clear what we mean by “secularity,” as before, reminding ourselves of the threat of anachronism when we’re using it to discuss ancient Greeks. With that proviso, though, we can ask something like this: Was Reason untethered to traditional religion liable to promote megalomania? There were certainly advocates of traditional Greek piety who said so. Pindar, for example, wrote: “Do not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals.” His warning came in the midst of the story of Bellerophon, who plummeted to his death after attempting to reach the dwelling of the gods on his winged horse.

The Greek philosophers largely ignored the warnings of the poets. Their arrogance—which we see reflected in modern philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger—makes us nervous, and rightly so. We become still more nervous when we detect it in our political leaders. The French revolutionaries substituted a statue of Reason for the altar in Notre Dame, right around the time that heads started to roll. That said, there was a parallel arrogance in the Divine Right of Kings, which arguably caused as much suffering as has revolutionary zeal, so I’m not so sure the secular version is any worse than its religious counterpart.

If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t know her, there’s a blockbuster historical epic movie about Hypatia (though it has scored only limited distribution in the U.S.). And, for those of you who don’t trust blockbuster historical epic movies, I’ve got a review of it on Religion Dispatches today:

Hearing about Agora’s success in Spain last year—the highest-grossing film of the year, sweeping up awards—couldn’t help but bring to my mind the empty insides of so many of that country’s churches, still charred after the various anti-clerical mobs of the last few centuries. I wasn’t the only one to make that association. With predictable ressentiment, an open letter came to Amenábar from the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, a Catholic watchdog in Spain, warning him: “Your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society.”

American “Catholic evangelist” Fr. Robert Barron adds in his Catholic New World review, “I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians.” One can only hope that it’s not a good enough movie to drive people to the streets.

In an interview with the New York Times, though, Amenábar turned the tables on his pious critics. “Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” he explained. “Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.” In this respect, at least, his sentiments have historical basis.

Keep reading to find out why.

Over the years I’ve used the season of Lent as a sort of laboratory for experiments with truth. Perhaps that’s not the most properly penitential way to go about these 40 days of fasting, which should be more outwardly directed than inwardly, calling us out of ourselves to service, repentance, giving, and recognition of our own fragile contingency.

My experiment this year was going vegan—eating no animal products at all, whenever possible. And this isn’t the first time. I did it also one Lent a few years ago along with several of my then-housemates, all of different faiths. That time, for me, it was difficult. Of all things, I couldn’t stop missing cottage cheese and probably splurged like crazy when Easter came.

This year couldn’t have been more different. I never once missed not being able to gobble down a slice of pizza or guzzle a glass of milk. A few baked goods with eggs in them might have been tempting, but that’s as far as it went. In fact, I loved being vegan. I’m not quite attentive enough to my body to know the difference in that regard (so brainwashed with Platonic-Pauline flesh-hating as I must be by now). But in my heart, I suppose you would have to call it, it gladdened me enormously not to be consuming the produce of other creatures. Closer, eating felt, to the hope of living nonviolently in the world.

The difference, undoubtedly, was all in the preparation leading up to this Lent. First, of course, was the not-so-subtle nudging from my mother over the preceding few months. For nutritional reasons above all, she has taken dairy out of her diet and has been rather evangelical about the idea. Intellectually, the nutritional reasons don’t do much for me, but more subconsciously, maternal pressure does wonders.

Along with that came some conversations with my former UCSB colleague Aaron Gross, a remarkable scholar and activist. For the Brooklyn Rail, I covered the launch event for his organization, Farm Forward, which is working to end factory farming. Aaron brought to my attention the deep moral and ecological bankruptcy of the animal farming industry—even to the point that the infrastructure no longer exists for truly sustainable practices at a large scale if someone wanted to try them.

Trailing on that, then, came more conversations with my friend Bryan, a fellow writer and passionate environmentalist. While my tendency is always to come at difficult social problems with novel, Yankee-ingenuity approaches, he puts his trust in simplicity and restraint. Not enough people today are willing to recognize, as Bryan does, that technology will not save us until we save ourselves. The upshot of his attitude is: we have to treasure the things we need and happily put aside the things we don’t. For him, this is less a matter of personal discipline than plain sense.

Comparing this year to the last time makes me realize how much preparation matters. It made the difference between 40 days of exhausting torture and 40 days of happy sacrifice. Actually, preparation is what Lent itself is all about—building ourselves in anticipation of the resurrection at Easter, ensuring we can experience, as fully as possible, its meaning. To those who would say that people are nothing but gut-level, instinct-processing machines, this Lent gave me an answer. Yes, perhaps we are gut-level, instinct-processing machines, but we are also much more. What we learn, think, and discuss matters enormously. Through these, guts and instincts can be calibrated and satisfied—not even necessarily through some dualist super-mind from outside, but by the resources our desires themselves have at the ready. The desire for compassion happened to have been built up strong enough by my friends, in this case, to overcome the desire for cheese.

Lent is over, and I guess I’ll be going back to my usual leniency: most-of-the-time vegetarianism, though this time with most-of-the-time veganism added on too. If there’s one thing I’d like to share about this experience, it goes to those who, when I said I was going vegan, said, “Oh, I could never do that.” Yes, you can, and a zillion other things. We can change the way we live, together and with the planet. It just takes preparation.

You know how people nowadays, when traveling especially, need to take a picture of everything just to be sure they’ve experienced it? Maybe they actually look at all those pictures. Or some of them. But isn’t the driving force much more that sneaking feeling at the moment of capture, a dizziness with experience that makes one want to plant it solidly in the wet-but-drying concrete of a digital camera, consequence-free, yet consequence-ridden?

I remember, especially, going to see the Mayan pyramids in Guatemala and Mexico almost four years ago. At the time I still made a point of not carrying a camera and drawing pictures whenever I saw something I really needed to experience. The extra time it took to draw provided the opportunity to sit there and watch how people encountered these un-encounter-able, incomprehensible ancient things. Click, then keep on walking. It is finished, as Jesus once said. The great event, captured in a little box, freeing the person to move on to the next one. But with all this great power of capturing we have, in brilliant color, 10 megapixels of detail, and optional video, is the eroding ontology of the unaided senses. The things seen, heard, and felt without the camera become less real, less sure. Right?

Certainly, praised be Twitter. Compared to the camera, it has got almost zero bandwith to show for itself. Yet still, with 140 lines of text, it has the power to define an ontology—a theory of being—all its own.

Is something real if it hasn’t been put on Twitter? It sounds like a crazy question, but after only a few weeks tweeting I have caught myself, in the thrall of experience, feeling the urge to tweet it. The moment was too much on its own. It would build something, inside my skin, that I didn’t know what to do with except broadcast. Is this merely the urge to self-expression, something as ancient as the ancients? Or something new and frenetic, something twitchy and pathetic?

Twitter and its 140 lines are a visceral (or anti-visceral) reminder that we cling to these technological prosthetics of experience not because they make experience richer but because they make it more manageable. They reduce the bandwidth, even while increasing the traffic. How many times, as the years go by, I have felt the need to repeat this conservative, cranky passage to myself! The god Thamus, as reported by Socrates, as reported by Plato in Phaedrus 274C-275B, on the god Thoth’s invention of writing:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.? Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are not part of themselves will discourage the use of their own memory within them.? You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Okay, you’ve read your Socrates, now you can watch the filmstrip. It’s funny.

It’s kinda bad. I’m obsessed with The Row Boat’s traffic. It has become a daily (eek!) ritual-cum-addiction to troll over to Google Analytics in the morning and see how many people have been looking at me and from where they are coming. In some way or another, the Google oracle can set the tone for my whole day.

Tuesday, on a whim, I published a little post about my wallet. Since I usually try to keep to more straight-faced and world-historical things, writing about the wallet felt a little odd. I discussed my motivations in an introductory paragraph:

A friend recently suggested that I write a blog post about my wallet. Seemed like a good idea to me. When you look around at the literature on the internet about how to improve blog traffic, one of the suggestions that often comes up is to teach something that readers can use. And since The Row Boat is, by and large, self-indulgent reflection on deathless questions, the chance to write about something actually useful is not to be passed up. It’s a way of giving back to my readers—a dribble of self-help in exchange for all your thought and patience.

The results far exceeded my expectations. That day, thanks mostly to the computer programming thread at Reddit (the post had some mention of certain data structures), The Row Boat received more than ten times its usual traffic. There were several very instructive comments and emails from strangers, as well as some delightful ones from friends. The next day, it was nearly all gone.

One temptation in all this is to lash out about the dumb readers. I’ve been writing all these deep and brilliant reflections for years, toiling in obscurity, and the thing that brings you all out of the woodwork is a post on WALLETS? Idiots. All of you. But I won’t do that. Anyway, some of the reactions I got were genuinely clever, and I’ll always be an advocate of cleverness of any kind. Plus, whenever there’s a temptation to get mad, behind it there’s usually an opportunity to learn something. Or to remember something—Plato taught, after all, that all learning is really recollection.

Like this: it isn’t everybody who cares about navel-gazing speculative writing. But everybody’s gotta have a wallet.

This passage from Henry Miller’s Big Sur has always stuck with me:

To those who protest that they are not understood, not appreciated, not accepted—how many of us ever are?—all I can say is: “Clarify your position.”

Quite a statement from a man who claimed not to revise. But it is a fantastic call to persistence. Keep trying, keep crafting. Keep reaching to figure out how you can communicate what needs to be communicated, to make the world realize why you think all this is so important, if, in fact, you do.

So here’s what I’ve thought to take from the Great Wallet Spike. Would love your suggestions for more:

• Continue on doing what I’ve been doing because here I stand and can do no other. Never let The Row Boat stop being a labor of love. Getting a bunch of visits (with a very bad bounce rate, too) on a single post doesn’t mean much anyway.
• Bear readers in mind. Have something to offer them. Writing is not just a gift being offered, but also one being received.
• Try writing more how-to’s. They’re fun. They’ll be collected in the algorithms tag.

Thank you, always, for stopping by and reading. Remember, I’ll be watching you!

The gist of Tompkins’s view of the universe comes out in his preface to Mysteries:

We live in a Dark Age, and have, for several thousand years. It is time for a renaissance—with the wisdom of the past.

… Augustus Le Plongeon calls architecture an unerring standard of the degree of civilization reached by a people, “as correct a test of race as is language, and more easily understood, not being subject to change.” If it is true that a nation’s capital reflects its standards of architecture, we risk being judged by the phony cyclopean walls of the Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives unless we engender architects sensitive to the cosmic values of geometry, such as R. Buckminster Fuller would envisage.

The ancient civilizations attached great importance to numbers as an exact language in which physical and spiritual ideals could be expressed and preserved; hence, they built numbers into their buildings.

Next, the book jumps into nearly two hundred riveting pages on the story of how Europeans gradually came to grasp the significance of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization, from Cortes to the Romantic archaeologists. Tompkins relishes in details and tangents, which come out especially in the extended picture captions, sometimes spanning entire pages. Nearly every page includes a picture or two, whether it be a period drawing of Tenochtitlan as the conquistadors saw it or a portrait showing just how handsome Alexander von Humboldt was. The relationship between text and image has much in common with the hardcover version of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, an old favorite of mine.

Where Tompkins really shines, though, are the chapters grouped under the heading “scientific analysis.” Here, charting all sorts of alignments among the pyramids against geography and the stars, he spells out his conviction in evidences that something very deep indeed was at work in the ancient structures. Unfortunately, these are the parts least engrossing to my temperament, so for today I am content to merely admire their form and effect rather than delving into the actual claims. Over the years I’ve seen some arguments from trustworthy authorities that Tompkins’s claims of ancient sophistication are overblown. So I can’t let myself take it all too seriously, only to enjoy the accomplishment.

Throughout the foregoing, Mysteries drops hints here and there of similarities with other ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as the occasional mention of Atlantis. In the book’s final section of chapters, though, Tompkins takes on these concerns outright, without flinching. Here he reveals himself as an all-out New Age enthusiast (see his aptly-named son Ptolemy’s memoir on the subject). Ancient Mesoamerican civilization, Tompkins believes, was likely seeded by seafaring Phoenicians who came by way of the mythical continent of Atlantis. Part of the evidence for this he takes from the visions of the great twentieth century psychic Edgar Cayce. I kept wondering why his credulity fell short of that beloved occult fad of the 70s, ancient, alien astronaut theory.

Regardless of how silly this all might sound to the sober-minded among us, I promise that Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids makes fantastic sick-day reading. Maybe even healthy-day. What one has to love about Tompkins, in addition to his virtuosity with words and pictures, is his powerful sense of trust in cosmic truth and in that truth’s ability to make us better. This, combined with the gusto of a spy, makes knowledge into life’s greatest adventure. From the dedication of Mysteries, one can imagine Tompkins at work, an Indiana Jones who knows that truth comes only to those willing to get their hands dirty.

To the staff of the Library of Congress, guarantors of free access to the sources, without which enjoyment of the First Amendment to the Constitution could be reduced to an exercise in vacuo.

I begin, mercilessly, with a quotation from Plato. Fitting treatment for someone I later almost call a Straussian elitist (only to quickly back down on the charge in admiration for Novak).

In Book X of Laws, Plato sighs, “Who can be calm when he is called upon to prove the existence of the gods?” Still, he concludes, “it must be done.”

Note: I have generally insisted on using the spelling “dialog” in all cases instead of “dialogue,” but most editors, including those at RD, demand the latter. I understand the need for conformity with general usage. But according to the OED, both are valid. And to me, the “ue” just reeks of the feel-goody fluff that is most polite interreligious conversation.

There is always this problem in doing historical work: what in our minds today was thinkable then, and what was not? For instance, there have been ongoing debates about whether the ancients were capable of atheism, or whether true atheism, as we understand it, is a recent invention of dour Victorians (or somesuch). What Plato says about naturalism here is as Victorian as can be.

But first, his moving sighs of woe at the youth who fail to accept the existence of the gods and thus venture into crime:

Who can be calm when he is called upon to prove the existence of the Gods? Who can avoid hating and abhorring the men who are and have been the cause of this argument; I speak of those who will not believe the tales which they have heard as babes and sucklings from their mothers and nurses, repeated by them both in jest and earnest, like charms, who have also heard them in the sacrificial prayers, and seen sights accompanying them,—sights and sounds delightful to children,—and their parents during the sacrifices showing an intense earnestness on behalf of their children and of themselves, and with eager interest talking to the Gods, and beseeching them, as though they were firmly convinced of their existence; who likewise see and hear the prostrations and invocations which are made by Hellenes and barbarians at the rising and setting of the sun and moon, in all the vicissitudes of life, not as if they thought that there were no Gods, but as if there could be no doubt of their existence, and no suspicion of their non-existence; when men, knowing all these things, despise them on no real grounds, as would be admitted by all who have any particle of intelligence, and when they force us to say what we are now saying, how can any one in gentle terms remonstrate with the like of them, when he has to begin by proving to them the very existence of the Gods? Yet the attempt must be made; for it would be unseemly that one half of mankind should go mad in their lust of pleasure, and the other half in their indignation at such persons.

Plato then assures the youths,

You and your friends are not the first who have held this opinion about the Gods. There have always been persons more or less numerous who have had the same disorder.

And continues with this incredible account of naturalism. He says he has known many who have taught this doctrine, though none of them has been able to maintain it until death. Since this comes in the context of a book on legislation, Plato is of course most concerned that naturalism makes the laws seem like mere human inventions rather than divine ordinances.

They say that fire and water, and earth and air, all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art, and that as to the bodies which come next in order,—earth, and sun, and moon, and stars,—they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate existences. The elements are severally moved by chance and some inherent force according to certain affinities among them—of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, or of soft with hard, and according to all the other accidental admixtures of opposites which have been formed by necessity. After this fashion and in this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only. Art sprang up afterwards and out of these, mortal and of mortal birth, and produced in play certain images and very partial imitations of the truth, having an affinity to one another, such as music and painting create and their companion arts. And there are other arts which have a serious purpose, and these co-operate with nature, such, for example, as medicine, and husbandry, and gymnastic. And they say that politics co-operate with nature, but in a less degree, and have more of art; also that legislation is entirely a work of art, and is based on assumptions which are not true.

Finally, and most significantly for me, he is aware of materialistic theories of religion. Again, they make him fear for the laws.

These people would say that the Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them.

Good things of which to keep note.

There was wonderful thing about it, though: it was in seeing The Love Guru that I saw—witnessed, experienced—the trailer for Wall-E, which, after a week of fabulous anticipation, I finally got to see last night. The feelings it left in me are still working themselves through my system, so I have few words. It didn’t hurt, of course, that I am a big sucker for movies with spaceships and robots and imagined futures. But more, from first seeing the preview, was this sense of feelings even greater than the things of them movie themselves: friendship, loneliness, melancholy, gratitude. Platonism has never been much my practice—the belief that transcendent Forms are the truth beyond the things of the world. Yet, though I enjoyed watching the movie, the things that went on in it somehow seemed unable to measure up to the Forms that they simultaneously were making me aware of. They pointed to an abstract perfection, and thus a cause for deep, deep longing amidst a world that can never embody such perfection. What powers has Pixar managed to spin into its marketing schemes? Is this crass manipulation? Or divine truth, or both?

I woke up this morning in tears—also not my usual practice.