The layering of history. How arts and letters seize upon the events of a
moment to explore a question such as the degree to which a life is
determined or free. Sometimes we are given these lessons in a pure form.
Disaster has long been a location for reflecting on fate--how much and
whether I deserve what happens to me.
Mike Tyson spoke to us after his fight as if from the podium of a time
machine. What he had to say would have been utterly clear to Aeschylus
and Sophocles; the tragedy evolved out of a tradition whose purpose was to
explore just such states of mind--when the hero is overcome by a certain
blindness, a temporary loss of control leading to actions that later are
cause of regret, retribution, and reversal of fortune.
The special interest in this case for the emerAgency is the beacon set
flashing by the language involved: the macaronic pun. The Greek term for
what happened to Tyson, or to the heroes of many a tragedy, is ATH (in
caps) or __ate__ (ah-tay?). The translation is, for the individual
person, blindness, foolishness; for a collective or group, calamity,
disaster. The Tyson-Holyfield fight was a disaster, manifesting __ate__.
You see the pun, of course. In most of the commentary the jokes took up
the biting of the ear to refer to Tyson's attempt to eat Holyfield ("they
shoulda fed the guy before the fight"; "best to work with vegetarians"
etc). Tyson ate Holyfield, at least his ear. He ATH him. It was a
disaster. Later, the doomed man apolgized and explained that he did not
know what came over him. Aeschylus would have known (it was __ate__).
The public reaction to the event is a measure of how different our
understanding of destiny is from that of the Greek tragedies. Where should
we look now for an equivalent for our own moment? What name do we have
for defining our relationship to blindness and calamity? These are
questions for the emerAgency.
best
Greg Ulmer * * * * * * *
http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/