diss(ertation) track | a didactic poem
(on the paradox of studying myth within the field of classics in the USA)
My mind’s brought to speak on those bodies in new forms
Which the gods’ve wrought through turning novelties into norms
Those mythical fabrics that dress up how we believe
And sound across our planet in a synaesthetic weave
Find that over in America there is a strange segregation
Between the ancient and the classical in mythic regulation…
When getting folks interested in the classical monoliths
There are few more tempting draws than ancient warfare and myths
The former unsurprising — for America is an empire in conjunction
With what the British Empire started in all its glorious dysfunction
Myth is a more interesting figure — it’s traveled far throughout the years
Spreading our most obvious desires and deepest latent fears
Attractive to a young country still making up its tales
Since our ideological record is just a history of our fails:
Manifest destiny, doctrine of discovery, to subjugate all who were here
Capitalism via the slave trade to loot wealth up through this year
War in Asia this past century helped seal our imperial hold
And yet our primary mythology’s unable to keep itself up in the fold¹
The myth of White supremacy has held us bound half a millennium
And America’s stroked its ego far more diligently than a perineum
Violence, money, and skin tone are where our beliefs are found
In all our tastes — from visual aesthetics to the segregation of sound²
So imagine finding ancient myth as an inquisitive youth
A set of stories and fanciful tales to fabricate a truth
That’s Greco-Roman myth in its strange hybrid forms
As it gets told to us as part of our own Western Civilized norms
Thus you follow the mythic thread, a spider down a spool
Ariadne to Philomela to Penelope in the wool
A tricky Arachne collaging a fabulation so spectacular³
Realizing the presence of these various myths in your vernacular:
Greek and Latin cognates dancing across a Mercurial tongue
Creating textured variety as a Cereal for the young
Through nature — the Hyacinth, Crocus, Dianthus, and the Mint
To the periodic table and its dank Plutonian glint
Volcanoes gushing lava into deep Salacious seas
Pushing ships of Theseus through inquiring Odysseys
Erotic anxieties of Cupidinous erection
Historically hystericizing Venereal infection
Myths give the English language a taxonomic seal
(We have a whole medical condition around Achilles’ heel)
These figures become textiles through the fabrication of hands⁴
As Nike and Hermes — the gods are now brands
Staring at Medusa and the gaze of iniquity
From lessons of Narcissism in the mirror of antiquity⁵
Teasing through conflations of the Roman and the Greco
With Bacchanalian Panic in a European Echo
From all these receptions across thousands of years
Of Chthonic, Olympian, and Pelagic spheres
Ever-hungry for more of this classical gleaning
You’d give anything to cross that threshold of meaning⁶
‘Til you reach the gate to be let through at last
When you first start learning Latin in your local high school class!
Dazzling new meanings and word placement elastic
As you dance through gerundives and passive periphrastic
Learning the tales that the Romans would tell
Through trivial Certamen and nerdy JCL⁷
Then off to undergrad to learn more in depth about narrative
In folklore, mythology and fairytales comparative
Myth is the heroic savior of the dying classical field
A subject always drawing in bright minds for scholarly yield
Yet crossing the threshold over into the grad
Myth is treated like some gauche embarrassing fad
“Too broad, too sprawling across space, time, and locus!”
The professors will always tell you as they nudge you to a focus
You could study myth-writers in their individual style
Or art history, philosophy, or the archive as a file
Iconography’s your best bet–at least then you get to see ‘em
As you consider the industrial complex of the modern day museum
These myths operate as the field’s primary honey trap
Before we get hit with our academy’s neoliberal money slap
So if you want to study myth there’s only four acknowledged pairs
To provide you theory and act as guides through all of these affairs.
First the German forefathers of Müller and Heyne
Locking comparative mythology into the classical arcana
Then our psychoanalytic daddies of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud
Reflecting mythological aspects into our subconscious void⁸
But it’s the romantic poetic archetypes that spark young minds to ramble
Through the boughs and thousand faces in the words of Frazer and Campbell⁹
Then philology became dickmatized when it met those most nifty
Structuralists over in France coming out of the 1950s
Myth followed suit at philology’s behest
Bart(hes)ering in Structuralism’s carefully crafted nest.
The call may in fact be coming from inside the house
When the last time we updated our theory was Levi-Strauss¹⁰
(There could be inspiration within the cosmogonies of d’Huy¹¹
But that book came out last year — far too soon for this field to see)
And due to this utter lack of conception
The field has slapped on the band-aid of reception
As a way to pull together all the mythic disparate parts
(An access point to prove classics ain’t snooty ‘bout the arts)
But the reality of reception begins to look us in the face
When we realize how much reception we’re practicing in this place
The philosophy of the DJ — crate-digging through the past
To remix ancient ideas into some new flow that might last
Though not always knowing what one is unearthing
Nor endless potential that this might be birthing
And not always mindful of gaps we’ve misplaced
With genres conflated–whole flows now erased!
(Plus can’t we acknowledge it’s a little bit too sick
That we barely discuss how much our myth is music?)
Myth’s how we encourage interest in this classical axis
But then ridicule it’s potential since we like theory, not praxis
So instead you major in Plato and his strange mythical assertations¹²
But guess what they want you to teach once you’re past that dissertation?
Myth — it’s the easiest ancient class for the administration to sell
Because capitalism rules academia in this neoliberal hell
So myth is a subject that’s enforced with undergrad
Hence the reason it’s blown up on the internet as a fad
Digital epistemologies now head this theoretical charge
Leading to an ideological break by and large
So when will philology finally come to the conclusion
That leaving myth on the ground at the grad level’s a delusion?
We might also need theorists beyond eight white men
To take another look at these stories again
Myths have a liquid stickiness that braids itself into nets¹³
Of mycelial whispers around unspoken debts¹⁴
Coloring itself outside the lines of those white-washing paints
From a smoothed marble antiquity in neoclassical constraints
Myth’s present in the dynamics of the field’s folly-dramatics
And persists to spite our myths, bursting out through polychromatics
Reception’s been the gateway for us to hold the rabble back
Yet at the margins of the field we see myths utilized for attack:
Like when radical Angela Davis was politically locked away
And the American mythmaking system came out in full force to play
June Jordan offered empathy from a moonwrit Plato’s cave¹⁵
While Toni Morrison smacked a white spectatrix into an early grave
By declaring her gaze myopic and ending her quick and fresh:
“Because the other thing about the Cyclop was [his] taste for human flesh.”¹⁶
Or when Alice Walker went to Florida and started lying through her teeth
To revivitate Zora’s folkways through praxis and belief¹⁷
Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove fly at the edges of our conception
Through their poetic interpretations relegated to reception¹⁸
Contestation over meaning in the midst of a heated fray
(No wonder we love ancient myth and war within the US of A)
In the multiplying pathways myth inevitably takes
I find myself drawn to these community stakes
Black women in particular use it as a defense
From the racialized mythologies enfolding to condense
And yet the field cannot consider these chromatic¹⁹ concoctions
Since we’ve cornered ourselves in our theoretical options
But the issue might in fact come from within ourselves
The “class” of the classics that’s kept us on shelves
The worth of that term is one we’re unwilling to let go
And what worth means in this time is only going to grow…
This grip that it holds on us will only become stronger
(Believe me I know: I’ve been a classical musician far longer)
Worth is the impetus on which belief hinges
Expressed across America in all manner of tinges
Is that why we give myths such hypocritical grief
Because our work is mostly colored by our classical belief?
How much longer can we pimp them out and pretend that they don’t matter?
What stories, lies, and myths do we serve up our students on a platter?
Why can we afford to ignore the roots of our issues as they rot?
Because precisely how much time do y’all think we’ve actually got?
Why is it so hard for us to look at this ever-present conflation?
“It’s too broad!” (like our entire purpose isn’t centuries of communication)
So we clearly have some issues that we need to work through
Because I don’t care what we should be — what do we want to do?
Be defined by necessity in lieu of our desires?
Just as we’re all bound by laws to harm, money, and liars?²⁰
Abolition’s in our roots — can you dig it? Feel the beats
Pulsing out from in the void to get us dancing through the streets.
So how many more canons of messy execution
Before we sync up in symphonic revolution?²¹
[1] For more on “folds” in the theoretical sense, see “The Smooth and the Striated” in Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)
[2] For more on the specific segregation of racialized musical genres see Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (2010). I am also deeply influenced by the research of Dr. Matthew Morrison and his work on the concept of Blacksound as an aural counterpart to the practice of Blackface.
[3] My use of fabulation follows Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) in considering the intrinsic role between Greco-Roman myth and sexual violence, hence her pairing with Arachne. For collage aesthetic and mythmaking see Rachel Farebrother’s The Collage Aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance (2009), especially the chapters concerning Zora Neale Hurston
[4] For the application of Deleuze and Guattari’s folds in the broader sense of fashion, see Stephen D. Seely’s “How Do You Dress a Body Without Organs? Affective Fashion and Nonhuman Becoming” (2013)
[5] See especially Jean-Pierre Vernant’s “In the Mirror of Medusa” in Garber and Vickers’ The Medusa Reader (2003)
[6] A recap of all the mythological English terms I used: mercurial from the god Mercury, cereal from Ceres, the flowers that take their name from metamorphoses of mythological figures (Hyacinthus, Dianthus, Crocus, Minthe), plutonian from Pluto, volcano from Vulcan, salacious from Salacia, a reference to the philosophical debate around the Ship of Theseus, odyssey from Odysseus, erotic from Eros, cupidinous from Cupid, venereal from Venus, the impact of the story of the death of Achilles on the medical field, the popular brands Nike and Hermes which were respectively named after the goddess of victory and the god of communication and traveling, Medusa follows the brands since her iconography is used in fashion (particularly Versace) and to match with the visual aspect that the term narcissism gets from being attached to the myth of Narcissus, bacchanalia from Bacchus, panic from Pan, Europe from Europa, and finally echo from Echo.
[7] The Junior Classical League is a part of the broader American Classical League, specifically for middle and high school students taking classes centered on the ancient world. Certamen is essentially Latin Jeopardy, buzzers and all.
[8] See Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Carl Jung’s “Psychological Aspects of the Kore” (1951), and following their tradition is Karl Kerenyi’s extensive work on Greek religion and ancient myth.
[9] James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
[10] Rolande Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked (1964)
[11] Julien d’Huy’s Cosmogonies: La Préhistoire des mythes (2020)
[12] I’ve deliberately misspelled this word not only as a way to fit the rhyme scheme, but as a riff on a section regarding how words and titles sound in Plato’s Cratylus around the idea of Persephone’s ever-changing name across Greek religion: “Pherepapha, or something of that sort, would therefore be the correct name of the goddess, because she is wise and touches that which is in motion — and this is the reason why Hades, who is wise, consorts with her, because she is wise — but people have altered her name, attaching more importance to euphony than to truth, and they call her Pherephatta.” (404d)
[13] For more on liquidity in the ancient world see Dakis Joannu and Brooke Holmes’ Liquid Antiquity (2017)
[14] For more on the relationship between fungal mycelia and mythology see my own “Mycorrhizal Mythophony: Towards Black (&) Classical Myth Studies” here on Corona Borealis!
[15] June Jordan’s “Poem for Angela”
[16] “Who is Angela Davis?” by Toni Morrison in the New York Times, October 29, 1972
[17] For more on the resonances of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker’s The Color Purple regarding their portrayal of Persephone, see Elizabeth T. Hayes’ “‘Like Seeing You Buried’: Persephone in The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple” in Images of Persephone: Feminist readings in Western Literature (1994). For more on Persephone as a figure that Black women writers turn to, see Tracey Walters’ African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (2007)
[18] See Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Anniad” in her Annie Allen (1949) and Rita Dove’s Mother Love (1995)
[19] For more on broader societal anxiety around color, see David Batchelor’s Chromophobia (2000). I must cite those who have considered these alternate forms of colorism from antiquity to the present, as they have guided me as I’ve attempted to find my own wayward path: Tracey Walters, who’s book on Black women writers and the classical tradition got me interested in grad school in the first place; Shelley Haley’s fearless leadership as a Black feminist classicist who’s stayed insistent on the importance of critical race theory; Sasha-Mae Eccelston’s work with Eos; Jackie Murray’s patient mentorship; Emily Greenwood’s persistent deliberation; Patrice Rankine’s tender unveilings; Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s deeply grounding exasperation and exacerbation; Sarah Derbew’s willingness to pick/t through entangled epistemologies of excess–but most of all to my fellow Black students and non-collegiate educators as we all are still finding our paths and attempting to for(a)ge through our own theories.
[20] Read as: “harmony and lyres” as a pun on the ancient Greek word “nomoi” meaning both laws and lyre songs, a conflation exploited in Plato’s Laws. For more on the role of consonance “symphoneia” in the Laws, see Marcus Folch’s The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato’s Laws (2015)
[21] Following Toni Morrison’s pun on can(n)on in her 1988 essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” as a way to get classicists to finally think about motive, and what motivates us using these classical texts. For the use of new musical genres towards political protest centered on the Motown song “Dancing in the Streets” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, see Suzanne E. Smith’s Dancing in the Streets: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (2001). For more on syncing up for revolution, see Daphne A. Brooks’ Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (2021).
