The Ages of Man

From Wikipedia:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man

 

Hesiod's Five Ages

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Silver Age

Virgil Solis, The Iron Age

The first extant account of the successive ages of humanity comes from the Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days (lines 109–201). His list is:

• Golden Age – The Golden Age is the only age that falls within the rule of Cronus. Created by the immortals who live on Olympus, these humans were said to live among the gods, and freely mingled with them. Peace and harmony prevailed during this age. Humans did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to a very old age but with a youthful appearance and eventually died peacefully. Their spirits live on as "guardians". Plato in Cratylus (397e) recounts the golden race of men who came first. He clarifies that Hesiod did not mean men literally made of gold, but good and noble. He describes these men as daemons upon the earth. Since δαίμονες (daimones) is derived from δαήμονες (daēmones, meaning knowing or wise), they are beneficent, preventing ills, and guardians of mortals.
• Silver Age – The Silver Age and every age that follows fall within the rule of Cronus' successor and son, Zeus. Men in the Silver age lived for one hundred years under the dominion of their mothers. They lived only a short time as grown adults, and spent that time in strife with one another. During this Age men refused to worship the gods and Zeus destroyed them for their impiety. After death, humans of this age became "blessed spirits" of the underworld.
• Bronze Age – Men of the Bronze Age were hardened and tough, as war was their purpose and passion. Zeus created these humans out of the ash tree. Their armor was forged of bronze, as were their homes, and tools. The men of this Age were undone by their own violent ways and left no named spirits; instead, they dwell in the "dank house of Hades". This Age came to an end with the flood of Deucalion.
• Heroic Age – The Heroic Age is the one age that does not correspond with any metal. It is also the only age that improves upon the age it follows. It was the heroes of this Age who fought at Thebes and Troy. This race of humans died and went to Elysium.
• Iron Age – Hesiod finds himself in the Iron Age. During this age humans live an existence of toil and misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights with brother and the social contract between guest and host (xenia) is forgotten. During this age might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing; babies will be born with gray hair and the gods will have completely forsaken humanity: "there will be no help against evil."

Who Were the Gods? Do You Wanna Be A Bird?

It was a tough homework assignment by Moraline: Who were the Gods? Because he wasn't asking a straight-forward question, and he knew it.

No, the question of "Who were the Gods for the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus," is one thing.

Then, the question of "Who were the gods for the Inuit?"

Well, that was the trick question.

My guess is that Moraline was challenging the reader to re-arrange his vantage point. The Inuit had no gods. That term, "gods," isn't the word to use. No, better use "spirit," as does Carpenter.

If this is true, did Moraline ask the question to point out that the Inuit in fact had no gods? That the very structure and point of reference of "gods" had no relevance or meaning to the Inuit?

If so, Moraline's work points at a huge divide in human experience: those that had helping and hurting spirits, personal, changing things that were part of life and shared and understood as a community, something normal, sane, and adaptive; and then something bifurcating, estranging, and alienating: that of the omniscient, omnipotent, beyond time and space.

Moraline's initial reaction to my extra-terrestrial theory was: "Look, you don't even need to get there to get there." And that's true if you can point to helicopters in the Amazon today. We're there right now, is his point.

But I am going to be difficult and say: Yeah man, but what about, say, 8,000 years ago?

What's my point here? You have tales that Heidegger calls "orginary," coming out of ancient Ireland and Greece. Far-fetched, crazy-assed shit. Far before Homer, and across more than a few ancient cultures. You have a dark ages that lasted 2,000 years before Homer and Hesiod. It happened after a period of very advanced civilization on Earth (Sumerian, in particular). It happened after the Greeks already reached a level of state building. What followed afterwards was a loss of the ancient Greek language. Homer and Hesiod did not understand the Greek that had occurred 2,000 years before their time. But the Greek that was 2,000 years before their time was more complex.

That means that so much time had gone by in Greece that by the time Homer and Hesiod were literate, their ancestors were mythical and nearly unintelligible to them. Yet their ancestors had huge civilizations, huge governments, huge surpluses.2,000 years of primitive darkness had passed in the interim.

Hesiod comes out of nowhere and writes about basic ways human can survive. He says he hates the sea, and says how to gain independence by farming and storing. He warns of government and disputes.

This is some crazy talk of gods. It's a phenomenology of man's reaction to a radically different other, what I think is ancient man's reaction to super-modern technology. I understand the human protest against even paying attention to some high tech visit 8,000 years ago or even further back. Because the phenomenology of the matter would ax most of it to the epoche. You'd still point to the cabin in the wilderness, to the traditional family in the wilderness, and point out, correctly, a fucking space ship, a fucking so-called 'dominant' class, really can be tossed in the trash can with the tossers, with the sitters.

You ever hear a bull frog in the dark? 

Who Were the Gods?

Moraline's contribution to the answer was more significant than he realized. Because he took a phenomenological approach; Husserl would have been happy.

The natural attitude gives a blunt answer that makes impotent and meaningless man. The phenomenological attitude (of which I consider Moraline) liberates man.

There was a dominant class that arrived a long, long time ago. Whether they influenced or created man isn't clear. Hesiod says they were the great race--but he doesn't say they were the great race of men, as they weren't men, but Gods. And this leads one to recognize: the term 'god' means drastically different things.

You have the same story, at the same time, on other parts of Earth. You also have incredible and sudden advances in mathematics, language, 'government,' engineering, etc. Of course, all of this 3000 B.C--India, South America, China, Middle East, Ireland. Yes, the Irish. Once cave men, suddenly building landing strips 5000 years ago. 

It then vanished and reappeared.'It,' what was 'it.' Why did Hesiod's voice, coming from the 'dark ages,' so dark that humans didn't even have crude oil lamps, much less language? Why did an illiterate refugee suddenly write epic poetry? Why was Homer a contemporary of Hesiod? What were these men writing about, how did these men learn to write when the advanced language and culture of the Greeks was decimated? Note that the Greek of Homer and Hesiod was new. Language itself had been dead for 2000 years. How did it somehow come back?

Perhaps what Moraline uncovers is the hidden transcript of the individual. The Inuit, for example. They either were unlucky to wander to such a cold and hellish place, or for them the independence was worth the cold. My take is that the Inuit were not idiotic, aimless wanderers. They got there and survived there because they did not want what they left. Scott speaks of the hill peoples of Asia, running from legibility.

Independent from what? It doesn't matter. Yes, they (the Inuit) are a community. But not dominated so easily by some force, perhaps what is called a force of legibility.

Yet to understand that the bully might have not been from Earth is something either new or ancient. Hesiod's account of the Gods agrees with the Irish, the Indians, the Hebrews, the Mayans, and Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Chinese. These are systemic tales, these are tales of sophisticated, organized violence. Being and Time suddenly is a clear account of the matter.

Who were the Gods? It depends on who you ask. Is your god your guiding spirit? Or is does your god strike you down with fire? Why is the aquifer of the Dead Sea radioactive?

Hills and deer

I run along a 10 mile path along the lake. Outside the lake you have the hills, and the hills are steep and beautiful. I rode past a local who was walking to the spring and after the traditional "Merry Christmas," he said "You got it, almost to the top." It was a wicked, steep hill. And then I saw the whole City and the river they call the lake and you would not know there is any bustle or hustle. I was soon lost in the hills. I asked a man in dread locks, walking with his family, how to get back. Of course, they asked me what I wanted to see. In my life, when lost, people always assume I am on a journey. "You can take the green belt, or you can head back to the spring," he said. The point was  don't miss anything.

I made it back across down the hills and past the river and over the bridge.

They came to the town for the energy, for the hills and the spring. The birds smile, and the deer are well-fed.

Roger Ebert and First Blood

"What we can't buy in this movie is the message. It's handled in too heavy-handed a way. Stallone plays a returned Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret skilled in the art of jungle survival and fighting, and after a small-town police force sadistically mishandles him, he declares war on the cops. All of this is set up in scenes of great physical power and strength and the central sections of the movie, with Stallone and the cops stalking each other through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, have a lot of authority. But then the movie comes down to a face-off between Stallone and his old Green Beret commander (Richard Crenna), and the screenplay gives Stallone a long, impassioned speech to deliver, a speech in which he cries out against the injustices done to him and against the hippies who demonstrated at the airport when he returned from the war, etc. This is all old, familiar material from a dozen other films clichés recycled as formula. Bruce Dern did it in “Coming Home” and William Devanein “Rolling Thunder”. Stallone is made to say things that would have much better been implied; Robert De Niro, in “Taxi Driver”, also plays a violent character who was obviously scarred by Vietnam, but the movie wisely never makes him talk about what happened to him. Some things are scarier and more emotionally moving when they're left unsaid. 

So the ending doesn't work in “First Blood”. It doesn't necessarily work as action, either. By the end of the film, Stallone has taken on a whole town and has become a one-man army, laying siege to the police station and the hardware store and exploding the pumps at the gas station. This sort of spectacular conclusion has become so commonplace in action movies that I kind of wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to see one end with a whimper rather than a bang. 

Until the last twenty or thirty minutes, however, “First Blood” is a very good movie, well-paced, and well-acted not only by Stallone (who invests an unlikely character with great authority) but also by Crenna and Brian Dennehy, as the police chief. The best scenes come as Stallone's on the run in the forest, using a hunting knife with a compass in the handle, and living off the land. At one point he's trapped on a cliffside by a police helicopter, and we really feel for this character who has been hunted down through no real fault of his own. We feel more deeply for him then, in fact, than we do later when he puts his grievances into words. Stallone creates the character and sells the situation with his presence itself. The screenplay should have stopped while it was ahead."

The Rambo Apple

"According to author David Morrell, the apple provided the name for the hero of his novel, First Blood, which gave rise to the Rambo film franchise. The novelist's wife brought home a supply of the fruit as he was trying to come up with a suitable name for the protagonist.^[6] It is uncertain whether David Morrell's wife brought home Rambos or Summer Rambos. Summer Rambos would have been much more common, but since his wife bought the apples at a roadside stand, either is possible.

James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, sentimentalized the Rambo in his poem, The Rambo-Tree which appeared in his 1902 collection The Book of Joyous Children.^[7] The poem includes the repeating chorus:
For just two truant lads like we,When Autumn shakes the rambo-tree
There's enough for you and enough for me
It's a long, sweet way across the orchard.

A similar sentiment was expressed by "Uncle Silas" in his column for the September 1907 issue of The American Thresherman: "What has become of the good old apples we used to eat in the long ago down on the farm? The Rambo, the best apple that ever grew in an orchard, is fruit vouchsafed only in memory. [In Missouri,] no apple was ever enjoyed like the Rambo.... A boy would go farther to swipe Rambo apples, and subject his pantaloons to greater exposure from ugly dogs than he would for any other kind, and boys know on which tree the best apples grow. A drink of cider without any fixin', made of Rambo apples, will go farther down and awake the molecules of mankind in a greater degree than any other kind of cider. The world is growing wiser, but not in raising Rambo apples."

The claim that the Rambo was the favorite apple of Johnny Appleseed is false. Johnny Appleseed did not grow or sell any grafted varieties, and for the Rambo or any other variety to be perpetuated, it must be grafted. As Michael Pollan indicates in his chapter on the apple in Botany of Desire, John Chapman (1774–1845), for religious reasons related to the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg, believed grafting was an unnatural practice. Chapman was given the nickname "Appleseed" pejoratively for his highly unusual practice of planting trees from seed. The apples grown from seed are almost all small and poorly flavored, so with very rare exceptions, his trees would have been good for making hard cider only. Back when the frontier only extended as far west as the state of Indiana, that worked fine for Johnny Appleseed, since cider was a staple and the pioneers didn't have any other choice in suppliers. The apple tree in Nova, Ohio, that is more than 175 years old, can either be the last surviving apple tree that Johnny Appleseed planted or it can be a Rambo tree. It cannot be both, despite any marketing claims."

Intelligence

The smart guys don't know what to do with themselves. They are so smart, they play with the world like a piece of used gum.

I'm happy now that I've concluded I'm only average. I took a test for law school and the result was that I'm OK, but not great.

I then took a test for accounting and the result, statistically shows, again, that I'm OK. But they are nice guys and open the gates.

For me this is great because I tried to do the great Black Diamond ski run of philosophy and it was like a kid in Junior High getting knocked into the stands at an NBA game.

Let those fucked-up philosophers gnaw on each other.

What I learned about other cultures is that the lay-out of the earth is incredibly different. It is a beautiful planet to see and smell. I highly recommend Earth.

Past that, I won't say anything else. See all of Earth when you're alive, if you can. If not, then you get to know the part that the explorer never got to see better than anyone else.

Beer, wine, and cognac along the way.

Cheers.