Resumption
I’ve not posted in several days. The writing routine has been interrupted by a remodeling project at my preferred spot for contemplation, my examination of soul for proper words. I think that good work requires being at home in a context. The renovation of the Starbucks is nearly complete and I should return to my customary habitat soon. No longer faced with the necessity to track down an early open coffee-house, I hope to settle into a productive routine of reading and therapeutic writing at the old home base.
I am transfixed by the Iliad, Homer’s great poem of war. War is essentially about rage. Whatever reason, justification, proclamation of policy given as a rationale for war, the essential driver is rage. The monster behind the curtain is a ravening self-destruction and other-immolating rage. Homer teases out a ballet of fury in his poem of the last two weeks of the ten-year siege of Troy by the Achaean alliance. The conflict ebbs and flows. Homer tells his tale as if the events were inevitable, –predestined by the gods.
I am reading an essay by Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force. Then I’ll begin reading the Iliad in a contemporary translation by the poet Stephen Mitchell.
One major event in the social zeitgeist of this week has been the run-up, and the execution of the punitive cruise missile strike on the Assad regime in Syria. This is retribution for the recent use of nerve agent weapons. I get it. Nerve and biological agents are massively and indiscriminately lethal. Many features of modern warfare seem 
similar to me: drone strikes, barrel bombs, even GPS directed artillery fire–death ascends ex nihilo. The 21st century mode of warfare makes the plains of Troy, the mano-a-mano Bronze-Age-style of conflict appear almost “civilized.” According to Homer the qualitative difference is illusory.
Rage, un-controlled, un-leashed, indiscriminately lethal, is the dark heart of war. The Syrian regime head is Assad who has his own rationale for preferring the complete destruction of his nation, to any other outcome. His counterpart is our American, elected, marginally literate President, randomly gesticulating, waving his small hands about, pronouncing destruction upon Assad and other enemies,…
It amounts to the same: Rage.
