Reading Notes #3: Prometheus Bound

Title: Prometheus Bound

Author: Aeschylus (translated by David Grene)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Form: Trade paperback (part of larger volume, Aeschylus II)

Pages: 49 (including Introduction)

Date of Publication: 5^th Century BCE

Source: Purchased from used book store

Dates of Reading: January 16, 2013 – January 17, 2013

The List: #244

Prometheus:

As soon as he ascended to the throne

that was his father’s, straightway he assigned

to the several Gods their several privileges

and portioned out the power, but to the unhappy

breed of mankind he gave no heed, intending

to blot the race out and create a new.

Against these plans none stood save I: I dared.

I rescued men from shattering destruction

that would have carried them to Hades’ house;

and therefore I am tortured on this rock,

a bitterness to suffer, and a pain

to pitiful eyes. I gave to mortal man

a precedence over myself in pity: I

can win no pity: pitiless is he

that thus chastises me, a spectacle

bringing dishonor on the name of Zeus.

Chorus:

Of iron mind he must be, must be made of stone

who does not sympathize, Prometheus, with your sufferings.

Myself, I would not have chosen to look on them;

now that I do, my heart is full of pain.

Prometheus:

Yes, to my friends the sight is pitiable.

Chorus:

Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?

Prometheus:

Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.

Chorus:

What cure did you discover for that sickness?

Prometheus:

I sowed in them blind hopes.

Chorus:

That was a great help that you gave to men.

Prometheus:

Besides, I myself gave them fire.

Chorus:

Do now creatures of a day own bright-faced fire?

Prometheus:

Yes and from it they shall learn many crafts.

(Lines 230-256)

I decided to give Aeschylus an encore, as I had always been interested in the myth of Prometheus, the fire-bringer, the light-bearer, and Prometheus Bound was on my list. Prometheus Bound is the sole survivor of a Prometheus trilogy that is assumed to have existed, and is generally attributed to Aeschylus. It consists primarily of a series of speeches by the chained title protagonist and the visitors to his lonely rock. Though this prevents any true “action” from occurring in the play, it does not limit the dramatic tension.

The traditional telling of the myth has Prometheus lashed to a storm-blasted rock, punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the smith-god, Hephaestus, and giving it to man. Here, a giant eagle comes every night and eats his liver in most gruesome fashion, only to have it grow back the next day to be eaten again:

Hermes:

Then Zeus’s winged hound, the eagle red,

shall tear great shreds of flesh from you, a feaster

coming unbidden, every day: your liver

bloodied to blackness will be his repast.

(Lines 1022-1025)

Other aspects of the myth include the notion that Prometheus originally created man from clay, and that the punishment for the gift of fire also included the creation of the first woman, Pandora, who is sent by the Olympian gods to sow discord and evil gifts among men. These latter ideas do not figure into Prometheus Bound.

In some ways, I enjoyed this play more than any of the Oresteia plays. Some of this may be due to the lucid and stately translation by David Grene, who renders a Prometheus who is both weary and defiant, an almost modern portrayal – like something you’d see in a movie – of the wily veteran undergoing torture, laughing through his tears. The Titan does not so much argue in his own defense (this play has not the litigious quality of The Eumenides), but rather rails against the injustice of a Zeus who wields unchecked power, and moreover, who forgets those who have shown him loyalty (for Aeschylus’s Prometheus had sided with Zeus against his fellow Titans):

Prometheus:

Now look and see

the sight, this friend of Zeus, that helped set up

his tyranny, and see what agonies

twist me, by his instructions!

(Lines 307-309)

The chief appeal of Prometheus Bound lies in the weighty drama of a god tormented and punished because of his love for humanity. Prometheus is a Titan, and thus a god more ancient than Zeus and the Olympians, but he has little power in the face of Zeus’s overwhelming force. Power enough, though, to save humankind from obliteration by the supreme god’s lightning bolts. Why Zeus wished to destroy the human race, and how exactly Prometheus stopped this, are not clear in this play. What is clear is that his gifts to humanity are extensive, and the enlightenment they represent is perhaps the greatest threat the new gods have to fear.

Beyond the gift of fire mentioned above, Prometheus goes on to describe a litany of gifts he has brought to human society: the knowledge of construction, written language, sailing, agriculture, medicine, prophecy, religion:

Prometheus:

In one short sentence understand it all:

every art of mankind comes from Prometheus.

(Lines 504-505)

And for this, his recompense is an eternity of miseries:

Prometheus:

I knew when I transgressed nor will deny it.

In helping man I brought my troubles on me;

but yet I did not think that with such tortures

I should be wasted on these airy cliffs,

this lonely mountain top, with no one near.

(Lines 268-272)

The analogies to the story of Christ, though imperfect, are enjoyable and unmistakable. A great figure, part-god and (symbolically) part-man, and the savior of mankind, is affixed to a towering height, tormented by the powers that be, his only crime – his love for humanity.

Two thousand years later, the stories still exist – both the myths of Greece and the words of Scripture – but their status in our culture is markedly different. Why do the Olympians exist primarily as fodder for academic study and fanciful books and movies, while the legacy of the Hebrews endures as the preferred mysticism and superstition of human beings?

Of the various options available to the western world, was there something more true about the Abrahamic religions? Perhaps in the sense that benevolence and love, the hallmarks of Christ and Islam’s Allah, are more attractive in the long run than caprice and willfulness, as embodied in the Greek and Roman gods. By this measure, it’s no surprise that the former survive as doctrine, while the latter are the stuff of fairy tales.

Presumably, such echoes were not available to Aeschylus or his original audiences, nor were the impact that Prometheus Bound and its source myth made on Milton and, later, the Romantic poets of 18^th and 19^th century Britain. And when the spirit of Prometheus was conjured as a guiding light of the revolutionary era of the late 18^th century, well of course that’s also a universe apart from the small local world that the ancient Greeks understood.

But surely, attendees of the Great Dionysia watched Prometheus Bound and heard in its words a rebuke of tyrants, of men like Pisistratus, who only a generation or two ago had seized power over Athens, and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, whose overthrow had led to the beginnings of Athenian democracy.

Though the other plays in the trilogy are lost to us, and lost is whatever evolving view Aeschylus had of the relationship and potential reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, taken on its own terms, Prometheus Bound is clear – Zeus is a tyrant, and his actions are inexcusable. Prometheus berates Zeus’s messenger, Hermes:

Prometheus:

Your speech is pompous sounding, full of pride,

as fits the lackey of the Gods. You are young

and young your rule and you think that the tower

in which you live is free from sorrow: from it

have I not seen two tyrants thrown? the third,

who is now king, I shall yet live to see him

fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored.

Do you think I will crouch before your Gods,

– so new – and tremble? I am far from that.

(Lines 954-961)

Though the Greek word, tyrannos, does not have the negative implications of our word, tyrant, given the pains the Athenians had taken to remove their tyrants and replace them with a democratic system, as well as the reverence bestowed on the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, it seems justified to think that most Athenians would not have welcomed any attempt to revert to despotic rule.

Prometheus is a powerless captive, but he is on the side of the right, and that is enough to sustain him until the day of his deliverance (he has foreseen his own rescue by Heracles some thirteen generations hence). His words also contain the one threat that Zeus fears; his gift of prophecy holds the secret to Zeus’s downfall. Prometheus alone knows that an ill-fated amorous conquest will lead to “a son greater than his father.” Implicit is the sense that tyranny, by nature, is fleeting, and leads to its own demise:

Prometheus:

Worship him, pray; flatter whatever king

is king today; but I care less than nothing

for Zeus. Let him do what he likes,

let him be king for his short time: he shall not

be king for long.

(Lines 937-941)

The myth goes (not mentioned in the play) that the sea nymph, Thetis, is destined to bear a child who will be greater than the father. Eventually, Zeus will learn this and dodge the bullet by not coupling with her, and instead marrying her off to the mortal king, Peleus. The child of Thetis and Peleus is, of course, Achilles, greater than his father by far, but no threat to Zeus.

*          *          *

What we have inherited from antiquity is but a fraction of the plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and this is perhaps a source of endless anguish for classicists, philologists, and lovers of literature the world over. Aeschylus is thought to have written at least seventy plays, and among the lost are the two plays that would have completed our picture of his Prometheus (though the authorship of Prometheus Bound is debated).

Looking just at the play we have, however, we may set aside issues of what Aeschylus was trying to say, which may forever elude us, and focus more on what we actually hear.

In this incomplete story of a defiant old god and a merciless new god, I take away a message that if there is to come a time when Zeus is king no longer, his undoing will be humanity, educated and nurtured by Prometheus and the arts of civilization. It is reason that turns humanity away from religious superstition, as well as its inherent despotism of ignorance and dogmatic force. We are indebted to myths, but we are not enslaved by them. We rightly celebrate not the fantasies of Olympus or Golgotha, but rather the symbols.

For we are indeed “creatures of a day,” and if there is any future, any immortality, for us, it is only because we pass on our scraps of reason and knowledge to those that follow us. The ideals of the American Revolution and the French Revolution were not accomplished with the setting down of the Declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille, respectively. They continue to be accomplished, and humanity continues to crawl toward enlightenment, one candle at a time. 

The Fat President

You know the guy. Everyone knows who the fat president is, right?

William Howard Taft.

There he is, the 27^th President of the United States of America. Quite the looker. According to various sources, Taft weighed “as much as 300 pounds” or even up to “350 pounds” during his time as the sitting president. Though at that weight, one can hardly imagine him standing!

If you remember anything about him besides his corpulence, it’s that he was the guy who had a custom extra-large bathtub installed in the White House. If you recently completed a year of high school U.S. History, maybe you know that he was Teddy Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor, and that his failure to follow Roosevelt’s policies led to the latter’s formation of the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party to try to retake the presidency. Otherwise, what was Taft to you, or to history? He was merely the fat president.

A sort of glory happened in 2008 when the United States elected Barack Obama to be president, a repudiation of the cynicism that said a black man could never be elected president by the American people. But as his presidency ossifies into immutable form, I fear that Obama will become another William Howard Taft – known for one prominent trait, but ultimately an insubstantial one. Will Obama be remembered as “the black president”?

Rather than seeing the Sandy Hook school shooting as a call for high-minded action, I expect that Obama will see it as yet another chance to stand with dignity above the fray, content to be The Great Sympathizer, the guy who says the right things, that we need to circle the wagons around dead kids, not dishonor them by arguing about guns. And that’s fine. He should be a nice guy, as usual. History tends to remember nice guys, right?

Generally speaking, Americans do not want their presidents to emulate Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Or do they? It seems like history remembers presidents who stuck their noses into the big problems of the day, Abraham Lincoln, for example, or Franklin Roosevelt. Is our gun culture really a bigger problem to tackle than slavery or civil war, economic collapse or a world war?

Rather than kowtowing to Americans’ supposed reverence for our “strong tradition of gun ownership,” wouldn’t it be worthier to be remembered as the president who stood up to the gun nuts and took away our freedom to turn kids into hamburger? Better yet, be remembered as the president who forcefully pried us away from our addiction to climate changing ways. There are probably a couple of other big issues that would qualify. Oh, that whole slavery thing? That hasn’t gone away entirely, has it? Equal rights for gays, those quaint second-class citizens? Perhaps the gays are doing just fine pushing forth their own agenda. They don’t need the president’s charity!

Everyone already acknowledges that presidents are highly concerned with their legacies. So wouldn’t it be a good idea for Obama to get a bit audacious with his leadership and his speeches, if only for the sake of his legacy? I for one am rather frustrated with his campaign slogan: “Change, but not too much. Forward, but not too fast.”

With reelection safely behind him, surely Obama can afford to be himself? Isn’t that what people loved about George W. Bush, that he was always himself? (Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to be anyone else, but that’s beside the point.)

Even when we all loathed Bush for going bananas after 9/11 and plunging America into two foreign wars, we couldn’t deny that this was Bush being Bush. And no matter what we might want to believe about the master of overreacting, Bush did not destroy America. Regular old Americans did that when we put our rights and future into the hands of the wealthy, the lobbyists, the selfish few.

My worry is that this passivity and guardedness is Obama being himself. That this is all there is to him.

Obama is fond of some words attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., who himself was actually quoting the 19^th century reformer and abolitionist, Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I can go along with that; progress takes time. Hopefully, Obama can go along with being remembered only as “the black president.”

Throw some bells and a red suit on him, and William Howard Taft would have made a pretty convincing Santa Claus. President Obama, what do you bring to the table? 

The difference between bitterness and anger

Some years ago, I overheard a young sage say the sort of thing I thought was only uttered by wizened old curmudgeons. She was apparently pontificating on an upcoming presidential election, and she said something to the effect of: anyone who doesn’t like America the way it is should leave the country. She was speaking not about individual candidates or policies, but about America as a system of governance and as a culture.

In the moment, I thought to myself that hers was a particularly hard-line stance, even if she was half-joking (which she wasn’t). It didn’t seem to me that intolerance represented America the way it would like to see itself. A more elegant formulation would be to say that all of us, by virtue of remaining in this country, have implicitly agreed to a social contract, and that if we really felt so offended and wronged by it, we would voice our opinion more strongly than by grousing.

Over the years, I have occasionally heard people express the same sentiment: find another country, you ungrateful ones who do not deserve the blessings that America lays at your feet. But words that once seemed merely thoughtless now seem vicious. To these words I now say that I would gladly leave if I could find but one inch of earth left that hasn't been defiled by civilization’s dirty institutions.

I’m sure I sound bitter, but I am not bitter. I’m angry. As I see it, bitterness is indicated by an impotent stewing and railing against a world you can neither change nor run away from. Bitterness is essentially self-destructive. Anger too is obsessed with a contrast between self-image and external reality, but it can be harnessed to produce something better than itself. Where bitterness seems to seethe at a kind of lack within oneself, anger represents a fullness of self that wants to burst out and impress itself on the object of the anger. Anger can motivate a person to look outside himself.

Wikipedia has an article on “resentment, also called ranklement or bitterness,” which draws from the work of one Robert C. Solomon, who expressed the distinction among resentment, anger, and contempt thusly: "resentment is directed towards higher-status individuals, anger is directed towards equal-status individuals, and contempt is directed towards lower-status individuals." 

If I take my cues from Wikipedia, then it goes to reason that my feelings would be bitterness if directed at Barack Obama or some senators or the fatcats on Wall Street. My “betters,” I believe is the term. But these are not the ones I would challenge, though they are easy targets. It’s the ordinary people that I am angry at, equal-status individuals who vote and by voting implicitly state that they accept the status quo, and that they don’t really want change.

I do not mean to say that voting is the disease and that people should be ashamed of what is grandly deemed “participating in the democratic process.” People should do what they think is right, but they should think first. Voting is merely the morphine for a diseased and dying society; it functions as a kind of masturbatory escapism. A way to wash your hands of the problems by saying you did your part.

So yes, I am angry that so trifling a thing as voting counts for so much in the eyes of so many. And so I rejected it and the slavery it represented. I tried very hard to live in that other country – that place of intellectualism and love and brotherhood, the country of the mind, I suppose. But it did not take long for me to realize that this other country belongs in our country, in our America, and we do it a disservice by thinking it too fragile to exist here.

Every year there’s an election, and every four years a big, unavoidable one that inevitably finds someone staring at me, appalled to discover that I do not vote. Perhaps it’s time to put my anger to use and modify my stance. I am not willing to vote the way the government tells me to vote. So I vote with my words and hope that others will listen. 

Booth and the Double Button

My former teacher at the University of Chicago, Wayne Booth, wrote an essay entitled, “Is There Any Knowledge that a Man Must Have?” In it, he discussed the aims of liberal education, and while I suspect he didn’t have in mind such a mundane task as sewing a button, Mr. Booth possessed a breadth of interests that surprised most.

On a recent winter trip to Seattle, in the midst of uncommonly cold weather (as confirmed/alleged by various longtime locals I happened to come across), I recalled Mr. Booth’s question when the buttons of my overcoat (the only coat I had brought for this weeks-long trip) started popping off.

The coat was barely adequate to fend off the chill in the first place, and it would certainly be useless to me if it couldn’t close. At the same time, I had never in my life sewn a button. I think my only sewing experience of any kind was a crafts project in elementary school. I didn’t plan to spend the rest of my trip indoors or furiously hugging myself to keep my coat closed. (Nor did my budget or temperament allow for the purchase of a new garment.) So I had a choice: take the coat to someone to fix the buttons, or sew them myself.

How hard could it be? I thought. So I bought a rudimentary sewing kit at Walgreen’s and, with the internet as my guide, I got to work. Here are the malefactors (shown with size references):

You can see that there is not only the main, larger button for the front of the coat, but also a smaller (let’s call it an anchor) button that attaches to the interior side. I didn’t fancy the idea of cutting my teeth on this pernicious “double button,” but I figured that one doesn’t choose the crisis, only the response.

Once I got going, I realized that it was indeed a simple operation, though none of the videos and guides I initially consulted made clear how to accomplish the final knot that the button required. So I improvised a little, and though my technique wasn’t entirely orthodox, the button held well enough. I tackled a second button with more assurance, but left too narrow a shank this time, meaning that the gap between button and fabric was barely wide enough to accommodate easy buttoning. But it worked. And voila! The coat, she is done:

I returned to the question: is there any knowledge that a man must have? (Or as Mr. Booth revised at a later, more politically correct time: what knowledge, if any, should everybody pursue?) Specifically, is sewing a button a skill that everyone should learn? Once I had done it, I had to say no, I didn’t need to have this particular knowledge, and if I had a personal handmaiden to sew my buttons and darn my socks till the end of days, I wouldn’t feel like I had lost some crucial piece of my humanity.

But the question is not about specific fragments of knowledge. Rather, it asks of each of us what it is that we need to know in order to be truly free as human beings. I wouldn’t say that learning to sew a button was an Olympian achievement, but I did enjoy the small freedom I felt in doing it myself, and knowing that when the time comes, I could do it again.

As soon as I join the ranks of professional seamstresses (we really need a masculine form of that word), I will announce the pricing for my services.

* * *

Wayne Booth was a great man, a great humanist. I was proud to know him, and only regret that I never got to know him well. Though the academy has a reputation for snootiness, I never knew a professor so at ease with bringing together the prosaic and the divine. I trust he would not begrudge me the use of his good name and good words in pursuit of matters sartorial.

“A man can be ignorant even of Shakespeare, Aristotle, Beethoven, and Einstein, and be a man for a’ that – if he has learned how to think his own thoughts, experience beauty for himself, and choose his own actions.” – Wayne Booth

I belong to myself

He was the grand salami of the Grand Slam, the lothario of Love-40, the debauchee of the double fault. Leave it to others to reflect on Marat Safin’s career. I just liked the man’s farewell.

After his final match, a loss at the Paris Masters tournament on November 11, 2009, he left his adoring crowd with these words:

“Today I will put all my memories, all my wins and losses in a small box. Today a door is closed, hopefully another one will open.”

A bit more poetry than you’ll ever get out of Federer or Nadal. Sure, they have the Slams and the insatiable drive to be the best that eluded Safin, but it seems like that kind of life and career just wasn’t meant for him. In his words:

“It’s a tough sport. It’s very cruel. What I’ll miss least is the injuries and the pressure. The pressure is what you are going through all these years. Because you are defending your points. You need to achieve, you need to improve, you need to count the points to see if you are going to make the Masters, if you’re going to be seeded at a Grand Slam or not. So you’re completely stressed 24/7. That is what I hate about it. It’s just too much. No rest for the brain at all.”

And now?

“Now I have no schedule, no practices, no nothing. I belong to myself.”

* * *

On a much smaller and less visible scale, I can relate to Safin’s sentiments. I spent almost two years competing as an amateur ballroom dancer, just a pond compared to the ocean of a professional sport, but to me, it was worth any ten sports combined and blended into an unholy smoothie of athleticism.

“Competing,” as any athlete knows, is just a tiny part of the commitment. There are the hours and weeks of practice and coaching and lessons, the body aches and alarm clocks clanging far too early, the hustling through rush hour to get to practice on time, and the hustling out to salvage what remained of a normal life – all meant to make you look brilliant for the five to ten minutes you actually spend competing at the competition. And after that comes the self-examination, the questions about how to get better, the questions about what questions to ask, and too often the halfcocked experiments and harebrained schemes to improve one figure or another. No rest.

I was lucky. I had a dance partner who made practice seem like play, who trusted me to make the right decisions on and off the dance floor, and who believed that everything we were doing was worth it. I can’t imagine Safin had anywhere near the same kind of support.

It’s been six months since I’ve danced seriously, and every day that goes by, I can feel it slipping away, the skill, the fluidity, the determination to become better. I know I could slip back into it just as easily as slip away. Unlike Safin, I haven’t run out of gas yet. But at the same time, I haven’t found the peace he’s found. I hope one day to be able to say the words he says so well: “I belong to myself.”

* * *

This is my 50th blog post, and for a while, as I considered how to commemorate the occasion, I was straddling the line between reverence and irreverence, and realizing that it can be difficult to have it both ways. I chose to lean on the former. Tune in soon for the other contender for the Big 50.

Long live the Con!

Who says you have to get inside Comic-Con to have a good time? Here’s what I saw on the outside looking out, walking around in front of the Convention Center and strolling the Gaslamp.

The Milieu

For a few blissful days every summer, Comic-Con turns the Gaslamp District into a veritable tent city of Amazons, Voltrons, Superfriends, orcs, wizards (both pinball and Hogwartian), spiky-haired Japanophiles, Sailor Scouts (yes, they still exist), keyblade-slingers, Pokemon trainers, X-Maniacs, Jedi Knights and other sad devotees of ancient religions – all wearing matching lanyards and packing grossly oversized swag bags.

* * *

The San Diego Convention Center, home of Comic-Con, has fitful dreams, talks in its sleep: “Must . . . grow . . . bigger! Accommodate . . . more . . . vendors! Keep . . . the Con . . . local!”

* * *

Comic-Con is the one event that makes downtown San Diego feel like the hub of a city that is more than a zoo and some beaches. And somehow, it does this by transforming skyscrapers into gargantuan video game posters.

* * *

Yes, more posters!

* * *

Trolley signs in Klingon = a brilliancy! True or False: Klingons hail from the planet Klingonigon!

* * *

It turns out that Skyline is a movie about people floating up into the sky, hence the little white bubble-men in this frame.

* * *

Yeah! Bubble-Man!

* * *

The Denizens

Don’t bears already have enough of an advantage without toting machine-guns as well?

* * *

Now hold the phone there, Michael Eisner. Something’s not quite right about these Disney princesses. I mean, come on, where’s Tiana???

* * *

Mob scene: a crowd hoping to catch Dragon Age 2 blow-up spears tossed from a balcony. Seriously.

* * *

Now isn’t that adorable? It’s a Wonder . . . boy . . . bun . . .?

* * *

Girl with platinum hair and rabbit ears. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

* * *

Before all those bad dreams started, Freddy Krueger was just another carefree kid reading Dick Tracy and kicking it with a Milhouse.

* * *

Ah, the classic “girl being ogled by sleazy dudes” photo. A timeless set piece.

* * *

Hahaha, some of you will get this joke. You perverts know who you are.

* * *

Will someone please give her a cookie, a tiara, and a box full of gold stars?

* * *

Walking among this elbow-to-elbow mess of exuberant humanity, and having cosplayed once myself, I was happy to see how many people had donned costumes (both homemade and store-bought), painted themselves, built accessories, stretched their imaginations to come up with something unfamiliar, and posed proudly for photos.

And then I became convinced of something. These wizards’ robes, metal brassieres, horns, lightsabers, princess gowns, all manner of animal furs – these were not the costumes. These represent something real about what these people care about. No, the costume is that fashion-challenged, mother-approved school attire that these chaperoned kids go back to when Comic-Con ends. The costume is that ill-fitting work shirt and suffocating necktie that the guy in the head-to-toe Vader outfit returns to after he takes his bag of newly bought action figures home.

The costume is that attitude we put on that says we’re okay with the life of workaday monotony, where we have to act like we don’t really know all that much about the things we value most, where we pretend that, yes, those are just little hobbies that we have, those comics, those games, those movie trailers that we wait hungrily for, or maybe it’s music or dancing or poetry or even Latin grammar, mirabile dictu! This is the stuff that makes people distinctive, and it’s the stuff they do when they are being who they want to be.

And your bird can sing

In a previous life, when shaggy hair and round-framed glasses were more my bag, I received two of the odder, more flattering comments I’ve ever received.

The first was from a girl I met through ballroom dance. One day, without prelude, she told me I reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t remember whom. “Someone famous and very good-looking?” I fished. I got it half right. After dance class, she finally conjured the name: “John Lennon.” She suggested that it went beyond the glasses and hair; there was something in my demeanor.

The second comment came after I had parked on the street one night, on my way to the Casbah for a show (undoubtedly, it was a sub-Beatles-caliber band). Just as I stepped out of my car, a (presumably homeless) man approached me, crying, “Hey, hey! You got a cigarette?” I was mildly alarmed, but right when I turned to face this figure emerging from the shadows, it was he who was taken aback. “Whoa! You look just like . . . that guy!” I shook my head, “Who’s that?” “The Beatles guy!” he said. “John Lennon?” (There’s not much chance of people mistaking me for Paul.) The guy seemed very pleased, but unfortunately, I couldn’t pay him back for his compliment, seeing that I tend not to pack death sticks.

This coming just a few weeks after the comment from my dance friend, I wondered if I had subconsciously been cultivating Lennon’s look. I certainly had him on the brain, having recently seen a TV documentary about his death and life. This was also around the time when the Working Class Hero two-disc compilation of Lennon’s best was released – my first serious exposure to Lennon’s post-Beatles work.

Hearing the music 30 years after it was made, I marveled at how humane it sounded, especially compared to most of the mindless aggression that clogs the airwaves today. In his songs, I heard a man obsessed with personal freedom and in love with love itself; fitting, since between love and freedom, when one is absent, the other soon withers.

Some time after my two interesting encounters, I had a chance to travel to New York, and I visited Strawberry Fields, a small garden on the western edge of Central Park, just across the street from the Dakota Apartments, where Lennon lived and died. Strawberry Fields commemorates his life and dreams, and on the day I visited, the Imagine mosaic at its center was particularly inviting:


Without any premeditation on my part, I think I just naturally gravitated to John more than the other Beatles. I’m not saying his songs were the best in the band (not all of them anyway), but only that I empathize most with the way he seemed to be. I think of how much we miss him now, not just his music, but the hopeful vision it fostered, and I hope that my similarities to him go beyond looks.

* * *

As much as I admire John’s solo work, he’ll always be a Beatle first in my mind. Today, September 9, 2009, is the big release day: all of their original studio albums REMASTERED(!) in two sets: 1) a stereo box set, and 2) a mono box set containing those albums that were originally mixed in mono sound. (Oh, and a little thing called The Beatles: Rock Band also comes out today.) It’s fitting that a band that took 22 years to remaster their music should issue it exclusively on a dying technology – the compact disc. (To be fair, the original 1987 CDs were “remastered”; it’s just that the 1980s tech sounded older and worse with every passing year.)

I bought the stereo box today. It may be the first time I’ve ever purchased a CD on the release date. It’ll also be the last; these are the last CDs I’ll ever buy. Well, until I can get my hands on the mono box.