Stuck In The Middle With M(n)u: An argument for Greek Consonance in these Existentially Voweled Times
~in which, a look at the harmonics of capitalistic worship, a chapter review of Antiquities Beyond Humanism, an ideological look at Disney’s Hercules, and utilizing the building blocks of philology towards abolition
Watching my country’s ideology collapse makes me more grateful than anything that I quit being a structuralist in academia —
Okay wait, lemme rephrase: it actually made me glad that I’ve gone my whole life working service jobs and understanding not only how essential those roles are to American society, but also how to work a variety of jobs so that when something unexpected happens to the economy (or as I view it, ideological collapse as far as America is concerned, for our ideology is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” at the cost of silenced and exploited bodies), I have a network to fall back on. Like the old saying: Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one. It helps to have many outs under a collapsing structure.
For those who don’t know what structuralism is — it’s cool, I didn’t either until five professors told me that’s what I was doing with my research. Over time I began to understand through context that what they meant by saying that I “took a structuralist approach” with my myth studies, was that I look at the interplay of myth across time and I talk about the mythic canon connected across literary and poetic tradition fitting into a fixed structure that I was exploring.
I usually would give an aloof shrug, or a quizzical smile, or some positive reply that still had an undercurrent of ambiguity. So much of what interested me about myth was so contrary to the Campbell corner of thought — I was less interested why different groups had similar myths in the same geographic region, as that seemed a little too self-explanatory. Instead, I’ve always been drawn to the why and how myths change over time. Structuralism seemed like the opposite of the style in which I liked to study — embodied in one particularly rambunctious myth text that I work with, Ovid’s Metamorphoses — change is constant.
It’s why at the end of my masters studies, I ended up relying on the primary classical training that I’d first received at a young age: classical harp. I ended up braiding it into my studies to add some texture: the study of myth was so ocularcentric (all that gaze) in the field and I was more interested in how myth sounded since so much of it was composed and sung. At the same time, I was in a production of Herakles in the chorus of Theban elders, singing Euripides’ lyrics with a reconstructed score to the live accompaniment of an aulos. Everyday my mind was consumed with how the Greek sounded, how it felt in my mouth, humming the arc of the words late at night, so they’d stick through the tune in my memory.
It was then that I started tasting Greek words more, sucking them up and swirling them around my tongue, like when I’d slurp up blackberry honey sticks from the farmers market as a kid — mouth pursed to not let any of the sweetness escape and teeth eagerly/anxiously chewing on the plastic to encourage the honey along.
The ancient Greek sounds and how they relate to myth and the rhythm of music and language is a brain-tickler I’m content to spend the rest of my days giggling with. But, as I said in the beginning, I’m very glad I gave up structuralism, especially as a philologist (a lover of speaking, a gatekeeper to the ways of communication) who was skirting on the edges of ethno-musicology in her lofty pursuits of unraveling evolutionary belief systems. Particularly when my ancient music studies reminded me of something I’d already known from my own years as a musician — music has its own engagement with philology.
There are different voices speaking to each other, composed aural scenarios, letters and notes woven together into their own textures of variation. The ancient Greeks found something godly in the process of singing things into being — the earliest extant texts are hymns, lyrics, epic cycles, and the harmonies/dramas of the divine. As a lyrist, I also think about the different modes and letters in notation that signify the different sounds these Greek letters can have.
Recently I’ve also been drawn to scholarship in my field around finding the gods in the alphabet itself, something that deeply interests my explorations into Greek philological sounds. There was something I read that I think Josh Katz wrote on hearing the gods in the Greek vowels, focusing on aeidein, the word to sing. It’s the word that the poet uses to invoke the muses, lingering on the vowel-ness of the singing word as the force that physically brings the gods about. I hear it in the gods who are aiei, or forever.
My colleague Ashley Simone was looking into something similar in Cicero’s astronomical Latin, observing the phrase a Iove (“by Jove”) as a representation of all the Latin vowels present (v’s and u’s were interchangeable). She had a metaphor in her argument about the vowels representing stars twinkling in their spheres. The metaphor lit a fire in my mind and I asked her a muddled rambling question at the time of her talk that I will now attempt to reconstruct: Was she was arguing that constellations were words in her Ciceronian poetics, with vowels as the fixed stars and consonants as the mutable possibilities of the lines of a constellation — strong stories based on how they’re connected around the vowels? It’s a thought that’s been sparkling through my brain like the first word of Carson’s reprint of poikilophron ever since.
It resonates with me — gods as vowels. Vowels are found all over nature, in the natural music of the spheres and sounds of life. Vowels are the first sounds we emit as a signal for communication. Because we do not understand language yet, it is our first way of expressing anxiety.
And when we don’t feel understood or if we are under duress, we return to vowels.
This is echoed in the structure of the Greek alphabet — the first and last letters are vowels, alpha and omega. “Ah!” and “Ohhhh…..” Wide broad mouth-open sounds. Often when we feel at the edges of something and pushed to a point, the return to vowels.
But to whose vowels do we return? Which beliefs shape our language? I was brought to these thoughts singing a 21st century musical reconstruction of a 5th century BCE Greek choral lyric and I realized that I felt the urge to apply my own sounds and interpretations to those words. Which I quickly realized that having the agency and autonomy to do so was incredibly privileged.
Recently I was reading Antiquities Beyond Humanism because I’d managed to question my way into owning a copy back at its book launch at NYU. In the chapter on “Sounds of subjectivity or resonances of something other,” Kristin Sampson talks about the voice and conceptions of corporeality in the earlier Greek poets verses the later Greek philosophers. A lot of the later philosophers made hella assumptions about the voice and identity regarding the body and soul. But voice was more subjective in the sung ancient epics. Nature has a voice. Battle-clash has a voice. Meat roasting on a stick screams. Voice, or phone, in Homer was something that had a lot more fluidity. In Aristotle, phone is psophos semantikos or a “sound that means something.”
This query from Sampson where she thinks through corporeality without body smacked into my embodied reality and gave me a predictable double-consciousness of comparison: I thought of two groups of voices in the context of the history of my identity in this country — one relating to my body as a black woman living under a whole network of structures in America and the other relating to what I guess Aristotle would deem my psyche (or soul), and what I felt I personally was going to do about it despite (in spite?) of those factors.
The first group that echoed in my ears as my brain turned over the concept of “corporeality without body” was the original group of bodies forced to build the ideological structure of capitalism that is now falling apart: the abducted African peoples whose scientifically dehumanized flesh was placed under the new imperial-colonial techne (or invention) of structural racism in order to justify a nascent political system with a triumvirate of ideological pillars: God without monarchy, manifest destiny economic growth, and an embodied neoclassical aesthetic. I think of the bodies told they had to be slaves, placed in neoclassical plantation architecture, often given classicizing names (Titus, Octavia, Vergil, Cassandra, Lucius), given a specific script to stick to in life, having such limited autonomy in regards to expression, production, and reproduction.
I think of the accounts I’ve read, the tales I’ve heard passed down, the films that are often too difficult to watch, of black slaves being whipped because they weren’t working hard enough, or they’d try to run away, or reject advances, or any given reason, or for no determinable reason whatsoever, or out of another’s pleasure. The screams are horrible, and so full of vowels. Whoever is ordering the whipping done is often taking pleasure in it or receiving some sort of calming effect from it, in the re-establishment of power. It works as a culmination of those three pillars — whipping the slave because God (or science) has deemed you superior, whipping the slave as a means to force them to work for your economic gain, and whipping the slave as a part of some thought-up Western Civ tradition in your own embodied neoclassical experiment: you as fury extracting pleading vowels to comply with whatever nonsensical structure was imposed on it: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in ritual form.
To bring it back to Sampson, doesn’t this blend corporeality without body and Aristotle’s voice being a “sound that means something”? Doesn’t this resonate as one of the first acts of ideological worship and exhortation in this country? Externalizing the hardships of life is the bedrock of capitalism and elite culture in America. Those most disadvantaged being constricted in some way to bear the externalized anxieties highest up in the perfect pyramid (from Greece, to Rome, to Britain, to America — the Egypt envy never fades).
I think Sampson’s on to something in the “other” though. I wonder about that other when feel the vowel sounds hot in my chest through inter-generational trauma, demanding to be felt, said, expressed, screamed, roared. I feel the anxiety but also, with 250 years of historical receipts shoved into the shortest calendar month, I feel angry. In the way I felt a voice leaping out of me watching the first Ferguson protests, or how my ribs never not shake every time I’ve ever sung Lift Every Voice And Sing. It’s in the simultaneous musical resonance, dissonance, and consonance between Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” and Zeal & Ardor’s “Stranger Fruit”. It’s in the o’s that echo in my ear of the “follow the drinking gourd” song that I hear every time I look up at the Big Dipper. And despite having interests throughout my life in astronomy, classics, myth, and beyond, I always hear that sung refrain in my head every time I look up the lip of that constellation to find the North Star. I’m not sure that’s what Katz and Simone had in mind around the singing astral spheres.
Which brings me smack to the second group of voices I heard calling out to me when thinking through “corporeality without body”. Because right alongside “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, there was another musical picture book that I read from a young age: a children’s version of “Aida”, written by Leontyne Price — the first African American singer at the Metropolitan Opera. It gives a brief account of the opera’s tragedy, but with some of the most beautifully rich illustrations of Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia. The patterns and fashions and colors in the book were fantastically wonderful and awe-inspiring in little single-digits me.
This past week I reread that version of “Aida”, quarantined at my sister’s house, and I realized how much you could read into my life’s experience through that one little book: Verdi first composed Aida after recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt in the 1860s. I later came to love Aida musically through my love of the Italian opera composers (and how much they in turn loved the harp), but was always bored and unmoved by the opera singers I’d watch perform it, usually smudged in brown to make themselves look more Egyptian or Ethiopian on stage.
But I laughed when I picked up “Aida” at my sister’s house, mostly because it’d never occurred to me how much her name reminded me of aoidos (singer), which tickled me because the opera is set far before the Homeric epic cycles, yet a later 19th century music composition. In that one picture book was encapsulated so many years of my studies and efforts — playing classical music, being in pit orchestra, writing plays for the stage, musically collaborating with friends, stage performance, engaging in restorative reception, classical myth and music, alternative colorisms — not to mention I’d never noticed that there’s an Egyptian harpist on the back jacket. Over my life, I’ve finally gained all the tools to understand the variation of voices calling out to me through one little picture book.
Aida aeide thea…
Vowels tend to structure our experiences, the points of great impact. Equally important are the points in between, the middle mutability, the fact that so many different cultures needed the same constellation, but saw so many different stories in the spaces between.
The middle of the Greek alphabet is two letters (24 in all), M (mu) and N (nu). M and N also occupy the center of the Romanized alphabet. As a mythologist, these two consonants remind me of one goddess in particular: Mnemosyne, the titan goddess of memory, mother to the muses. M and N is a closing of the mouth, with the intent to speak again. Saying her name makes me wonder if the ancient Greeks rested their tongues on the roofs of their mouths instead of the way I do, on the bottom. Tongue placement is important when humming out “Mmnn”. A mutable sound, a pleasurable sound, a sound of distaste, a sound of recall, a means of musicality without the emphasis of the impact of existential vowels.
Like I said: I’m glad I was already looking for alternatives to structuralism. Because these things I study, questions I have — music, myth, autonomy, autophony — all deal with the self under different forms of expression, and the self under different forms of constraint — from nature, to society, to the interpersonal, to the spiritual.
More literally, toss around M and N in your mouth for a bit while you read this. It’s sound and expression that hangs, behind your lips, right at your teeth. It’s sound that’s mutable and molded by the expressionality of your lips.
I would like to briefly be very transparent for what I’m advocating for: While we hold our society structures responsible and ourselves accountable for our own impact, perhaps there are avenues to better understand ourselves in ways that we haven’t before. And while this current situation is one not experienced in any of our lifetimes, the externalization of the hardships of our system in trickle-down effects of terror are some of the oldest and most sacred forms of worship in this country to uphold its ideologies. It’s just quietly evolved under capitalism because it wasn’t ordained from a king or emperor. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness: rugged individualism and the ability to create your own self-myth on the lands christened with indigenous genocide and having black bodies bear the evidence of worship in their voweled screams. So in a way, the existentially voweled terrors of today have precedence and ironic consonance from the beginning of this country — 250 years of screams under capitalism. I’m glad everyone’s starting to hear the symphony now.
But 1776 was not the beginning of the screams and 2020 won’t be the end — instead we’re still stuck in the middle, often being told to keep our ungrateful mouths shut. We literally find ourselves shut up and isolated from each other — save for essential workers who are now bearing the brunt of the economy. As a service worker, and as a person who has three immediate family members who are essential workers right now, I can tell you that this is the kindest that I have ever seen this country regard these positions in my lifetime. Because the current constraints are having the reaction that people are being more intentional with the way they engage. Intent and impact, necessity and desire, bliss and pain — these are all the textures that make up experience and memory.
Back to holding M and N in your mouth — try saying “Mnemosyne” out loud (mm-Nay-Moh-SU-Nay). Try keeping your tongue still and moving your mouth around it to make the pronunciation. I find it to be a name that requires my mouth to be paying attention to the way it’s chewing it around. As I swirl it around, I think about the clashes in Greek pronunciation. I think about what notes are in the melody of saying the name and what they’d be in the ancient and modern notation. I think about how the roof of my mouth and my lips do the primary work around creating consonance of the consonants. I have sung Mnemosyne more times than I can count, more variations than I can remember — yet the movement of it always forces me into a smile, the same way the name hums and buzzes against my rib-cage on its way up my throat and tickles my vocal chords into melody.
I think of my first relationship with music — as a harpist, and how the majority of the music I play takes place in the dead center of my 46 strings, usually only reaching into the extreme lower or higher octaves for emphasis. I then think of my lyre with its 7 strings, the lowest hypate, highest nete, and mid-string mese, those three strings which were once worshiped as three muses at Delphi.
I think of m y first great ambition in life — of becoming a famous playwright and winning a Tony — and how much patience I had to acquire to learn how to craft an excellent and engaging middle. I think about how in studying Greek tragedy, I learned each ancient drama is a musical with its own threads of choral lyric braiding together a textured layer to the story and an extension to the broader musical/aural world in antiquity. I think about how these textures and extensions issued from my own mouth and gave me a new way of thinking, engaging, and communicating, as a witness on stage in the myth of Herakles.
To braid these threads together, I would like to end by merging these ideas in another bit of childhood nostalgia: the 1997 Disney film Hercules.
Believe me — as a classicist, mythologist, and lover of reception — there is so much to critique here, and I would highly encourage everyone to check out Lindsay Ellis’ excellent video delving into the matter. Instead I would like to focus on the role of the Muses within the film, those mutable daughters of memory. In this version, the muses are five black gospel singers of various sizes and body types. They sing the arc of Hercules’ life in a mixed tradition of ancient Greek theatrical musicality, black American gospel traditions, and a capitalist (Ellis compares it with the 90s athletic icon) interpretation of the “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” ideology in regards to literal self-mythologizing.
First they sing a triptych theogony parados “The Gospel Truth” establishing how the gods came to be and the circumstances that have led to Hercules’ demigod status. The cognitive dissonance kicks the film right off — not only do the trio of songs rewrite the origin of Hercules’ entire mythos — in this version, he is also the son of Hera, taking away his ancient tormentor and having Hades substitute as the villain — but the incredulity is cheekily shrugged off by ironic refrain of the Muses: “Though honey it may seem imposs’ble, that’s the gospel truth.”
Later, the Muses sing arguably the strongest song on the soundtrack, “Zero to Hero”, a triumphant paean about the capitalist rewards you can receive by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (as a demigod trying to achieve full god status) in a clear parallel with American athleticism . It’s a song that requires strong lip-consonant work as well as dealing with the voweled sounds owed to Hercules’ growing fame. The Muses sing:
“When he smiled, the girls when wild with ‘Oohs!’ and ‘Aahs!’
‘And they slapped his face on every vase —’
‘On every VAHse!’
From appearance fees and royalties, our Herc had cash to burn!
Now nouveau riche and famous, he could tell you what’s a Grecian ‘earn’!”
The blending of capitalism and American neoclassical conception of Ancient Greece through the consonant voices of black female gospel singers makes for a heady experience — especially when they break it down and go double-time.
And it’s worth noting that this song comes in the mid-point of the film and the accolades Hercules has received up to this point are meaningless to him because his efforts go unacknowledged by his father, Zeus, as enough to bring him to godhead. It is only after he becomes more emotionally attached to Megara and sacrifices himself in order to save her that he achieves godhead — and ultimately then sacrifices it to be with Megara. The Muses sing “A Star Is Born” as Hercules achieves his newly voweled heights. From “The Gospel Truth” to “Zero to Hero” to “A Star Is Born”, I see those familiar three pillars — carried over Protestantism, rugged individualistic rigged Capitalism, and embodied neoclassical fame and glory. That doesn’t stop the tunes of Alan Menken from being unbearably catchy and still very-played on my phone.
However, there is a fourth song of the Muses that I’ve held back to make this point: because the ideological structure ultimately is unsatisfying to Hercules, even after his emotive manifest destiny monody “Go The Distance”. Following “Zero to Hero” he is deeply unsatisfied due to his feeling a lack of connectivity. He feels unseen and isolated, even after achieving such great fame, even from his mentor, Philoctetes. He feels increasingly drawn to Megara, who is a secret agent of Hades. Despite her double allegiance, she finds herself also drawn to Hercules, but is wary because of how love got her into her current predicament working for the lord of the underworld. There’s a very predictable and tragic script that Megara and Hercules are a part of, as their own histories in the film’s narrative, their role as doomed romantic couple, and from within their ancient mythic tradition.
But then there’s a love song the muses sing, the only time they directly intervene via song into the narrative of the film. They create counterpoints as Megara emphatically insists that she isn’t in love, emphasizing that she won’t say that she’s in love, even evident in the phrase being closed off in the song’s title: “I Won’t Say (I’m In Love)”. The Muses counterpoint that her voice is already saying it without speak: “You swoon, you sigh, why deny it, uh-oh?”
Effectively — the Muses help to create a spectrum of Megara’s emotions for her to consider by calling to attention her embodied reactions in counterpoint to her trying to rationalize/argue her way out of her emotions. It ends on a mingled middle ground: Megara concedes that “at least out loud… I won’t say I’m in love.”
The song is full of Megara gnawing on her own lips, caught between her memory of love and its impact, and the newer feelings of love buzzing in her chest. The anxiety around the vocalization of her emotions is present — however it is in words and direct speech that she is restricting herself. The Muses hold the argument that she’s been speaking in different ways. The song is absolutely key to the film because it informs us of Megara’s perspective and how she’s processing the dual lives she leads — the structure under Hades that she’s constrained by and her newer feelings of connectivity with Hercules. She ends on a note of internality, blurring the lines of speech, voice, and the how of how we say thing — all in song with the Muses.
It’s new and innovating myth. And it wasn’t until I was in my own Herculean chorus that I understood to what extent. In Euripides’ Herakles, Megara spends the majority of the play longing for her husband to return to save her and her children from being murdered by the tyrant Lycus. Herakles returns and disposes of Lycus, much to the delight of the chorus of Theban elders. However, our delight quickly turned to horror when the ancient goddess of insanity, Lyssa, arrived to drive Herakles mad and cause him to murder his family. The chorus of Theban elders sings its final song with Amphitryon, Herakles’ foster father, whose old age had prevented his own and the chorus’ desires to intervene in the events of the play. In the end, when Herakles retreats to Athens with Theseus away from accountability, it was Amphitryon who is left to deal once again with the family that Herakles has left behind.
In the production I was in, we ended with Amphitryon collapsing to the ground, bearing the weight of the play with his fellow elders surrounding him in empathy and holding him through the horror. Every night we performed, I was brought to tears by the finale each time from singing out for Herakles, exalting in his arrival, and then singing in horror at his crime, and finally in empathizing with Amphitryon.
Something in my embodied experience on the stage, the black gospel muses singing ideology in Hercules, the picture book by a black opera singer with Africana classical reception all come to a point — song, myth, and memory are threads through history with incredible impact. If I can braid those three strands together, perhaps I can turn this back into what Kristin Sampson was trying to get at with the Greek voice. Because I actually (and this is a very rare case for me) hold with Aristotle on this one and agree that a phone is a psophos semantikos — a sound that means something. And I don’t think that’s an idea that isn’t present in Homer. We just need to get a little meta with it when we think about it regarding myth and music: the voices of Homer show that the scope of what “speaks”, what sounds, or lack thereof, are in the realm of Mnemosyne, of memory, precisely because they are remembered. They’ve gone from oral singing to being written down and preserved through history (kinda like Richard Martin’s ideas of muthos, but with less agency). They are voices that means something because they’ve been composed, sung, and remembered.
Perhaps in singing, in songs, in aurality, in oral agency we can find that “other” Sampson was sensing in the sung archaic myths. Maybe if we put Homeros in our mouths and really linger on that M, we might find that something other, whatever it may be, humming deep in our rib cages, ready to pour forth from our mouth in some flow or another.
As I say every time I order a black and white shake — you are what you eat. What you consume often comes flowing back out of you. And I think, being the largest conspicuous consumer culture in history, there is quite a lot to consider — hence my appeal for Greek consonance. For sounding together. And for holding to the center and pausing before acting. And the acting part is necessary. Otherwise this is just centrism.
And now more than ever we also need alternatives to centrism and neutrality — we’ve gone far beyond Agamben’s State of Exception. However, I do think there is power in being in the middle, and exploring what that middle consists of is important. I’m always in the middle — as a middle child, as a student of ideology, as a harpist, as a playwright, as someone biracial, as an interdisciplinary scholar, as a queer femme, as a waitress, as a secretary. As someone living through this pandemic.
So I’m gonna be looking back on all I’ve consumed, tasted, chewed on, digested, been composed of, and try and remix it into a beat that resonates with others for me to work with. Find some harmonies and linger on the M and Ns for a bit, and as on my harp, and in my writing, and living my life, I’m gonna find my groove in the mixed and mingled middle.
Maybe that’s what Sampson was getting at — we’re always trying to hear something more than what we deem ourselves. A voice is a sound that means something because it is a sound that we listen to, not just hear.
May the daughters of memory let this melody linger through my musings.
