Hyperborean Life

Spring 2005

The winner of a contest at one of the great panhellenic games might hire a poet to sing about his athletic triumph. Pindar is preserved as the greatest poet of praise from archaic Greece . His arresting opening for the first Olympian ode (476 BC) captures his esteem for excellence:

Best is water, and gold like burning fire
stands out, like man-magnifying wealth.
But if of athletic contests you wish
to speak, my dear heart,
do not look to any star shining more warmly at day
through the empty air besides the sun,
nor will we declaim a contest greater than Olympia!

Each of the piled-up images points to something preeminent in excellence—the best. Praise for Hieron, the powerful ruler of Syracuse in Sicily, follows naturally on this general reverence for excellence. At the close of the ode, Pindar wishes: “…may it be that I join with victors at all such times, being foremost in wisdom among Greeks everywhere.” So added to this list of a few of the best things, comes naturally the best poet.

But what a strange world, where powerful victors hire a poet to compose a song, performed during a joyous victory revel or around a feasting table. Something old was not best, but rather the new: “Praise old wine, but the blooms of newest hymns!” (Olympian 9). That demand fueled the livelihood of poets. Pindar was the pinnacle of the praise tradition, but other local poets must also have fed the hunger for a beautiful celebratory song. We can call a concrete space, such as these performances in honor of a victor, a cultural niche. A niche such as this demands new composition and trained artists—for these were not performed by a single standing poet, but by a troupe of dancing singers.

We could diagram our own cultural niches. Perhaps we spend half an hour getting to and from work—opportunity to listen to the radio or to get through a book on tape. We work 9-5 on weekdays—opportunity for “prime-time” television shows on week nights. You have a weekend off—the leisure time for a film or to continue with a novel. Every art fills a niche, which is just a way to say that art does things: it fills certain leisured time periods; it fills walls; it provides music for dancing. It brings us some form of pleasure within a bounded cultural role.

We can go a long way in our American world without needing to commission a new song. For a wedding or birthday celebration we turn to recorded music, or quote somebody else’s poetic lines. Even in churches, those cradles of so much past musical innovation, it is common to hear taped played as backup for the special music. The easy presence of CDs and radios makes music more common, more at our fingertips, than ever before. But these devices in turn have come to clog the creative niches. We have not multiplied the creative centers as our population has increased, but rather multiplied the profits for a handful of creators—our best-sellers and chart-toppers.

Sometimes we speak of the “miracle of Greece.” And it is odd to imagine classical Athens, where Herodotus knew Sophocles, where Aristophanes satirized Socrates. A traffic jam seems to have formed about the excellence of genius. One can say something similar about Elizabethan England. At the birth of William Shakespeare in 1564 the population of all England was perhaps as high as three million people. From among that same three million we must number every prominent writer and scholar of the cultural efflorescence that we know as the English Renaissance.

In each of these cases one is tempted to subscribe to some version of the myth of the golden age, and shrug that we have now declined from those peaks. Greater Atlanta , where I live, has many times more people than Athens , and more people even than the entire population of Elizabethan England. So what else could account for our lack of great writers? We can discount the idea that somehow our imaginative ability is any less than for those living in Elizabethan England. An important difference is the number of unoccupied cultural niches where creative work can be profitably done. We rely much more on the creative work of others—those funded by deep corporate pockets.

Atlanta has a local music scene, like most large American cities. Local theater exists. But it hardly matches the local cultural demand in Shakespeare’s London . In his biography of Shakespeare, Park Honan describes the London theater.

The company in good, or ideal, times acted on every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent; they put on a different play each working day of the week, though some plays would be repeated in the weeks ahead. For example, the Admiral’s men typically put on fifteen different titles in the course of twenty-seven playing days. An actor usually had to keep at least thirty parts in his memory, many more if he doubled in minor roles.

That is a system bound to produce and draw exceptional talent. Why can this not be duplicated in a greater Atlanta which has a population that dwarfs Elizabethan London? Simply because the audience is not there: we watch the same movies that show in every other big city in America . Local theater inevitably caters to sub-cultures whose concerns are not addressed by the larger culture and its generalized entertainment.

“Hold the oar!”, Pindar sings in Pythian 10 when he wants to change direction, imagining his song as a boat gliding over the water. Why change directions? “Because the best hymns of praise, as a bee, flit from one theme to another.” Constant change was the goal, and Pindar served up mercurial and twisting paths of words. Song was part of the good life, as is clear from his description of the happy life of the Hyperboreans, living beyond weary human cares:

The muse is not far distant
from their ways. Everywhere the dances of maidens,
the sounds of lyres, and the ringing of pipes are in commotion.
Having bound their hair with golden laurel
they feast joyfully. [Pythian 10]

And the muse does not have to be so far distant from us, if we could only imagine our own daily life with a few more niches for the imagination. Technology thus far has been harnessed to limit and centralize expression, but there is no reason why this should continue to be the case when the tools for our own photographs, our own writing, and our own music, even our own movies, are so near at hand. We can resemble a little more those mythical Hyperboreans, blessed by Apollo, and singing their own songs.