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Dana Gioia on Seneca and The Madness of Hercules (Episode 74)
780 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
“The central theme of Seneca’s tragedies is how to endure a world in which there is no justice, no safety, no guarantees—political or divine—of human dignity.”
For this episode, I went to Sonoma County, California to speak with the poet Dana Gioia.
Seneca was a brilliant philosopher and statesman, but not many know he was also a world-class playwright. Dana Gioia is changing that.
Our conversation focuses on Dana’s translation of Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules but also covers Dana’s story, Stoicism, and much more.
(02:19) Dana's Story
(13:29) Choosing Art Over Material Success
(19:30) Seneca Enters the Picture
(32:02) The Madness of Hercules
(38:25) The Value in Seneca's Violence
(44:44) Reading The Play
(51:21) Reading vs Listening vs Seeing
(57:59) Bacchus
(59:55) Seneca the Playwright vs Seneca the Philosopher
(01:07:31) Seneca on Anger
(01:14:26) Stoicism Today
(01:21:11) Fasting
(01:29:05) Final Words
Note: I had use backup audio for 1:02 to 1:08. You’ll notice a slight decline in audio quality for those 6 minutes.
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
The main message, I think, of Stoicism, you know, it's not saying, you know, giving you an intellectual regimen, it's not giving you a physical regimen, although he recommends things in both regards. But what Seneca and Stoics are saying is that achieving a kind of emotional perspective and maturity is the key to managing everything else in your life.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Dana Joya's Background and Journey
00:00:42
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with the poet Dana Joya. The stoic philosopher Seneca may be most well known for his practical philosophical work. However, he was also a playwright. Dana Joya recently published his translation of Seneca's Hercules Furans, entitled Seneca, The Madness of Hercules,
00:01:08
Speaker
In addition to his poetic translation of the play, it has a fine, critical introduction to Seneca, his life, work, and the influence he had on later figures, like Shakespeare.
00:01:23
Speaker
So all that is the focus of the conversation today. However, we really talk about much more. The polymathic Tyler Callan once called Dana Joya an information billionaire, which seems like a apt description to me. He's written criticism, poetry, read more than nearly anyone, but also marketed Jell-O and led the National Endowments for the Arts.
00:01:48
Speaker
We discuss history, Seneca, Stoicism, poetry, and art. Dana's wisdom and generosity shine throughout the conversation. Enjoy.
00:02:04
Speaker
Welcome to Stole Conversations. My name is Caleb Montaveras, and today I have the honor of speaking with Dana Joya. Thanks for having me here. Well, it's a very manageable honor, I think, to speak to me. I'm glad to meet you, and I think you should have fun talking. Yeah, so you recently translated Seneca's Hercules Furans, which we'll get into. But before we do that, let's start with a really broad question. What's your story?
00:02:33
Speaker
I think the best way to describe my rather unusual career is to say that I'm a working class guy from LA. My dad was Sicilian. My mom was Mexican. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I knew from a pretty early age that I wanted to be
00:02:54
Speaker
somehow involved in the arts. But I didn't know what that meant. I mean, I didn't know anybody that didn't have a manual labor job or a kind of low level service job. And so it was largely a fantasy life that I hadn't. And so I was a musician when I was really
00:03:10
Speaker
I started learning piano in parochial school. In high school, I played piano, saxophone, clarinet. When I went to college, I went to Stanford, I decided I was going to be a composer. But I was about just shy of 20.
00:03:30
Speaker
I simply woke up one day and realized that I would be a poet. It sounds pretentious, but somehow my unconscious had sort of that throughout. I always liked poetry. Like everybody else, I'd written a lot of bad poems. But I understood that's what I wanted to do, and I had no idea what it meant. So the rest of my life has been figuring out, what does it mean to be a poet?
00:03:59
Speaker
How does a poet make his way through life? And how do you pay the bills? Because I knew I wanted to get married. I wanted to have a family. And so I went to graduate school first because I'm a poet. You should be a professor. Isn't that the conventional thing?
00:04:15
Speaker
And I went to Harvard Graduate School. I liked graduate school. I liked Harvard in most respects. It's a bit snobbish. I can say that because I went there, but I do think it's people at Harvard are very
00:04:31
Speaker
I'm a little too proud of the fact that they are at Harvard, but nonetheless, it's a superb school, I had a good time there. But I realized after a couple of years that being a professor was very different from being a writer, and that the longer I stayed at Harvard, actually the worse I would be as a poet.
00:04:48
Speaker
Because I'd be writing poems to self-consciously, I'd be writing poems to be analyzed, rather than this weird kind of communication, which is the way poetry works. We can talk about that in a little while. So I decided to quit. I'd had jobs, believe it or not, since the age of nine.
00:05:08
Speaker
And so I had no illusions about having a shit job somewhere and, you know, writing at night or, you know, working at the night, watching that or whatever. I wanted a good job. So I went to Stanford Business School because I was all pretty good at running things. I went to Stanford Business School and I probably was the only person in history who went there to be a poet.
00:05:32
Speaker
I did the minimum amount of work. No one has graduated doing less at Stanford Business School than I did. But I achieved three really good things. I got an MBA. And I learned a lot. But it wasn't like it was worthless thing. It's just that I wasn't.
00:05:49
Speaker
I'd always been an A student and every business guy, I myself would be the worst student in the class or the best student. That was something education. I realized how most people go through school, they're not that engaged. I took a lot of that time and I spent about three hours every day writing or reading. So I started publishing and
00:06:15
Speaker
matured myself a little bit as a writer, but most importantly, and that's the woman I would marry.
Turning Point: Embracing Poetry Full-Time
00:06:21
Speaker
I knew that I would marry her within a few weeks of knowing her. It took her five years to recognize my rationale, but we've been married now for 43 years.
00:06:33
Speaker
I then went to New York. I was in business for 15 years. I was working at General Foods Corporation, which was the largest food company in the country at that point. And I worked about 10 hours a day. And I came home and I wrote at night. And after a number of years, I was successful in business. But I was also a very well-known poet and critic.
00:06:58
Speaker
I had a number of things happen in my life. The most significant one was that my first son died suddenly. He was four months old. He died of sudden death syndrome. Anyone who has lost a child or is in a family where they've lost a child knows the trauma that that represents. And as we were coming out of that and we had two more sons, I realized that, and this sounds very cynical,
00:07:28
Speaker
I recognize mortality as a force in my life. And you only have one chance to be in this world, even if you believe in another world. And I felt that if I was going to be a full-time writer now, it was the time to do it. So I simply quit my job one day.
00:07:48
Speaker
to everybody's astonishment. I didn't have another job, and I decided that I would make my living as a writer. I was lucky because I had published an article called Can Poetry Matter? I don't know if you've read it, Carol, but it's probably, it was published in 1991. It's probably still the most famous American article in poetry in the last 30, you know, 30 plus years. And it made me internationally famous. And so I felt that gave me an opportunity
00:08:18
Speaker
to make a living. And that's what I did. I worked for the BBC. I reviewed for the New York Times, The Washington Post. I began editing anthologies. I began doing a lot of stuff as a writer. And we had a couple of lean years, but then it began to work.
00:08:38
Speaker
I would have probably done that for the rest of my life. In the same way, I might have actually worked at business and written at night until retirement had I not lost my son, had I not had that basic existence of Sean. I came back to California because I was in New York for nearly 20 years. Came back to California, which is where I'm from, and where I really feel a very deep connection
00:09:05
Speaker
much more than most people, I think, do towards place. But I've never thought of myself as anything but California or where I was living. And then at the age of 50, I
00:09:22
Speaker
I ended up taking a job I did not want, but I did out of a certain public obligation. I became the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which was a failed institution that Congress was trying to eliminate.
00:09:38
Speaker
And so I went to Washington to save the NEA. And I'm happy to say I managed. We rebuilt the institution. We got the budget raised every year that I was there. We've launched its largest programs and most successful programs in its history. And I could have then once again stayed in Washington the rest of my life. I had many, many people in Washington that wanted me to continue there, but I came back to California.
00:10:06
Speaker
I had to teach part-time for a couple of years at the University of Southern California. I had two kids, two sons in college. Also, when you're in public service, you lose money. I didn't want to sell my house here. I came back and I did it. Then I had a stroke of very good fortune. Once again, it wouldn't have happened otherwise, which is that Governor Brown asked me to be California poet state laureate.
00:10:35
Speaker
And I did that for four years and became the only poet laureate in California's history who visited all 58 counties of the state and did events in all 58 counties, which was a kind of adventure. My wife and I turned it into a kind of interesting odyssey. And it was, you know, we did it together and then I left.
00:11:03
Speaker
USC. Now that was I paid the bills. I walked away from a university chair. I was nuts. But that's a whole other subject. But it was, I wasn't, my destiny was that I came back here just in time for a fire to practically burn my house down. It destroyed my name. So during the pandemic, while everybody else was in complete isolation, I was
00:11:27
Speaker
We had people here every day and we were cutting down burned trees and we were rebuilding things. So for two years we rebuilt this. Then I had a broken pocket flood of the room we were in. This room was gutted nine months ago and had to be rebuilt. So in my retirement, rather than writing full-time, which I had hoped, I'd become a kind of second-rate contractor. But actually during that time I finished a couple of books.
00:11:52
Speaker
And so what's my story? My story is a kid who
00:11:58
Speaker
was excited by art, was excited by literature, was excited by music. But I didn't know what they were, except his experiences. And I let that, in a sense, guide me into a life in which I worked in academics, in business, in government, in the media, and most importantly, as an independent writer working only for myself. And so I had an unusual life. It's instead difficult in a lot of ways.
00:12:29
Speaker
I can't imagine not thinking of myself as blessed when I'm able to do what I love and I'm able to make a living with that. So, so there's a saying that Seneca made, it only has five words in the pattern, but, you know, which is Fatah Dukam,
00:12:57
Speaker
one of them taught him. Trahut in Volantatu, which means fate guides the willing person, the unwilling one, it drags behind it. And so even when my son died, I just believed that you follow your destiny and you trust where it leads.
00:13:26
Speaker
It's usually surprising. It's usually surprising. Yeah, um, surely you must have had different opportunities come up at the time to I don't know say make more money on a great book or how'd you how'd you think about that sort of thing? Well, what I left when I announced that was being general foods As a vice president there and it's a company where vice president is real. This is a very senior office I had a a
00:13:54
Speaker
agent that I happened to know socially. He was the agent for a couple of writers. He called me up and he announced, and this would have been in 1991, end of 1991. And he said that a British play and that he had put together a book deal for me. And he could offer me a $600,000 advance to write a book about how MBAs were destroying American business.
00:14:22
Speaker
Which is an idea I don't totally reject. That's a whole other discussion. You probably get big offers like that all the time. This is in 1991 dollars. It would be a million dollars. A million dollars, just a little bit more.
00:14:41
Speaker
And I didn't say no. I said, well, I've got to talk to my wife. But I told her, and she says, well, what do you want? Do you want to do it? And if I didn't, I thought I could have secured my, you know, if I had done it, I could serve my future. But what I told her was this. And it sounds very corny, but I thought of Robert Frost, which is about his told about the road not taken. And, you know, the stubba was walking.
00:15:03
Speaker
down the road, it comes to a fork, he takes one side. He says, I had to go to the other side too, but knowing how way leads on to way, I doubt it would ever come back. And I said, well, it would be interesting, I could probably do it
00:15:21
Speaker
in 18 months. But I said the trouble is if I do that, I didn't quit business to write about business. I'd rather actually do business than write about business, which is not any insult to people who write about business that I read their writing all the time. I read the Wall Street Journal every day.
00:15:39
Speaker
I said, but then I'll have to do a book that gets an 800,000 to offer advance and then I'll have to get a book and I'll not write books that I want to write. And so I called the guy up the next day and I said, I just don't want to do it. And he was flabbergasted because he was a good guy. He liked me and everything else. And I just said, I just don't want to do it because it's not a book I want to write. Instead, I put together
00:16:02
Speaker
Can Poetry Matter? Which was a book of essays, and it's sold very well by the standards of books of essays about poetry, which is one of the infinitesimal facts. But it was a book, and 30 years later, people still are buying and reading that book in small numbers. Please don't get me wrong on that. It's never been on the best that I've ever listened, or will be. But the book is still alive. The book on MBAs would not have been a year afterwards, a little bit forgotten.
00:16:32
Speaker
We were talking earlier before the camera began about a British writer of the 30s, 40s, and 50s named Cyril Connelly, who edited Horizon. And Connelly said that the challenge of a writer is to read a book, to buy a book which will still be read in 10 years.
00:16:54
Speaker
When I first read that, it's how silly people read books that are 2000 years old, but I assure you as a writer, very few books are read 10 years after their publication. And so what I tried to do with my career was to write the books or the articles or the poems that only I can write to take my time and to write them in a way that they stay alive.
00:17:21
Speaker
for more than 10 years. I'm hoping, I think of myself, what would take this book to be alive in 50 years?
Influence of Catholic Education and Seneca's Works
00:17:28
Speaker
Then 50 years, you know, even with the Middle Ages, I'd be dead. So what, you know, how can I write something that somebody in the next generation can read profitably? Seneca sort of happened that way. And that means you just, you don't, Russian, and you go for a kind of perfectionism.
00:17:46
Speaker
Will the book pay your living? No way! It will. It's an abysmal
00:17:53
Speaker
economic investment, but what it does do is to create a life which will, in its entirety, support you. People will invite you to lecture. People will invite you to teach. People will do things because they respect the imagination and the intelligence that writes that way. So all of my advice to writers is bad advice. Nothing I recommend to people. We'll get them an agent.
00:18:23
Speaker
We'll get the best seller. But working this way, I've been able to write well, be well regarded, and make a living. Isn't that a perfect trifecta? Right, right. Yeah, I suppose you can't always have all things, so be careful what you choose. No, it is.
00:18:51
Speaker
Well, even there's all these sorts of things. I mean, Ray Bradbury, who I did pretty well in his later years, used to say, jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
00:19:04
Speaker
And I think that's really true. I mean, if you're determined to fly, that's the way to do it. Because the experience teaches you how to do it. Now, obviously, it's a metaphor, not an engineering idea. Sure, sure. But I think it is true. You take who leap, you follow fortune, and you believe that fortune will guide you. So how does Seneca enter into the picture? Well, you know, Seneca,
00:19:34
Speaker
This is a project that I've been involved with for probably a quarter of a century, but it really begins when I started college. I had an old-fashioned Catholic education. They didn't emphasize mathematics or science, but by gone they taught you Latin.
00:19:57
Speaker
because they wanted to make sure that if you're 18, when you graduated high school, you wanted to be a priest, you were prepared in theology or in philosophy and Latin. I had an extraordinarily good education for the 12th century. And having been raised in late middle-aged Los Angeles, among people that hadn't changed since the 12th century, it never questioned me that this was anything but the right education for the future. And indeed, ironically,
00:20:25
Speaker
At the age of 72, I use my Latin, my philosophy, and my theology every day. The computer languages that I learned, the statistical methods I learned, everything went in business school I don't use. So it is practical. But anyway, I came to college. They abolished Western civ.
00:20:46
Speaker
as a requirement. And I probably, if Western civilization had been required, I probably would have complained. But since it was abolished, I decided to take it. Yeah, then you have to take it. That's what I like. I'm just a contrarian. So I started in this, I didn't know what the hell I was signing up for, but it struck me, it's a good idea to read Homer and Sophocles. So I did this class and we spent like nine weeks on the Greeks.
00:21:12
Speaker
And they came to the Romans, and they said, well, you know, Romans are just not as good as the Greeks, and we'll spend like a day, you know, you know, you know, reading, you know, Santa goes by the day meeting Cicero, and that, you know, that was it. They just said, well,
00:21:28
Speaker
You know, and I sort of said, you know, so when I read Seneca and they're giving us these essays, I said, this is really good. You know, I, you know, I, you know, I find this much more useful than reading Plato. Now, I know that's an abomination, as a department of philosophy, but Seneca was not interested in giving you as a abstract theoretical system for philosophy. What he was interested in doing was giving you
00:21:55
Speaker
a practical worldview that you could apply. And when I was reading this, I said, you know, my Mexican and Sicilian families, the men are stoics. This is the philosophy that they practice. And I never thought, I just thought, this is what my father's like. This is what my grandfather's like. You know, I hadn't thought of it as a philosophical system. But anyway, I like it. And
00:22:20
Speaker
The rest of my education, I kept waiting for Seneca to reappear. I took a huge year of old class on the tragedy, caught by the head of the Spanish department. Seneca was born in Spain, for God's sakes, when it was part of the Roman Empire. And we read Ocasio, Corne, we read all the Greeks, we read Tirso de Boliva, we read Lope de Vega, we read Shakespeare, we read Schill, he didn't sign any Seneca.
00:22:47
Speaker
And I said, it puzzled me that, you know, that you wouldn't do it. And so following graduate school, I didn't get it. And I was really, I was doing work on Elizabeth Ethan's coursework. And I was actually, it was very important for me because I actually scanned every line of several plays because I wanted to teach myself as a poet.
00:23:08
Speaker
how Shakespeare's contemporaries had written blank verse because it was a performative art. They were doing it for the theater. By the way, it sounded. So I did that.
Reviving Seneca's Plays through Translation
00:23:20
Speaker
And at the beginning of his book on Elizabethan drama,
00:23:24
Speaker
Eliot writes, really it was until my book, I think the last really great literary essay on Seneca. And I read it and I said, this is really fascinating. So about the time I dropped out of graduate school,
00:23:39
Speaker
I read a play of Seneca's. Now, you've got to understand, the plays of Seneca are contemptible. They're violent. They're vulgar. They're readily written. They copy the Greeks too much, but they aren't enough likes for Greeks. I mean, there's all these reasons to handle it. Nobody ever says the good things. I read it. I said, man, this is a hell of a play. It's the fiesties, you know, which is...
00:24:03
Speaker
And it's and it begins with a fury meets a ghost and they're talking, it's almost like a no play of the Japanese. And I just thought it was wonderful. So I started reading these other plays of Seneca and I really liked them. So clearly I'm defective in the same way that Seneca, but the fact is that the Seneca plays are much more like
00:24:28
Speaker
the movies we have now. It's like it reminds me of Quentin Tarantino is pure Seneca, which is that these people like just come and just give speeches and the speeches are exciting. You know, you know, I'm going to blow this this poor college kid drug dealer up. But before I do, I'm going to give him this long speech, you know, and people. I remember being seeing Pulp Fiction, which I have problems with Pulp Fiction. I mean, I don't think it's the great great film where my sons do.
00:24:58
Speaker
But by God, Tarantino was doing something, nobody else did. He was just having violence and rhetoric and poetry together. And that's what Sam Good is like. And these characters come and they just give you a speech to knock you out of your seat, and then they go off and murder somebody, you know. And so I had a chance to do a version of this about 20 years ago, and so I did a version, and we produced it in the lower Manhattan.
00:25:25
Speaker
And this guy wanted, I used to go out drinking with this one, he comes to the police meetings, after which we'd go to these bars. And it's a work night, it's 2 a.m., we're still in these damn bars. And we're just talking about books. And I tell him about this thing, he says, I don't have to put it on music. He says, I'll pay to put it on. I said, how can you put it on?
00:25:44
Speaker
He says, I don't make that much money, but I spend it all. Why don't I spend this on? And I just saw this guy about a couple months ago. He moved back to Bay Area, you know, and he he loved the actors and he kind of better theater and stuff like that. So he bought together a group of actors. We did a semi-stage production of it two nights in a pretty big place. We packed it. And I said, well, I don't want.
00:26:09
Speaker
any of the actors to try to make this like a modern play. I want this to feel ancient. I want it to feel foreign. And I want you to come on the stage and I want you to give these speeches to terrify the audience. Just
00:26:25
Speaker
valid to thou could make it like opera and we did it and the audience was like whoa and then they just got into it and then you know it was over i mean it wasn't like we you know uh i think we actually enough gate and he was able to pay the actors just to the gate so would he you know he i didn't want to force him into financial ruin he did that later on his own but he's been through to cry a great guy uh and uh and so then uh it was a version of it was published in this
00:26:52
Speaker
Johns Hopkins Roman Drama Series, which was a disappointing venture in many ways. But I always said, I want to get back to this, and I want to bring it out as an ideal thing. So I didn't do it for a number of years, but it was always in my place. This is what I wanted to do. So when I quit,
00:27:16
Speaker
my job after the fire, you know, you know, it's what it's basically a real fire started working on again. And so I took, I took a shorter essay that I wrote and I rewrote it. I went to maybe 18, 20 drafts and it got longer and longer and better and better. And I did it because I wanted to write an essay
00:27:38
Speaker
that not only explained Seneca, explained Seneca's drama, but to a certain degree expressed my outrage that this guy had been written out of the canon and that he'd been so, I think, willfully misunderstood. And then I took the translation and I just worked on it and worked on it because I wanted a translation that when you heard it,
00:28:04
Speaker
you knew you were hearing poetry. And I had certain sections before that you could actually just perform as a poem. People would go, wow, with great poem. And so that's what I brought out. So I think it's
00:28:21
Speaker
the first serious attempt to revive Seneca for about 100 years. There's only been two translations of the play in the history of English. The first one was done by John Dunn, its uncle.
00:28:39
Speaker
That's how far back it is. Jasper Haywood, who was a Jesuit and also a sort of Catholic spy, eventually. And he did it for this edition of Seneca. Seneca was the first Latin, first classical playwright to be translated or named. So Shakespeare would have read these translations. And in fact, one of the few things we know about Shakespeare, because people were saying, well,
00:29:07
Speaker
doesn't that very good latin or greek but one of them says well you know shakespeare in english read by candlelight produces you know uh many good plays and the guy's complimenting uh shakespeare so it was that and then the second one is a was a kind of
00:29:24
Speaker
epidemic or translation, I think 1911, I think it was, something in the early part of the century, which was very, it wasn't trying to be poetic, it was just trying to give you a, you know, a, and this guy actually also did trot, you know, which is a literal translation. So this is really the first attempt to make Shakespeare work, to make Seneca
00:29:46
Speaker
Manus Frickeli's work is poetry since Shakespeare's time, actually a little bit before Shakespeare's time. And so, you know, it's up to you to let me know whether it's any good, but I gave it my all because I didn't, you know, because you're writing a poem, you know, it's very easy to say, well, this part of the play is not very good, I'll just write a poem.
00:30:10
Speaker
Why did he write it this way? And I tried to make everything work. Now you could say not everything. I didn't work. But it's because I failed. They didn't try. But I feel pretty proud of it. Because you get a sense of the power of the characters.
00:30:26
Speaker
The actress who did the version in Soho is kind of a very, she's very powerful. She's good looking, but what we could really notice about her was just she was a powerful woman. And I thought I could sit in there and she needed work. And so after we did this, I said, you know, if I get a gig to read poetry, will you come and just do this? And so I would go to a poetry reader, poetry reading, and I would do some poems. She would come out and she'd do,
00:30:53
Speaker
Juno's monologue, which is the entire first act of this play. And then I'm gonna do some more. And people loved it. Miss Actors loved it because she had to learn this part and now she's got to use it. But I found
00:31:06
Speaker
that it was very dangerous because this is a crazy vengeance ridden goddess who wants to destroy Hercules since he was a baby. She tried to destroy him in his cradle and she's getting mannered and crazier and nuttier and it's all vengeance.
00:31:25
Speaker
Afterwards, the women in the audience would come up and say, I really loved that thing that you did for Jill. She's so right about me. She's like, whoa, murder people. But I felt a certain degree. It was a little like Quentin Tarantino. These are wild and violent speeches. And it makes sense within a drama. If you exert it, it's not a moral example.
00:31:54
Speaker
You don't take food. That's not the character you should be basing the realm for, nor Hercules. So the thing about this play... Well, let's give people a quick précis about the play, because I think many listeners will be familiar with Seneca, but they may have taken a look at one of his plays, if any at all. And if you've done that, you probably will be surprised if you're familiar with his moral philosophy, perhaps.
00:32:18
Speaker
What do people know if there's the average person or average literate person who knows about Hercules? Two things.
00:32:26
Speaker
He was the strongest person who ever lived. I mean, he had such incredible strength that nothing could defeat him. And the second thing is that through one of his irresponsible acts of violence, he had to make amends by doing 12 labors for King Eurystheus. And so the king kept sending him labors, hoping that he would die.
00:32:55
Speaker
things like they were all impossible labors. And so this play begins when Hercules has just finished his 12th and final labor, which you remember is to go into the underworld and bring back Cerberus, the three headed dog. And so
00:33:18
Speaker
because of this triumph that he's done of basically fighting every monster on earth, Hercules is going to be made into a god.
00:33:31
Speaker
And this is what just really annoys Juno, because Juno is the wife of, as you know, of Jupiter. You know, she's all Hera and Zeus would be their Greek names. And she's also, this is a little kinky, she's also Jupiter's sister. You know, they, you know, they're rather like, you know, some Egyptian royal family, they marry with the family. And Jupiter has not been a faithful husband.
00:33:58
Speaker
And she's continuously humiliated by his bastards, his mistresses. And quite often, he rewards them by making them into stars, deifying them. So she's just drawing the line of Hercules. So Hercules doesn't know this, but Juno is plotting to get him as he comes out of hell. So he comes back to his native city and discovers there's been a coup,
00:34:26
Speaker
This king that's been killed and the usurper has given Hercules' wife an ultimatum that she either marries him or he will kill her and all of Hercules' children. And he thinks Hercules is perished in the underworld. He's about to get a violent surprise. So Hercules comes back to Thebes
00:34:55
Speaker
he finds out the situation, he kills the usurper. But because, and this gets into dark magic to a certain degree, that all mythologies have the gods above and the gods below. Even Christianity, I'm a Catholic, we have the gods and what's below is the demonic
00:35:17
Speaker
of reality, angels and demons, gods above and gods below. And what, like Las Vegas, what's in the Hades must stay in Hades. If you bring things out of Hades, you unleash dangers into the upper world. This has become the part of, I don't know how many horror films or TV series. Sorry, sorry. But Seneca was there first, you know. And so,
00:35:46
Speaker
Hercules does not understand that by dragging Cerberus, who is the sacred guardian of the underworld, he's unleashed all of these furies and spirits. And that's what Juno uses implicitly. It's not, she talks about it, but you don't see it on the stage, drives him mad. He goes mad and he kills his own family.
00:36:13
Speaker
and then he comes out of the madness. So it's the tragedy of Hercules' furious, which is Hercules gone mad, is that the strongest man in the world who cannot be defeated by going mad uses his strength to defeat himself.
00:36:34
Speaker
And so at the end of the play, he's basically being taken off stage by Cape Theseus, who he saved from the underworld to a place where he didn't redeem his life. But as mythology shows, all of Hercules's greatest deeds are now, for the most part, behind him. He has been a bad ending, as people know, for mythology, where he's tricked by a centaur. His wife has been sent out by putting on
00:37:03
Speaker
you know, a poisonous shirt, which he cannot remove and has to, you know, find an elaborate way of killing himself. So this is really a tragedy of strength without judgment. But you could be the strongest person in the world, but if you do not control your anger, you do not control your vengeance, that stunt cannot protect you or your family. Very sad. Right, right.
00:37:32
Speaker
So it's an exciting play. The interesting thing, the thing that I really loved about it, which was Jimmy to it, is that the third act of this is a description of the underworld. The species has come up, and everyone wants to know, well, what the hell, what's that cell like? And he tells them, and it's terrifying. And I am absolutely sure that Dante read this
00:37:56
Speaker
And it's reflected in Dante's Inferno. And people never talk about that. They always talk about his bar right from Virgil and Homer. This is something Dante would have known from school days on. And so it's a wonderful, dark, poetic, violent play that's full of great poetry. So what's not to like? I'm a guy from LA. I was raised by the movies, monster movies especially.
00:38:25
Speaker
A common criticism of Seneca's plays is that they're crude or they spend too much time in the perverse without anything to show. Like maybe one angle on this is you have the distinction between curiosity toss and studious toss where there's a sort of perverse curiosity and the gladiatorial games or the plays perhaps of a gory nature.
00:38:53
Speaker
as opposed to more serious seeking. How do you think about that? How do you answer that general pressure? Do we like to read J. Austin?
00:39:05
Speaker
Jane Austen reflects a kind of relatively tranquil part of British history. I mean, there's wars and slavery and everything in the background, but things are basically good in Jane Austen land. On the other hand, do we like to read the Master of Margaritvia by the Bull Garkov or Solzhenitsyn or these things that Mandelsham, Monica, that come out of this Stalinist terror? And we do because in our lives,
00:39:33
Speaker
peace, there's war, there's justice, there's injustice, there's democracy, there's totalitarianism. And it would be, I think it's a naive take to expect that somebody working at a court of Nero. Seneca Virgil is born in the Roman Republic
00:39:55
Speaker
and lives through the civil wars at the time of Augustus. So he
Comparative Analysis: Seneca's Rome and Modern America
00:40:02
Speaker
sees the Rome. At the end of the Republic, he sees the violence, the political chaos brings, and then he sees a great emperor who brings the Pax Romana, the peace to Europe.
00:40:16
Speaker
Seneca is essentially raised under, you know, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, and Nero. He has no memory of the republic. What he's seen are increasingly banned, violent, and in some cases, mad emperors. And he's struggling. And you see this in his essays. You certainly see it in the accounts of his life. And you see it most clearly in the Tragedies.
00:40:46
Speaker
What do you do when you're really in a world where you could just be killed by the government the next day without justice or you're tortured, you could be imprisoned, your family's in danger. And so Seneca is the acid test of stoicism.
00:41:09
Speaker
Marcus Aurelius, but Marcus Aurelius was an emperor. Seneca was essentially the prime minister. Seneca understood even as prime minister you could be killed, and indeed he was. His whole family was killed in a matter of about a week. In one week during the Pizonian conspiracy, this was a pot to kill Nero. Nero killed
00:41:35
Speaker
Seneca. He killed Seneca's nephew, Wukun, who was the last great epic poet of Rome, who wrote the Forcelli, a poem about the civil wars, and he killed Petronius Armiger, the author of the Satura, the author of the first Roman novel. And so one week
00:41:58
Speaker
Nero killed the three greatest writers of the era. And I would maintain, I've never seen anybody say this, Roman literature never recovered. Because they killed the epic poet, they killed the dramatist, an essayist, and they killed the novelist satirist. And so they killed the three great traditions of Rome. And the Seneca is in this world. He sees
00:42:22
Speaker
You know, he sees the upper kill his own mother. He sees the he sees Claudius his wife commit public bigamy, you know, and he's just all these bizarre things, you know, and and that's what he's writing out. It's very different than Athenian democracy. And so I think Seneca is actually more relevant
00:42:49
Speaker
to contemporary readers in some ways than the Greek dramatists are. Because what he's writing from is an empire gone dark. And the American Republic, like the Roman Republic, has become a kind of imperial power.
00:43:12
Speaker
When I was in Washington, I was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I would see the president and the vice president drive by with these vast motorcades and guards. It was imperial. This is not the republic that Jefferson or Adams or Addison
00:43:34
Speaker
Now, you could say, well, they have to, for all these various reasons. But we've become this imperial power. And I'm not anti-American. I don't think America is the greatest evil in the world. I really am not. But you have to notice, you know,
00:43:51
Speaker
You know, what we have, you know, the immense amount of state violence that we have, of international violence we have, the world, you know, the terrorist world, the wars that will continue over at least, the external wars that will continue as they've all been, they're positively evolving. And that's what's had this wrong about.
00:44:13
Speaker
And American entertainment has become darker and darker and darker. I mean, Seneca is a little like Jane Austen. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, to, you know, to saw or something like that, you know. Anyway, but I fell in love with Seneca as a writer.
00:44:32
Speaker
I wanted to find a way of making it work. And what you make in work is you translate this poetry as poetry, not as, well, this is some kind of Roman railroad. I don't know what he's doing. I'd love to have you read some of the Madness of Hercules. What I wanted to do in translating Seneca was to get
00:44:57
Speaker
What I felt was the excitement of these plays, which was in the language. When people are criticizing, they criticize so many words. It's a little like Salieri and Amadeus. Too many notes, the influence, Joseph the Second, too many notes.
00:45:18
Speaker
But the fact is that what Seneca is doing, it's a lot like opera. The plume de la comes out there, and she just dazzles you. So this play begins at night, because of tragedy.
00:45:34
Speaker
should take place in one location from dawn to dusk and you know all the action has the energy of time and place and you know an action the play has you know those three areas so this Seneca sneaks a little bit he starts before dawn so it's night and all the stars are out and this
00:46:00
Speaker
woman comes on stage and she's the goddess Juno and what she begins to do is to look at this dodiac and point out that these stars, these cross relations are commemorating her husband's adulterous affairs and she is not happy about it. So this is the way that it begins.
00:46:22
Speaker
Call me Sister of the Thunder God. That is the only time I have left. Once I was wife and queen to Jupiter, but now abandoned by his love, and shamed by his perpetual adulteries, I leave my palace to its mistresses. Why not choose for Earth when heaven is a whorehouse?
00:46:47
Speaker
Even as Zodiac has now become a pantheon of prostitutes and bastards, look at Callisto shining in the north. That glittering slut now guards the Arguide fleet. Or see how Taurus rises in the south, not only messenger of spring's warm nights, but the gross trophy of Robyn's rape.
00:47:12
Speaker
Or count the stormy cleateens, those nymphs who terrorize the waves, once warmed Job's bed. Watch young Orion swagger with his sword a vulgar upstart challenging the gods, while godning Perseus haunts his golden stars. Gape at the constellation Job warned,
00:47:36
Speaker
Aster and Pollux, his twin bastard sons, and now not only Bacchus and his mother parade their ill-begotten rank in heaven, but my great husband, lord of lechery, discarding his last shred of decency, has crowned his drunken bastard slut with sorrow.
00:48:02
Speaker
Now you realize this is not a woman who's going to have a charitable look at anyone whom her husband's produced, but she just begins by this great rant of this woman matted her cheating husband.
00:48:20
Speaker
And I'll tell you, you know, I know from having seen a performance still speaks very strongly, you know, to women. But you know, she goes on, she rehearses all of these things, she recapitulates.
00:48:37
Speaker
Hercules's labors. And she's starting to say, how is she going to defeat him? And she realizes she's going to defeat him by making him mad. So the strength turns to herself. And so at the very end, she's summoning up, because Hercules has unwittingly opened the underworld
00:49:02
Speaker
And so there's now free transit from these things. And then she ends with a kind of spell. Now servants of the underworld begin. The fire of vengeance, rage. Now servants of the underworld begin.
00:49:25
Speaker
The fires of vengeance raged. Electo laid the hissing furies out of hell and let each loathsome goddess snatch a burning brand from the infernal pyre. Now on to work revenge the desecration of the six.
00:49:42
Speaker
And then, you know, she gives this, you know, this spell, you know, and then she, then she goes, whenever she gets incredibly mad, she pretends to be reasonable for a moment, then she gets even vengeance. So Seneca doesn't scrape this rhetorical thing of anger, calm, anger, calm, and this kind of pyramid, you know, of anger, and where she's only invoking the infernal spirits. And then she goes,
00:50:12
Speaker
I have always been a good stepmother to my husband's gifted son. Today I'll make amends. I'll stand beside him when frenzy blurs his sight and help him send each arrow to its unsuspected bar. I'll be his staunchest ally in the fight, and when he finishes his giving slaughter,
00:50:34
Speaker
I'll have him raise his dripping hands to Jove and ask for admission into heaven. I see the first bright traces of the dawn. The pine is set, and now I must speak home.
00:50:51
Speaker
She never reappears. And it's just this kind of great overture of vengeance and violence. And that's what I tried to do, the choruses. I tried to do a different thing where I'd catch the mood of these things. And it's meant to be played. It's meant to work on stage.
00:51:21
Speaker
Right, yeah. To what extent do you think someone can understand it merely from reading? Well, I think it's very core to read. When you want to read the play, you need to know the 12 labors of Hercules, you know, because they're referred to all the time. You need to know the Roman, and then be a dog, you know.
00:51:41
Speaker
You don't need much else. The rest is self-explanatory. When he goes into the underworld, he really gives a kind of guided tour. He tells you how you get down there, each river you cross, what you come to. Right, right, right. And it's really... So I think it's actually a very accessible play. Now, the choruses are a little different because the way a Greek tragedy operates in the late Roman tragedy is you have the action, and then you have the chorus commenting on it.
00:52:08
Speaker
And so the core the choral bones are sort of poems that puncture that separate the acts. And so those can be a little more difficult. That's why I tried to make them, you know, more, you know, you know, I try to make them clearer and I try to make them musical. I did each of them in rhyme. And, you know, the
00:52:35
Speaker
and I changed the meter so that you capture the moon. In one case, it begins with a very gloomy thing, but then the chorus sees that Hercules has come out of hell, and so they figure that things are all right, so they shift meter, and he and Thebes has come the joyful day on each high altar. We will say, our choice is sacrificial beast,
00:53:03
Speaker
out to prepare the lavish piece, summon the workers from the field and taste the fruits their labors yield. I don't think there's difficult poetry, but you know it's a lot of times when you see Porus is translated, they're translating this musical Latin into
00:53:22
Speaker
obscure prose. And what you got to do is figure the tune and deliver the tune, because most of what poetry communicates is by rhythm and sound. Yeah, that's right. So I try to bring that across. And I think actually, I think the play plays pretty well. But if you don't know who Hercules is and you don't know at least a few of the labors and you don't know who Jupiter or Juno are, you are in trouble because you know itself. But, you know, but it's basically there's, you know, Jupiter above
00:53:49
Speaker
Pluto, Bobo, Juno, who's mad at everybody, and Hercules. That's the extent that the Olympian pantheon really is, you know, is called the question. The opening thing talks about the zodiac, but actually anybody who's interested in astrology or astronomy probably knows all of those, you know, who the Pleiades are, and you know, who Taurus is, and things like that. So here's the sense, so much of our culture
00:54:19
Speaker
was codified in Rome. Some of our months are named after, we have two months named after Rome in Paris, July and August. We have our planets are named after the Roman, they're not under those names.
00:54:39
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose it's certainly comprehensible, but there's I suppose there's a question that comes to mind, which is if you merely read the piece to, you know, you already need to embody it in order to get that extra, you know, amount of dramatic knowledge or embodied. That's why you should be seen or we could hurt here. I actually have a kind of see set of all Shakespeare's plays and others and all.
00:55:06
Speaker
I'll drive someplace. My wife gets invited here. My kids don't like here. I'm by myself. I actually enjoy listening to Midsummer Night's Dream or Timing of Athens or something like this because I don't have a chance to see these things. But it's because I've seen them that I can register. But, you know, a place should be seen. But when I was young,
00:55:29
Speaker
I couldn't go to the theater. I didn't want to go to the theater. There was not that much theater in Los Angeles. I would just read a play at night. So I read a lot of famous plays. And I talked about my, over there, I had to talk during the break about a science fiction writer, Tom.
00:55:46
Speaker
Tom's dish. Some people will know some of his novels like Cam Concentration, or even, you know, his books, The Brave Little Toaster. But Tom was the same way. When he was young, he would read plays. And we talked about, you know, we read all of Tennessee and Williams plays, and we read these. And a lot of these I've never seen, but I know from having read. So,
00:56:07
Speaker
until people put on set and go, reading a book is probably the best you could do. What I love to do is to do another semi-stage reading and record it. And, you know, I think it works well and the actors, I try to make the voice of each of the characters
00:56:28
Speaker
somewhat different. You know, Mikeus, who is the fellow who serves the government, you know, I made him sound like a southern politician, you know, just this reasonable calm, and he's, you know, always trying to strike a deal, you know, because you have to sort of differentiate the actors. But I, you know, I did
00:56:49
Speaker
I can't have the best I could. And I'm hoping somebody will read it and say, gee, I'd like to produce it. Which is why at the end of the thing, I put suggestions for production.
Co-Founding a Poetry Conference and Stoic Principles in Seneca's Plays
00:57:03
Speaker
Because in case somebody wants to do it, I have a little note called a translator's note. And then I just say, to a director wishing to melt the play out after the following suggestions,
00:57:16
Speaker
We're talking about the acting style. We're talking about how you do the chorus. I talk about how you make cuts. And somebody will do it. I think so. I hope so. That'd be fantastic. Don't be crazy. My friend Richard Ryan, who gets his first production. Probably because we were both, you know... See, there's certain times when you drink it off, certain...
00:57:41
Speaker
projects seem plausible. It wouldn't seem plausible if he were sober. And the funny thing is that they often work, you know, because it removes your inhibitions and you do it. So, you know, when you drink, don't get in a car, but do produce play.
00:57:59
Speaker
Right, right. You also have the line, as a philosopher, I think, or maybe Herodotus has a spot about the Persians, where they would consider an idea sober and then they would also be crucial to see how it passes when. Well, you do, you know, next morning was you wake up. Years ago, I created a writer's conference. A friend of mine and I worked at my parents' house in Sevastopol, and we had a bottle of Pinot Noir.
00:58:25
Speaker
And we began drinking it and we talked about how, you know, there's 2500 writers conferences in the United States, but there's not one that you could go to and learn how to write in meter, have anybody critique about your use of rhyme or do a verse narrative. And we thought it would be nice to have a conference that actually taught the traditional techniques of poetry by poets who use them.
00:58:54
Speaker
And so by the time we finished the Model 1, we did it. And everyone else, we were crazy. We didn't have a bug here, we didn't have a stamp, anything, but we did it.
00:59:03
Speaker
Uh, and I just did my sure force will and persuasion and four years later. We were the largest poetry conference in the United States Because we were doing something different From everyone else than we were trying to do it really well And to create an atmosphere that when young writers came we treated people as equals, you know, it was a a positive kind of respectful fun atmosphere, uh, and you know, we we ran it for 20
00:59:33
Speaker
You know, some years I had to move on. When the two founders left, it sort of faltered because people didn't keep it on strategy. But as long as you kept it on strategy, you know, we had more people than we could deal with almost. So, you know, so I'm all for divine, the divine madness. It's a box to mention another level of room and pantheon.
00:59:55
Speaker
Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about how you see this play fitting in with Seneca's philosophy. We've touched on it some, but is there a general theory you have about this?
01:00:06
Speaker
Well, there has been an argument among classicists saying that, well, the person who wrote these plays and the person who wrote Seneca says they're two different people. Now, I don't take that argument very seriously. The reason I don't is that pretty much everything that there was to know about
01:00:29
Speaker
classical literature was known by 1900. The texts were established, except for a couple of fragments of Sappho and a little Greek comedy of Menander. There's been no new texts. And so the texts are there. They've been edited. They've been annotated.
01:00:54
Speaker
about all you could do is to challenge what the consensus is. So you have to, anything anybody says you have to challenge. And so I think, to a certain degree, the argument Seneca Tragicus was not, you know, Seneca, you know, philosophers, is a hollow one. I think it's a rhetorical argument. You know, you could publish an article on it. And why, now,
01:01:23
Speaker
Seneca's essays are very clean, very concise. The tragedies are grandiose and violence and everything else. But I think it's, you know, if I take a writer and I have him write an essay and then I have him write a novel, you get two different sides of their personality. And I think that when
01:01:46
Speaker
I know. When Seneca is writing essays, he's writing in his own person. He's saying, I am an example of Roman stoicism and I will set a good example for you, my friend. So he's writing an essay, he's writing a letter to somebody, but the letter is a letter that you
01:02:09
Speaker
Seneca is writing letters to posterity, to all Roman to posterity. In the plays, he has the luxury of putting words into the mouths of fictional characters. So he can have Hercules, or he can have
01:02:30
Speaker
or Juno say things that he would never say in his first person. And so I believe that Seneca used his plays to reflect his anxiety, anger, and
01:02:54
Speaker
suppressed violence about his sense of what life had become in imperial Rome. And I think there were vehicles for all these darker emotions, which as a Stoic, he knew he must control in his life.
01:03:10
Speaker
And so, you know, you think of Edgar Allan Poe as a very meek, you know, very polite man. He drank a lot, but the stories are violent and crazy. He channeled this. You see this again and again, that the HP Lovecrafts of the world are very mild-mannered, polite people. Their imagination kind of goes wild. So I think, you know, for Seneca, this became a form in which he could channel his dark
01:03:40
Speaker
darker vision, free of the weight of being an exemplary stoic. Now does that mean that the plays contradict the stoic philosophy? No, they show the consequence
01:04:14
Speaker
flaws in their character. So it's a dramatization of Seneca, of Stoic principles. And I think they are more expansive and flamboyant than the Greek plays. And what Seneca reminds me of
01:04:44
Speaker
the way that opera, you know, time stops and violetta makes you feel what's going on in her heart. And you have this tremendous emotional transference. And that's what I saw operating when we did the stage production. That's why I said don't try to do realistic drama where, you know, you do this and you walk over here and you pour a glass of water and you light a cigarette. Just go there and be
01:05:17
Speaker
And people have this emotional transference. And the other thing is that they have this kind of inevitable violence. There's a wonderful scene in, is it a version of Antigone that was written after World War II by Sheerid the Bedor. And it begins when the chorus comes out and says, here is Antigone.
01:05:45
Speaker
She's just a girl. She dreams of marriage. She dreams of this. But the machine of tragedy has been turned on. And once this machine has been turned on, it cannot be stopped. And that's what Seneca is doing. Before the play opens up, Juno has put into effect this tragic tidal wave.
01:06:11
Speaker
And until that wave lands and crushes everything in its path, the action isn't over. And you know it's going to happen. The tragedy is not about surprise. It's about witnessing what do strong people
01:06:37
Speaker
when the worst things in the world happen to them and they still resist breaking but they have to articulate their suffering and it's a very strange art form in that respect because you know what they're doing is something that nobody wants to see and yet we're drawn to it's like a traffic accident you
01:07:09
Speaker
There's a crime scene. There's a desire, in a sense, to see the worst fates that we might encounter. And that's in the Greek tragedies. But here, it's on an imperial level. And Rome is bigger productions, bigger budget, wider screen, and technicolor.
01:07:31
Speaker
One thing that was just brought to mind was Seneca in On Anger talks about how anger is not merely an immediate reaction. Lots of people react to something out of frustration, but anger is the madness that sort of takes over when that initial impression, the Stoics would say, is agreed to and sent to that initial impression.
01:07:57
Speaker
Become angry become mad and you know, you're just saying that the play sort of takes on at that very point where reason has left and All there is is different forms of anger Well, it's What's interesting about Celica is
01:08:21
Speaker
is this notion, and you see it in the letters, but you see it throughout the tragedies, that there's a kind of pollution that happens to you.
01:08:34
Speaker
when you indulge your darker emotions. And I think we see it in the life that there's a kind of, you do it, then you sort of acclimatize yourself then and it grows and grows until there's a point where you no longer are controlled. Like Juno, at some level Juno is not even conscious of how evil she is, you know, because she, the anger allows her to justify
01:09:00
Speaker
her cruelty, her rationality, and then carry on at a magic level or a mythic level in a merely emerging, immersing yourself in the underworld, you can't get the stay off, you know, when you leave. And I think that's a rather profound psychological point that the actions that we take
01:09:29
Speaker
changes in ways that we eventually can no longer detect or control. And that we have to, in a sense, understand where we're going. And that's the interesting thing about set-up on anger is that you just stop.
01:09:48
Speaker
and you uh there's almost you sleep on it and and and you see that by the next day so much of your motivation was irrational and it's dissipated uh and it would have been uh self-destructive but how many people that were talking to have said an email that they regretted five minutes later you know you you know you really should just
01:10:13
Speaker
You have to vent it, write it, but don't send it for an hour and chances are you delete it, revise it. And so, you know, and so it's really about controlling your emotions. I mean, it's always very simple. It's that you can't control the world. All you can control is your reaction to it.
01:10:33
Speaker
You know, it's and it's a little like alcoholic synonymous, you know, is that you accept what you can't control when you work with what you can. So, you know, I think it's.
01:10:47
Speaker
In general, my impression at 18, reading Seneca, for the first time remains my impression at 72. His philosophy makes a lot of sense. Stoicism represents a very practical, effective
01:11:06
Speaker
a set of values by which to lead your life. We have more control over our lives than Romans did. A Roman who survived infancy probably could look forward to living about 30 years on the average. We can look forward to living nearly 80 years.
01:11:29
Speaker
And so we have more time to enjoy, more time to make mistakes. And I love one of Seneca's remarks, which is that he says that no life is too short. But he also says it's not that life is short, but that we waste so much of it. And I think that that's
01:11:51
Speaker
You're part of the energy of stoicism. If you accept the inevitability of mortality, your choice is basically to drift there or to use every moment until then as wisely as possible.
01:12:11
Speaker
And, you know, St. Jerome, who was a great fan of Senegas, kept a skull on his desk, his memento mori, so that at every moment he was reminded he would die and then not to waste his life. You know, it's interesting to me, and I happen to sit on next to a famous psychologist on an airplane about a month ago,
01:12:37
Speaker
And we were talking and she asked me, was I happy? And they said, I have all these questions. And I knew they were kind of standard questions. And her field was, how does your age and your part of life affect your happiness? And I said, well, you know, in my 70s, I'm much happier than I was a young man. And she said, what was your worst year? I said, probably when I was about 50.
01:13:03
Speaker
And she says, you know, you're right. Exactly. But I think part of it is that you make it to my age. And unfortunately, some of my dearest friends did not make it to my age, either through bad luck or bad behavior. You don't take anything for granted. You just every day seems more of a gift and you enjoy things. And I think my wife and I are both
01:13:32
Speaker
slightly astonished at the joy that we have in our life. But I think it comes from approaching life from a stance of gratitude.
01:13:44
Speaker
I was so busy struggling with life, struggling with destiny, struggling with all these things. When I was young, I didn't have gratitude. I didn't have any ease in things. Existence was a battle.
01:14:04
Speaker
And you realize that the thing that I quoted before that you have to let your life guide you. You have to go with the courage of your life. And if you're skillful enough, it'll take you where you need to go. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
01:14:28
Speaker
Stoicism from not with, if people would know it, but outside, they have a sense that stoicism is some kind of test about how much pain you can endure. Maybe they've read Madison Hercules, but it isn't. It's really about putting yourself in an attitude towards life that you don't worry too much about the things you can't control, and you are grateful for those things that you have.
01:14:57
Speaker
It's not bad. You know, I was raised by people that have very hard lives, were relatively poor, were always working hard, and they were joyful. They, you know, they
01:15:11
Speaker
They took joy in things that nowadays people, I don't think, appreciate as much in marriage, in family, in relations, in the holidays, the few holidays they were given from their work. They didn't waste those things.
01:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, Epictetus has a line about treating everything you have as if it's on loan from fate. Which it is. I mean, it's like the comment about, you don't buy beer, you rent this. But that's the thing about existence. And even if you believe in eternal life,
01:15:51
Speaker
You'll never be 20 again. You'll never be 30 again. You'll never have a newborn child again. You're about to get married. You'll never merge your life with somebody else in a celebration of marriage. These moments say come, and if you don't seize the day,
01:16:13
Speaker
The day doesn't come, again, another day comes, but it's different. And this poem I wrote that, again, it's called The Road, it goes, he sometimes thought that he had missed his life by being far too busy looking for it. Searching the distance, he often turned to find that he had passed some milestone unaware. And I think that's the way a lot of people, especially great successful men,
01:16:42
Speaker
And I don't, you know, many people don't agree. I think stoicism is more a male philosophy. In a traditional sense, about people who have to go out in a slummy looking world, people who may face military conscription, people who, you know, are given, you know, the difficult work in which they really only have the
01:17:08
Speaker
internal resources and their own individuality to face, you know, versus the traditional, this is Roman sense, female, which is, which has, you know, which is this creation of the home with this, you know, this web of family relations that helps support you.
01:17:30
Speaker
But I find it a joyful and realistic stance, which I think is completely compatible with my Catholicism. It comes very naturally out of my Mexican and my Italian heritage.
01:17:49
Speaker
many modern Stoics underrate the importance of gratitude, as you mentioned earlier, in the philosophy. Marcus Aurelius, his first book are the meditations. It's a long list of people who have helped him. Well, there's a kind of militant
01:18:09
Speaker
I think it's they feel a battle by society and they have to fight their way into being able to articulate and express themselves.
01:18:22
Speaker
This is probably an authentic reaction from their personal circumstances. But as somebody who's like on the other side of that towards the end of my life, I think that to be open to the grace of existence and to approach life from an aspect of gratitude
01:18:49
Speaker
is an extraordinary, it's the secret to happiness. And so other than arguing about what you've got to have and what you didn't have and what you've missed in the set of the other, you start with what you have and you're thankful for it. Anybody who's had a serious accident was that you can't walk for a couple of months, then you walk again.
01:19:14
Speaker
You know, you can't, you know, you argue, I think you've gone through some financial distress, and this having a little bit of money just to be able to indulge yourself becomes this extraordinary gift, or you've been separated from people for a long time and you, you know, you come back, you know, to your family, whatever. And so I think we take so much for granted, especially in our society now, because we're given so much. So people are given so much, they don't even have the chance to enjoy it.
01:19:42
Speaker
And I think stoicism, which is...
01:19:47
Speaker
which is moderate what you have so that you enjoy what you get.
Emotional Education and the Role of Arts
01:19:52
Speaker
Not bad advice. Yeah, be moderate, nothing in excess. Because you think of Roman society in the West, maybe Persians maybe, with the first society of luxury and excess, where people, because of the extent of the empire and the wealth of the empire, the people, especially the ruling cats of Rome, had fantastic
01:20:13
Speaker
material wealth compared to what happened in the earlier eras. I mean, you look at the palaces and things like that there, even by today's standards, they're rather extraordinary. And, you know, there's a kind of drunkenness that that could give you. You see in the United States, you know, people are so, I should talk for all the books I've got.
01:20:37
Speaker
I'm the poster boy for, you know, bibliomatic success. But except for my books, you know, I think I'm not fairly smart, but I'm, you know, certainly stoic in my appetites. You know, people are just busy getting stuff and more stuff and more stuff and more stuff. And I think it's a kind of delusion as if having more is going to make you happy.
01:21:05
Speaker
You know, then, anyway, with its own hand, the world will be here.
01:21:11
Speaker
Well, it brings to mind the contemporary of Seneca, Musonius Rufus. He always castigates his students for living in luxury. And one thing that came to mind the other day is, today, the typical person probably has about as much energy at their disposal as a Roman with 200 slaves. That's the sort of thing that people estimate. So he would be much harsher even on the typical person, perhaps. My wife and I,
01:21:41
Speaker
do a serious fast during Lent and during the end of it. And we simply, we cut back, we cut all these things out of our diet, we eat less, and it's clarifying. But first of all, I think I lost about 10 pounds, but you become cautious
01:22:06
Speaker
of your appetites, that you're so busy satisfying you almost forget. And hunger is a very clarifying and actually energizing physical impulse. And so I found that it was kind of joy in fasting.
01:22:33
Speaker
In our culture, that pleasure is often found in people that are doing bodybuilding or jogging or whatever, where they have a kind of spiritual discipline that is expressed in physical exhaustion, physical transformation. And I think that that's very sound. I do think it's a diminishment if you're doing it for your body, but not for your
01:23:03
Speaker
emotions, your mind, your imagination. There is, I think, a great shortcoming of American education and American culture in that we don't know how to educate our emotions. And certainly that's
01:23:26
Speaker
The main message, I think, of Stoicism. It's not giving you an intellectual regimen. It's not giving you a physical regimen, although he recommends things in both regards. What Seneca and the Stoics are saying is that achieving a kind of emotional perspective and maturity
01:23:48
Speaker
is the key to managing everything else in your life. I do think if you look at American education, the emotional component is almost blank. They have rules, they have punishments, but they don't know if it says how to, especially the boys, they don't think that they know how to take all the natural impulses and to cultivate and refine them,
01:24:17
Speaker
to be productive rather than destructive. And what great civilizations do is to take all this potentially destructive energy and turn it into positive energy, positive, towards positive outcomes. That is, in some ways,
01:24:38
Speaker
the benefit of arts education, which, you know, in my own argument of why I think Seneca wrote his plays, it allows you to channel the energies towards productive means. And I'll give you an example. Then I worked in
01:24:55
Speaker
And my high school in Los Angeles was not a particularly distinguished high school. It was an all-boys Catholic school. And the brother's main objective, I think, was to keep us from going to reform school, because it was in a rough neighborhood. And in fact, a lot of the guys there were getting into trouble.
01:25:18
Speaker
But we did have the best band in the city of California, the Metro-Oxford, which is quite a distinction. And it was just the action of having some very good band masters. And so I went into this thing and it was really.
01:25:34
Speaker
was serious music in the way that a lot of the bad school had a serious sports program. In fact, my high school, long after I left it, produced the best football team of any high school that saw this in California. Now, what I learned in band was band was full of
01:25:56
Speaker
young men that were potential criminals. They were explosive, they were violent, they were intemperate. But you give them some drums to beat, you give them a trombone to play, and they sort of put the energy into that. I mean, they would make rude noises, the breaks and things like that. But what it did is that it gave them the channel, and then, like a sports team, it had them play together.
01:26:24
Speaker
And they learned in a sense to focus their energy and to work for a kind of collective positive outcome in a very subtle way. And what was the way it was was beauty, the beauty of the music they were creating, which was intoxicating to the people performing. If you're performing music and it's working, you feel it.
01:26:50
Speaker
ten times as deeply as the audience does. It becomes transfiguring. But it was a way of controlling and channeling your emotions and working for the outcome way down the road with these root noises that you make when you begin turning into melody, turning into harmony. And I do think that
01:27:13
Speaker
If you took young people and you put them in theater, you put them in band, you put them in maybe debates, just as putting them in football or basketball or baseball.
01:27:30
Speaker
You educate and refine their emotions in ways you can't do otherwise. In other words, you manage suppressing them. You're yelling at them. You're forbidding them, saying, search is channeling it. And so I was lucky in that respect. And I see this even when I was teaching at USC. I had musicians. I taught most, whenever possible, I taught in their school, the Thorpe School of Music. I had musicians who
01:27:57
Speaker
versus the scholars and the scientists were completely different human beings. But they found in musical way of developing and expressing their personality, their intelligence, and their intelligence was not
01:28:15
Speaker
probably, you know, often the intelligence that was handled, of course, formed a miracle in any way. It was a kind of an expressive intelligence in very productive ways. And the difference between the poets
01:28:28
Speaker
and musicians, which is why the musicians were happier, is they were the artists that quite literally played together versus the people that saw themselves as longers, as being alienated from one another, and who began in a sense to cultivate their own unhappiness, which I think is a temptation for an artist's intellectual.
Conclusion and New Stoic Movement
01:28:49
Speaker
a kind of self-righteous cultivation of your superiority, that since the world doesn't see it can only be expressed through your resentments and anxiety and unhappiness. But I think it's not a bad thing for an artist to be happy. Yeah, I'd say that for people in general.
01:29:09
Speaker
Well, is there anything else you'd like to add? This is fantastic. Thank you for putting it up with me. I'm just going on and on and on. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
01:29:25
Speaker
a surprise and a reward for me to discover your community. And I can call it that, which is this movement of New Stelix, of these young people that are in very different ways, are going back to classical ideas and stoic ideas in particular. And you give me hope.
01:29:49
Speaker
for intellectual life, because almost in every case, you're working outside of the university. You have the benefits of an academic training, but you, for whatever reasons, declined to be circumscribing by academic life.
01:30:07
Speaker
You're living in the broader world, but you're holding on to your education and you're sharing it through books, through podcasts, through coaching. And I think that is an enormous
01:30:23
Speaker
significance to our future. And so, you know, I'm grateful to discover you and I'm grateful for any attention that you throw my way. Glad to hear it. Thanks so much. Good.
01:30:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening to StoA Conversations. If you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stoaletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
01:31:04
Speaker
If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyar.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to
01:31:31
Speaker
stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.