the young tommy
posted by Diorissi at 7:39 PM
Sunday, April 06, 2008
About Me
- Name: Diorissi
- Location: Australia
unfashionably earnest and spiritually challenged. Fond of those who speak before thinking and who live this as their one wild life - no dress rehearsal this...
Previous Posts
- Is it just me or do exhortations which would seem...
- all the seasons in a moment at Hathead
- hat head
- gloves on
- straw bale house making
- rozelle graffiti
- the inimitable naughty dolly
- townsville architecture
- the house at the turn off
- unique use of a car port in the outback
6 Comments:
What a suave and sophisticated dog in the making!
indeed - who would imagine the shame he is now capable of portraying when caught in the rubbish...i love his insouciance here...
Learning to be ashamed
(when caught poking mid the rubbish)
seems a good way to describe growing up.
Greek and Latin have words that mean both shame and honour. Always seemed odd to me: I wanted honour to be something beyond behaviour driven by fear of shame.
But maybe it's not such a negative view. Could Tommy feel honour until he had learnt shame?
Shame is the affect of hierarchy in the literature I read - telling you your standing. (So - quite relevant to honour). Some even say keeping your views of yourself flying in loose formation with how others view you - and you hide if you feel you don't quite measure up, or the parts of you that don't. Perhaps honour is the public noting that you do measure up, and for a moment one has nothing to hide?
Adam Phillips suggests that our ideals are the residue of our narcissism - and that we feel rage when someone transgresses them. There is a link with shame there - but the coffee is coming through...
Love this line of enquiry
Shame, Narcissism, and Honour: the Desire to Having Nothing to Hide (if only for a Moment)
...will be the title of a brilliant dissection of Homer I will someday write. Agamemon's enraged when they nick his girl, so he nicks Achilles to save face. So Achilles skulks in his tent, until someone kills his mate, and trumps that shame. Paris' sense of bringing ruin on his home is so acute, he can barely fight. Hector goes to his death when he'd rather stay in with wife and kid.
Whereas Odysseus, who's mostly well-balanced, has no shame in disguises, begging, lying, stealing, flirting: all in a day's survival.
And rage as impugned ideals, the narcissist's world transgressed, makes sense. I'm always tickled by people's fury about:
- bad grammar, split infinitives, apostrophes etc
- vandalism, graffiti, spitting, swearing, gum, noisy phones...
which I attributed to anger at the clash with their (falsely) remembered halcyon innocent past; but more sense and more immediate if it's the challenge to ideals, the "dishonour" they pay us through such difference.
Oh - love your detailed analysis of the rich pantomime of ancient masculinity. The masks and chameleon quality of Odysseus make him far more charming than the war-bluster and honour-mongering of the rest.
Regarding having nothing to hide for a moment - I love Georg Simmel's work on the mask of the aristocrat. He suggests masks are a concession to caring about what the populace thinks. Those shameless aristocrats! Wonder if embracing one's idiosyncrasy could function in the same way?
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