Aaron Machuca

“The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas. Culture. History. Genes don’t contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We’ve always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols… from tablets to books… But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That’s what history is, Jack.”

I would be remiss to not include some sort of homage written for what are arguably the most influential artforms that have graced my life. Much of my idiolect and mannerisms are largely attributed to how I have been molded by the written word from the titans of prose and poetry before my time.

But what exactly do I mean when I refer to art or poetry? I know this seems rather superfluous to ask as the natural assumption would be to think I am literally talking about visual arts and the poetics. But my definitions of these terms have expanded to try to include the breadth of our social ecosystems. Poetry, for instance, has not only extended its influence on our colloquial speech but is intrinsically embedded within the linguistic roots of our very languages. By nature, we are drawn to metaphors to assign intuitive notions from our lived experiences and transfer their tangibility to that which would otherwise be nameless to us. As Pauline Yu mentions in her paper on Metaphor and Chinese Poetry, “Metaphor, to return to Poetics, is “poetic” language; it offers a means of avoiding the prosaic through deviation from ordinary speech.” The essence of everyone’s vernacular is guided through analogy and hence carries traces of poetry within its morphology.

Art is similarly multifaceted in how it appears in various practices, not just exclusive to or as a subset of the humanities. When we refer to specialists of a field, we often hear the phrase “The Art of _____” to liken what they do as an unconventional artform. Indeed, anything that involves a creative imagination and some level of self-expression in their work can easily be categorized as art. The hummingbird arms of a boxer dancing to their violent rhythm as they snap, recoil, and reset their limbs in one fluid motion–with bold intent akin to a honey buzzard diving in on a beehive. A no-named theorem imbued with simple elegance in its arguments, evokes the same stark astonishment in me as Sappho’s magical lyrics. And the critic’s review, whose interpretation delves deeper between the lines to find meaning beyond an author’s intent, may rival the artistic genius of the works they review.

On a global scale, we can draw lines to distinguish art and poetry as their own independent mediums, but we miss the details in doing so. Just as a city serves as a microcosm to its state or country at large, art too is scattered across pockets of our reality; which contain multitudes in cultural value. The quote at the beginning of this page is an excerpt from Metal Gear Solid 2, where the game bursts into a meta, surreal, post-modern deconstruction of the franchise’s playerbase. This might come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with the game’s storyline, especially considering the fact that its development started sometime around 1999. But it’s all true, this was a dialogue exchange between an AI and the game’s protagonist concerning free will and the control of information in this new era of “digitized life.” Over the past 2 decades, fans have since correlated the “trivial information [accumulated] every second, preserved in all its triteness” that the AI speaks of and current day social media content, forever immortalized thanks to the internet. My own website is an example of this! I’ve easily created my own platform to spin my own forum of my own truths within my own little pond, and anyone else can do the same. You begin to wonder how arbitrary our personalities are and whether or not we truly had the capacity to exercise original thoughts, or if everything we do is a result of social osmosis. Whether or not we are our true selves or a byproduct of succumbing to an algorithm’s influences–cherry picking personalized data and turning us into electric sheep of a particular shade of wool.

Anyway, I’ve gone on about this topic long enough and there’s plenty of YouTube video essays that discuss this moment at length if you’re interested in learning more about it. History retains a small fraction of knowledge concerning ancient life as we are able to extrapolate it from classic texts. What aspects from those days that weren’t preserved in text or artifacts are simply left to speculation as to what life could have been like. Our understandings of these societies, even as early as the 1800s, are slightly misconstrued by modern retellings and interpretations. They portray civilization through a heavily filtered lens, that frame life in accordance to an artist or director’s imagination. I mean look how we warp present times; how many times have you looked at photos of a national park only to find it was nothing like the pictures you saw online? Nobody ever speaks with the immediate wit and charisma like they do in film–people are BORING and awkward and weird, even at the professional level. Celebrities and influencers present a persona with inflated characteristics to who they actually are and the lives they actually live, trimming out the mundanity and hand-selecting flaws to appeal to your humanity. Digital platforms just allow us to bend reality through curated media, not unlike fantasy worldbuilding in fiction.

The point I’m getting at is, how do you make sense of context when at best all you have to work with is an exaggerated exhibition of the world? I couldn’t say how other people do it but luckily for me this problem isn’t as apparent when the bulk of my reading material primarily comes from translations of mythology. It is ironically easier to work with texts that aren’t trying to be anything beyond the stories they relay, then you don’t have to discern between what’s real and what isn’t. What you are left with is a gateway into what respective societies deemed important enough to emphasize within their scriptures and how that serves as a reflection of their cultural values.

The Celts, were a warrior society in the early days and we can find indicators that hint towards their beliefs through early Irish and Welsh literature. I should also preface, because my exposure of myths from Proto-Indo-European societies primarily followed the theories of Georges Dumézil, the scope of my analysis will be limited to that school of thought. Nevertheless, take the pivotal tale on The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the account on the battle between the Túatha Dé Danann and the Fomoire. In a translation of the Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Turied, Elizabeth A. Gray describes the story as, “A contest between the gods of pagan Ireland and their enemies, also once a supernatural race.” She goes on to say that “although the conflict is set within the chronological framework of Irish pseudo-history,” the narrative is a “paradigmatic illustration of principles fundamental to the ordering and maintenance of human society.” The beginning recounts events prior to the main story, where the Túatha Dé Danann had allied themselves with the Fomoire while they were residing on the islands north of Ireland. Not long after, the Túatha Dé Danann occupy Ireland after the defeat of previous inhabitants in the first battle of Mag Tuired. During that battle, the Túatha Dé Danann king, Núadu lost an arm and was deemed no longer elligible for rule. After some deliberation, Bres, the illegitimate son of the Fomorian king, is selected to be the new Túatha Dé Danann king, a decision which proves disastrous as his egocentric kingship thrusts his subjects into ruin. In his incompetence, Bres ignores the social roles and status quo of their society; eventually leading to a satire to be made against Bres, causing him to retreat to plead for his father and the Fomorian army’s support against the Túatha Dé Danann. Meanwhile, the Túatha Dé Danann restores Núadu’s former position after his silver arm was miraculously healed and recruits the warrior Lugh, master of all the arts. With Lugh’s superior skills, the vastly outnumbered Túatha Dé Danann are able to claim victory after Lugh casts a sling-stone at Balor’s (his maternal grandfather) evil eye.

I’ll end the synopsis there for those interested in reading the tale on their own, which I highly recommend, but I wanted to highlight some noteworthy points in my summary. First, I want to elucidate the reasoning for Núadu’s ineligibility as king after the loss of his arm. This is rather simple, though neither the text nor the translator notes I am referencing (to my knowledge) clarifies this point, as the Túatha Dé Danann believe a king must be physically unblemished or they would not be capable for sovereign leadership. In line with Dumézil’s tripartite system which categorizes sovereign power, martial forces, and fertility as social groups (or functions), each subsequent king that leads the Túatha Dé Danann can be seen as a reflection of these functions. Bres with the third, Núadu with the second, and Lugh (temporarily) with the first. Gray elaborates on this point in saying, “This sequence as a whole demonstrates that the virtues which typify the three functions are among the qualities that define a king: he must be generous, brave, and just.” The narrative further examines rules designated towards other social roles within Indo-European societies, but this is sufficient to illustrate the parallels between myth and its real-world counterpart. Interesting enough, whenever the gods find themselves reciting incantations or speaking prophecies, they will break away from prose to speak in poetic form. It suggests as though poetry is a form of magical knowledge that is sacred within the first function of the Dumézilian tripartite hierarchy. Slight tangent, but there is a reason God himself speaks almost exclusively through poetry in the Old Testament–though more on that later.

Sometimes Irish folklore will have texts that exist as an intermediate myth that depicts a human society living among demigods with extraordinary power. And I know of no better example of this than the Táin Bó Cúailnge or roughly, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. This epic is often referred to as the “Irish Iliad,” and for good reason as the narrative provides background details on tales prior to the Táin before shifting towards the central figure Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, performing legendary feats to single-handedly overwhelm the invading armies of Connacht–seeking to steal the great Brown Bull of Cuailnge. Due to the fragmented nature of early Irish literature and our uncertainty regarding how long the Táin’s was passed off orally before its literary existence, we are left to speculate how long the kind of culture the Táin describes lasted in Ireland. To quote Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin, “The Táin and certain depictions of Gaulish society by Classical authors have many details in common: in warfare alone, the individual weapons, the boastfulness and courage of the warriors, the practices of cattle-raiding, chariot-fighting and beheading.”

This is possibly my favorite book of all time, but for brevity I’ll only be focusing on Cú Chulainn, serving as the euhemerized version of Lugh in the Ulster cycle of Irish literature. There’s a certian archaic charm that comes with reading myths like this, and I don’t think any summaries could do it any justice so I will leave the reader with excerpts of my favorite passages:

“The first warp-spasm seized Cú Chulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his feels and calves switched to the front… His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane wouldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skill; the other eye fell out along his cheek… His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.”

¹

“One horse was lithe and swift-leaping, high-arched and powerful, long-bodied and with great hooves. The other flowing-maned and shining, slight and slender in hoof and heel. In that style, then, he drove out to find his enemies and did his thunder-feat and killed a hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred, then four hundred, then five hundred, where he stopped – he didn’t think it too many to kill in that first attack, his first full battle with the provinces of Ireland.”

²

“Ferdia raised up the shield to cover his upper body, but it was too late. The charioteer sent the gae bolga down the stream. ‘Beware the gae bolga,” he said. Cú Chulainn caught it in the fork of his foot and sent it casting toward Ferdia and it went through the deep and sturdy apron of twice-smelted iron, and shattered in three parts the stout strong stone the size of a mill-stone, and went coursing through the highways and byways of his body so that every single joint filled with barbs."

I could gush ad nauseum about this book, but I’ll cut it off here before my word count treads into the “long essay” territory. One last thing while I’m on this topic, the icon that I use for my website is actually a rendition of Cú Chulainn as described in the Táin that I had commissioned from the astounding, Dan Raymond. Please, please, check him out, he is highly underrated and deserves more love for his incredible artwork–tell him I sent you!

Cosmogonies underpin mythology as a concept fundamental to their usual worldbuilding structure, you will seldom find a pantheon without one. Among those few, Celtic mythology has the unfortunate distinction in offering very little or no information explaining the origins of their universe. Why this is the case, to my knowledge, is unknown and a big point of contention within academic circles centered around Indo-European studies. It could be that there were records simply lost to time or that they never had them in the first place. The latter seems highly unlikely considering our human tendency to gravitate towards having some rationalization that accounts for our primordial origins. The Greeks were thankfully able to salvage a well-documented (or as well-documented as ancient stories can get) cosmogony and theogony, and to a lesser extent–so did the Scandinavians!

³

Apologies to The Odyssey enthusiasts out there but I’m going to neglect the Greek folklore to provide Norse mythology a chance in the spotlight. A big portion of our information on the Norse mythos primarily comes from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose and Poetic Edda. …

Editor’s Note: As of the time I’m writing this I don’t have access to my Poetic Edda translations because I left them all in Berkeley so I have to make do with what I have and what I can remember but I’ll add in examples of Norse poetry as soon as I can.

For anyone still caught in the winds of my ramble fest, firstly, I appreciate you taking the time to read my thoughts on something very dear to me. I wanted to end this off with a final discussion on my absolute favorite genre to read from: Biblical Poetry from the Old Testament. I only read from Robert Alter’s translations of the Hebrew Bible as it is the closest you will ever get to a faithful translation that retains the original poetic essence of the Old Testament’s scripture. When it comes to translations of any kind, you have to keep in mind what the author’s intents are and their proficiency to deliver a good translation. Religions centered on the Bible can be subtle but splinter off with deviations of the Old and New Testament suited to their purposes. Often time, this translates to appealing to the layman and ensuring a broader audience can derive a good enough understanding from the text. Other times the translations just fundamentally misinterpret or misunderstand what exactly the stories were trying to convey–especially concerning more arcane literature like poetry. And considering a third of the Old Testament is comprised of poetry, you can see where issues arise in attempting to demystify the word of God.

What makes for a “good” translation is difficult to measure and depends on the context, but I can assure you that no one has ever translated the Hebrew Bible with as much prowess as Robert Alter and his dexterous grip on versets has. It is certain that everyone who has been granted life will encounter circumstances that try their mental endurances. By default, we are born into a minimum level of encumberment that will wear us down for the rest of our life. For one reason or another, some of these scenarios surpass our linguistic capabilities to express them–good or bad–and are thus constituted as ineffable. Cultures around the world have different methods to reconcile with this universal issue, and the Hebrew Bible serves an impressive attempt at that.

I’m not here to preach or gossip to you about the word of the Lord, in fact I am not even religious myself. My sole interest here is to appreciate biblical poetry as an uncontested form of literature; whether or not you agree with this academic reading of the Old Testament is up to your discretion. There are three books that compose the Hebrew Bible which are: the five book of Moses, prophets, and writings. Because the focus is on biblical poetry, readings are taken primarily from prophets and writings. Beginning with Psalms, I’ve always found this book a little curious in how the content defies your expectations with respect to the “intended” usage of these prayers and songs. They are meant to serve as a general celebration to seek God’s glory but still be specific enough to fit an individual’s circumstances for their troubles. Yet, there’s something insidious in how apocalyptic and grim much of the text reads from a surface level perspective. Take Psalm 18 5:7 as an example:

“The cords of death wrapped round me,
  and the torrents of perdition dismayed me.
The cords of Sheol encircled me,
  the traps of death sprung upon me.”

To the uninitiated, this takes on a wildly dark approach to call upon the Lord’s attention to lift them from the deluge of their despair. Alluding to pangs so great it’s as though death was embodied through a cord and constricting against them, then casually referencing how they feel as though Sheol suddenly struck doom on them. Though I suppose rousing the spirits of one’s sorrows was never a light-hearted subject to begin with. And then there’s versets 15:17 in the same Psalm:

“[The LORD] let loose His arrows, and scattered them,
  lightning bolts shot, and He panicked them.
The channels of water were exposed,
  and the world’s foundations laid bare
from the LORD’s roaring,
 from the blast of Your nostrils’ breath.”

This is an archetypal example of parallelism found within biblical poetry, Alter explains this in The Art of Biblical Poetry, “The most common pattern in this regard is one of the incremental repetition: something is stated; then it is restated verbatim with an added element.” Although in this case the versets aren’t reiterated verbatim, they build off the previous lines with incremental descriptions. Here, God’s terrifying power is displayed in comparing natural disasters of the world with his physique or direct actions. The imagery of a lightning storm is painted through literal arrows fired from God’s bow and is then animated in the unorthodox description of “panick[ing] them,” associating the frenzied motion of anxiousness to a swarm of lightning bolts being shot from the sky. Then, showcasing God’s ferocity in how even the winds blown from his roaring mouth and his nostrils are able to part massive seas asunder. It’s a simple but extremely effective technique that allows the writer to scale descriptions of the small to planetary lengths at a moment’s notice.

But there is one exception to Psalms that has a more graceful tone compared to the vengeful brooding found in the other prayers. I’ll leave it unannotated as it’s a beautiful poem that speaks for itself:

One last analysis. Originally I planned to leave some room to examine the Book of Job as the antithetical challenge to Proverbs and Psalms, but perhaps that’s better suited as a separate post on its own given its ambitious length. Instead, I’ll go over one verset from the Song of Songs that I have always been fond of since I first read it. A story of two lovers (accompanied with a reinterpretation of my scribbled notes from 2020):

Chapter 2, 15:16
“Seize us the foxes,
  the little foxes,
despoiling the vineyards,
  but our vineyards are in bloom.”

Seizing the foxes, as if to say any attempts to contain the lover’s affection for one another would prove troublesome in their scampering and unbounded joy. The word “little” serves to reinforce the mischievous nature of foxes as they ruin the vineyards, unmindful of their surroundings due to their focus placed in each other. The contradiction in the ending line, “our vineyards are in bloom,” is immediately resolved with the clever usage of “our” reconfiguring the previous line as a metaphor for their love.