Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!
This week, I talk about the weather; the Apple of the
Week, as promised, deals with hubris; we have a bunch of pictures and a list of
The Christmas Knitting. So, cosy up with a nice hot drink, and let’s get on
with it.
Next week, I will be posting on Thursday at the latest
– I hope, or not at all. Because: I am going to England for the weekend! I
think I may have mentioned a while ago that I am going with my eldest son,
Andreas, to the Black Library Weekender in Nottingham. So we will be away from
far too early Friday morning to way late Sunday or, technically, Monday. No
blogging for me, since I will not be lugging my laptop along; I simply can’t be
bothered, and I haven’t got a smart phone. I will bring my new camera, though,
and take some pictures to show you how Nottingham behaves in November ...
But baby, it’s cold outside! The temperature here has
dropped about 6 degrees Celsius in a few days – beautiful days they have been,
with sunshine and clear skies, and the stars out at night, and the nearly full
moon shining. On Saturday morning, I took some pictures of the frosted lawns
and trees; and I could take more today, if I wanted. It melts during the morning,
when the temperature climbs above freezing – but winter is definitely coming.
Oh, and it snowed on Friday.
So, out come the knitted goodies, and of course I want
to make even more hats and mittens and socks and, in general, lots of woolly comfort
and guards against the cold. But more about that; now it’s time for the
Apple
of the Week:
I mentioned hubris the week before last, as in ‘the
suitors are repeatedly described as being hubristic’. Now, if you are familiar
with the term, fine. You can skip this part – or read it because it’s vaguely funny
and there is knitting involved.
But let me just explain what hubris is and how it
works in Greek mythology and literature.
The word hubris basically means the stepping over a
boundary, moving out of your designated area; doing or saying something that
you are not supposed to. It would be hubris, for instance, for a human to
attempt unaided flight. That is in the province of birds. It is also, to the
ancient Greek mind, hubris to ignore the warnings of prophecies and oracles, in
other words to think that you know better than the gods.
Let’s break it down: hubris is not the part where you
drop a stitch in your complicated lace pattern – that is human fallibility.
Hubris is not the part, either, where you forget to put in a lifeline –
everybody forgets stuff. Hubris is the part where you cast on for your First Ever
lace pattern, consider the concept of a lifeline and decide that you do not
need it, because you are not going to screw up. (When I say ‘you’, it is
strictly in the generic sense, of course – you are wiser than that, right?)
Now, you may have knitted a whole bundle of beautiful
lace shawls and never had to frog the whole thing because of an irreparable
mistake. That is probably because you are a great knitter and you know what you
are capable of doing and, more importantly, what you are not.
But here’s the thing about hubris and the Greek gods –
they can decide to let you get away with something for a while, to let you
think that everything is just fine and dandy and that you can just carry on.
You, the beginner, knit your first lace shawl without
frogging disaster, and it is lovely. All is well. You decide to try Estonian
lace – after all, how hard can it be?
Lifeline?
Superfluous.
Kidsilk haze?
Beautiful.
This blindness is called ate, and while you are afflicted by it, you are unable to see the
impending doom ... In the above lace knitting scenario, that would be making a
mistake, not discovering it until several rows later, and having to frog, or
rather, laboriously unpick while swearing like a pirate and reaching for the
whisky, Kidsilk haze. You get my point, I think.
So, hubris is doing something wrong and/or stupid,
when you really should know better, and getting the wrong kind of attention
from the gods.
The punishment is nemesis, often personified as the
goddess Nemesis. Now, nemesis always matches the hubris in some way, being in
the same category and perceived severity.
Now that we ‘get’ hubris, let’s move on to a classic
example: Oedipus. We all know the term ‘Oedipus complex’ coined by Freud to describe
a boy’s hatred of his father and love of his mother; according to Freud, this
is a faze that all little boys go through and should move past to be able to
form healthy relationships in later life.
The girls’ equivalent is the Elektra complex, named
after the daughter of another Greek hero, Agamemnon, who was murdered by his
wife / Elektra’s mother. But that is another story for another day.
(Just for the record: I am aware that my transcribing
of the names of characters is not wholly consistent: some of them I spell more
like the Greek, some more like the Latin equivalent that is common to English. It’s
a compromise between my own desire to be close to the Greek and the need to be
understood.)
The story of Oedipus really is the stuff of tragedy – as
told by the great playwright Sophokles: he is encumbered with not only hamartia, the fatal flaw that any tragic
hero must have (and, let’s face it, that most of us do have), but even more a
Fate that dooms him to kill his father and marry his mother. Now, Fate is
unequivocal and inescapable; even for the gods. There is no room for bargaining,
no short cuts, no running away.
Fate is revealed to the participants through the voice
of the Oracle at Delphi, where Apollo speaks through a priestess. This
institution was a major player in ancient Greek society and functioned for at
least 2000 years, from sometime in the Bronze Age up till 393 CE, when
Christianity became the only legal religion of the Roman Empire. Ordinary
people, kings and governments sought the aid of the Oracle in matters of
everyday life events, wars and crises.
So when king Laios of Thebes and his queen, Iokasta,
have a son, they ask at Delphi about omens for his life – and are told that Laios will be murdered by his son. Trying
to avoid this, they give the child to a shepherd – to leave out for the wolves
or lions to eat, probably: they cannot kill the baby outright without incurring
the supreme wrath of the gods, and this roundabout method was the way, then, to
get rid of unwanted children.
The shepherd, though, gives the baby to a colleague
from Korinth, and the boy grows up in the royal household there, not knowing
that he is adopted. As a youth, Oedipus (‘Lumpfoot’, so nicknamed because of
scar tissue after severing of the ankle tendons when he was put out) overhears
someone saying that he is not his father’s son and decides to go to Delphi to
ask the existential question: ‘Who am I?’ The answer he gets is certainly not
the one he expected; the words of Apollo are: ‘You are the one who will kill your father and bed your
mother.’
Not surprisingly, Oedipus wants to avoid this, and instead
of heading home to Korinth and the people he still believes are his parents, he
takes the other fork in the road and heads towards Thebes. On the way there, he
encounters on the narrow mountain road an old man with an entourage; neither of
them wish to move aside for the other, and the quarrel ends with Oedipus
killing the old man and most of the entourage. And I just know that you have already
guessed the identity of this old man, right? Yes, of course: king Laios was on
his way to Delphi to ask for help in a new crisis.
It so happens that a sphinx has set up camp just
outside Thebes and spends her days asking riddles of travellers and then
proceeding to eat them, when they cannot answer. Which is rather bad for
tourism. Oedipus is clever and solves the riddle – the sphinx promptly loses
her will and reason to live and throws herself into a gorge. Crisis averted.
The town of Thebes is delighted and honours the saviour by electing him king;
because, incidentally, their old king was murdered recently by a band of
highwaymen. Part of the job as king is to marry the widow of the former king
... and the stage is set.
For years, everything is great: Oedipus and his lovely
wife Iokasta have four children, he is a good and caring king to his new home,
all is well. Then blight hits: crops fail, livestock and women deliver
stillborn young – something is rotten in the state of Thebes. The Oracle at
Delphi in consulted again: Thebes is plagued by the continued presence of the
unpunished murderer of king Laios all those years ago. Oedipus immediately
launches an investigation – after blaming his brother-in-law Kreon for not
solving the mystery at once; but they were busy with the sphinx problem at the
time – to find and exile this evildoer, and threatens harsh punishment for
those who hide him or fail to reveal their knowledge of him. Can you say tragic
irony?
The blind seer Teiresias is summoned: he ought to know
something. And he does, but refuses to talk at first, warning Oedipus that he
really does not want to know. After being accused of murdering the king himself
– we see a pattern emerging: Oedipus tends to blow up when crossed, one of his
flaws – he says outright that Oedipus is himself the man he seeks; his sons are
his brothers, his marriage is tainted. Oedipus understands nothing. He cannot see
what is going on with his life.
Next, Oedipus accuses Kreon of having conspired to murder
Laios; to which Kreon very sensibly replies that he would much rather be a
trusted adviser to the king than bear the burden of responsibility.
Further facts come to light about the time and place
of the attack on Laios; and Oedipus begins to wonder if he can be the killer –
after all, he was there, on the road, at the time. But he is not a ‘band of
highwaymen’; a witness report is needed. This is bad, of course: if Oedipus is
the regicide, he has to exile himself; but it is nowhere near as bad as we know
it to be ...
In the middle of all this, a messenger arrives from
Korinth to say that the king there is dead, quietly, of old age. This is a
great relief to Oedipus, who is thus, he thinks, acquitted of patricide – he is
still, however, worried about bedding his mother. Iokasta tries to put him at
ease with the famous line (that Freud made so much of) that ‘every man dreams
of bedding his mother’ and that Oedipus shouldn’t worry too much about it.
Now, Iokasta has very good reasons for dismissing
dreams, prophecies and the like: she believes that the Oracle was wrong so many
years ago about Laios’ fate, because the son who was supposed to kill him died
in the mountains, and Laios was killed by robbers – or possibly this man Oedipus
who came from another city.
The messenger knows that Oedipus need not worry about
his mother who really is his adoptive mother: he turns out to be the shepherd
who brought Oedipus to the palace in Korinth instead of leaving him to die,
when he got the child from a local shepherd. Iokasta slinks away into the
palace (she knows at this point),
while Oedipus chuckles at his wife’s ‘snobbery’: what does it matter if he were
the child of slaves? If only ...
Next to arrive on the scene is the one surviving
member of Laios’ entourage on the day he was killed; this man had been a
shepherd, was promoted to bodyguard, but requested a transfer back out of town,
when Laios was dead and the new king took his place (he must have recognised the
attacker). He is here to clear up the matter of whether Laios was killed by one
man or several: if it were several, then Oedipus is in the clear. The messenger
from Korinth recognises him as the former colleague, and despite the poor man’s
reluctance, the story of the boy who lived is gradually unveiled. And finally,
Oedipus sees himself for who he is: the man who killed his father and bedded
his mother.
He runs into the palace, finds Iokasta dead by her own
hand, hanging from a rafter, and uses her dress pins to gouge out his eyes, the
eyes that have seen what no man should see, the eyes that no longer have any
right to see the sacred light of the sun or the faces of his accursed children.
From this blinding, we can get an idea of what Oedipus’
hubris is: not the killing or the bedding – that was all down to Fate and just
his bad luck – but the mental blindness and the arrogant mistake of trying to
avoid his Fate. This arrogance began, of course, with Laios and, to some
extent, Iokasta, who tried to avoid being killed by his own son. By their very
actions, they created the circumstances that made the whole thing possible:
Oedipus did not knowingly or willingly kill his father and bed his mother – he killed
an arrogant old man on a mountain road (ironically, they were both equally hot-headed
and stubborn), and he did his duty by marrying the widowed queen of the city he
did not recognise as his home.
Now, what can we learn from all this? The religious
reasoning and morality expressed in the tragedies of the 5th century
BCE can seem rather heavy-handed: the inescapable Fate, the hubris-nemesis
symmetry; all that was being challenged at this time by the natural philosophers
who sought material explanations rather than theological for the way the world
works. And the citizens of the new democracy in Athens may have relished the
thrill of this tragedy, but not taken it literally once they left the theatre
and went back to their lives, which they believed to have some control over.
The question of free will versus preordination has
been much discussed over the centuries, with religious and philosophical camps
lining up arguments on both sides. This is not the time to enter into that
discussion, unless perhaps to point out that it is not over; only now science
has entered the field bearing DNA evidence that leads some to suggest that
everything we think and wish and do is determined by our genes.
That may be so; but Fate or genes can only stack the
cards – it is up to every one of us how to play them, and we retain the
responsibility for doing it the best we can.
The
Knitting:
The owls
all have their eyes now; I got a bit of a shock when I threw the sweater in
water (gently, of course): all of the yellow beads turned green! That was quite
odd, though not a disaster, since the green beads looked fine on the green
sweater.
The effect was temporary, though: the semitransparent glass beads apparently
are fully transparent when wet, and now that they have dried out, they are almost
to being a slightly greenish yellow.
And I finished the Owl Cowl; I put buttons on this
time, which turned out to be a lot quicker.
I am really enjoying this Hitchhiker thing; before
starting the first one, I saw several comments on Ravelry to the effect that it
is a fun knit and thought: ‘Fun? How come? I mean, I get that it’s an easy,
accessible knit, being all garter, and the construction is kinda new (to me, at
least). But how can it be fun?’ But it is
fun. Turning the corners on the tooth-edge is very satisfying, with or without
the beads. And now that I’m working one in some of the Trekking sock yarn that
I dyed, I have to say again that I love this yarn: it is so great to work with.
So, everything is shiny on that front.
The Bowtie socks are moving along, or rather, the
first sock is; not very quickly right now for reasons cited below. But they
will be good when they are done, and I’m still liking the wee little bowties.
And the Trekking yarn is nice, have I mentioned that?
This skein seems softer than the one I used for the Watson socks; I think it
may be because of the iron modifier I used to get the khaki colour. Something
to note for future reference.
The Hitchhiker has been put to one side for now,
however: I decided late on Tuesday that I want to bring my Carnaby skirt for
the trip to Nottingham next weekend – and seeing that I’d done about a third of
it, and once it’s knit, it needs to be washed and rinsed a gazillion times and
dry and then have buttons sewn on, I
thought I’d better get cracking.
So now, I have only a few pattern repeats to go, maybe
just one more short row section and the box stitch panels surrounding it. My
last ball of yarn is getting smaller by the minute, though – and this is only
my own fault (it being the last, I mean): I’m knitting with Aran weight yarn
instead of Worsted, and apparently I did not adequately take into account how
much more yarn I would need. From the pattern, I calculated that 3 skeins would
be enough, maybe a bit more, and so I dyed 4 skeins. Well, those 4 skeins might
just do it, otherwise I’ll have to improvise some stripes down the buttonhole
band with the walnut-coloured yarn, perhaps, or the undyed.
So ... the Christmas Knitting: I have done the 4
cowls, which leaves me with
6 hats,
3 pairs of mittens,
2 scarves (including the Hitchhiker),
1 pair of socks,
6 little animals
and a partridge in a pear tree – uh, no, I mean a bunch
of stitch markers.
That list looks rather daunting, all put together like
that and not forgetting the skirt and the socks that are on the needles right
now, and the cowl that I’m planning to do for the Knit1Geek2 hobbit-along ...
and a few tree ornaments, and I really could do with a pair of flip-top
mittens, and a Jayne hat would be fun, and ...
We’ll see: I will begin at one end and see where it
takes me, and if it is too much, I’ll just not do it. No knitting for 40 hours
a day to make it all in time; that way lies madness.
Oh, and here’s a tie-in to the serious business: if I
were to declare that all of the above would certainly be finished in time for
Christmas, no problem – the knitting gods would notice, and I would be very
likely to trip over a ball of yarn and break my wrist. See? Hubris and nemesis
in action.
Today being the last Sunday of the month, I went to
the local knitting group this afternoon, bringing with me three blue projects:
the Carnaby skirt to work on until I ran out of yarn, the Bowtie socks, and
because they need to be tried on when I’ve done the gusset increases, I packed
the Hitchhiker as well. Just in case. The crocking from the yarn in the Carnaby
led to me talking about plant dyeing – and the pattern led me to advertising
Ravelry. Nobody there had heard about it, so maybe there will be new users :o)
And speaking of travelling: I need to decide what
knitting to bring – apart from not forgetting passport, tickets, toothbrush and
other minor stuff, of course. It depends on the next few days’ knitting, so I
will get back to you on that, before I leave.
That’s all for this week! I hope you have a wonderful
week ahead and some glorious autumn weather to enjoy – or spring weather, if
you are so inclined.
Happy knitting!
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