Thread by @sentantiq

take a minute and imagine a tree in a park or garden. Make it a really nice tree that has been well situated in its environment. Think about the trees’ imperfect symmetry, they way it occupies its space

#HomerTrees #ClassicsTwitter

https://twitter.com/sentantiq/status/1378698210345156608

Now think about this: someone planted the tree; others tended to it and trimmed it; more people spent generations selecting this domesticated tree from its ancestral stock. It is a inextricable product of nature and nurture.
#HomerTrees

Then there’s the aesthetics of the tree. Your appreciation is based on other trees you might not remember as well as an entire ‘grammar’ of human beings and the environment

#HomerTrees

You judge a tree differently from a shrub or a flower for historical aesthetic reasons

You are mostly not cognizant of these reasons

The shrub thing is a bit of an aside, but it is about genre

#HomerTrees

Now, if someone asks you who is responsible for the tree, what do you say? Is it someone who designed the park? Is it a gardener? Is it the first person who imagined a tree in the garden?

#HomerTrees

Any single answer ignores hundreds of people and things that contributed to the treeness of this tree. It also ignores the salient fact that you are the one judging the tree and that your judgment is shaped by non-tree things.

#HomerTrees

For me, the Homeric epics are like that tree. They come out of a complex relationship between performance traditions, new technologies, and aesthetics that are both products and producers of the same song culture. And ours

#HomerTrees

We always simplify our interpretation of where the tree came from because our minds are too small to understand we are part of mind-networks and our lives are two abbreviated to feel time’s larger sweep

#HomerTrees

We impose simple origin stories on art and human products because it is hard to escape our own single experience of culture and see how it works in the aggregate

(also, we have been trained to see the world in terms of self over collective)

#HomerTrees

We impose a god/author model on complex things for cultural and psychological reasons. It is a fallacy to insist that design implies a designer when we are recognizing design as viewers because we are conditioned to do so.

#HomerTrees

There's no smoking gun about Homeric authorship. there will never be a clear answer to the issue. THAT we care so much about it is a problem. it is, dare I say, the rot at the core of 'western' liberalism and capitalism, this desperate search for ancient authority

#HomerTrees

Most people find in searching for "Homer" what they want to find. That's my experience of teaching, reading, and writing about the epics for over two decades. That's also why I keep returning to the bench and thinking as much about who is thinking about Homer and why

#HomerTrees

And when I turn back I think less in terms of "who wrote the Iliad" and what the people were like who domesticated the epics and set them aside and why we still look at them today.

#HomerTrees