“I’m over here looking at the world’s oldest most broken down dairy case worker. His soul is less then dead.”
-A Truck Driver making a night time delivery to a supermarket, 11/15/21
…
Little did my friend know that the runner up was in his garage, under the covers, praying for sleep to forever take him. I recall how it was almost funny how rapidly I aged in my late 40s, going from people suspecting I was ten years younger than I was, to people looking at me and not recognizing me of old, or assuming I was ten years older.
Nobody, of the 500 or so people who I worked closely with and new their names, over 38 years in the retail food business, ever wanted to be part of that business. Everyone, from the CEO of Metro, to the general manager of Bi-Rite who wanted to be a physicist and indeed had a degree in that science but still ended up managing a supermarket, ever wanted to be a clerk or even a manager.
It occurred to me after reading this that a fleschine, a meat-bot, is all that modernity wants from any of us, that our system of screwing each other over and exploiting each other has evolved into a self-aware system that hates us all and seeks our reduction to a compatible part. That old dairy clerk sounds like George, whose helper I was during my part time departure from that business.
For 24 hours I lie abed listening to Aristotle on poetry, 10 times I think, nodding in and out. His unqualified regard for the genius of Homer invited me to click on The Iliad. Listening to the first 8 books for the next 20 hours, I was stricken by the malice of the female deities, that female gods involved themselves in men’s wars even more than War himself, who is something of a savage dupe of theirs. What is more, the only gods who cheer for genocide, for the annihilation of entire peoples, are the female gods, not the male gods, who tend to want respect and restraint from men, not their liquidation.
Thetis, the silver-footed goddess who bore Achilles, pities him for his tragic life of “but a minute” not even a whole day in her scale of thinking. This gives a clue as to the malice of the goddesses, that men cannot feel pain on their scale, because they have lives like leaves, shed in autumn. Thus, these female powers seek the death of that human tree, push and push for War and his attendants Rout and Panic and Discord to affect the death of a people, the erasure of an identity, the killing of a community.
It is of interest that in historic times, the nation named after Athena, Athens, chose genocide often as tool for dealing with enemies, to include desecration of tombs. Of additional interest, is the fact that over the past 40 years, since America has become extremely feminized, with women promoted aggressively, that there is no longer a tradition in the U.S. military [and of course on TV and in movies] of respecting the enemy. The enemy is now always incompetent, monstrous, petty, pathetic. The respect felt by American service men for their German rivals in two world wars has been posthumously redacted and those foes repainted in the popular imagination as cartoon monsters.
The most savage and “awful” war god is not Ares, but Athena, a veritable wolf of war, as violent as War himself, but calculating. It has occurred to me that Homer uses the deities in large measure, as tidal forces that drive the woes of men. Of interest is that even Aphrodite gets involved in human combat and that the only masculine deity to stoop this low, other than base Ares, was Apollo, the most syncretized of the Arуan sky deities, representing higher arts and plague, respectively the initial benefits and drawback of civilized living.
I am reminded, that I in part embarked upon this study out of curiosity as to why the cultures with the highest regard for the feminine sphere [Aryan and Amerindian] punched so far above their weight militarily and have since fallen into such abject decadence. In early modern Europe, nations headed by women waged war more often and more successfully than those headed by men. The first empire upon which the sun never set was begun under Queen Elizabeth and bloomed like the nightfall of mankind itself under Queen Victoria. Both of these War Queens were sterile, witch-like creatures.
Throughout Homer, the point is often made that the plight of women is miserable, to be a slave or a driver of slaves, that the woman whose men are slain and is sold into captivity, will “labor under the direction of some other woman” in some “distant land not her own.”
There are hints in The Rage of Achilles, that even the ownership of women taints a man, with the possession of the daughter of the Priest of Apollo tainting the rule of Agamemnon, who will go home to be butchered by his traitress queen. It is clear in the acts and in the words of Achilles, that he might have slain Agamemnon, if not for his respect for Athena, goddess of strategy [which is to say of aggressive deception.] He honors her and stays his hand and thinks and declares that he will not trivialize himself by fighting over the possession of a woman, that Brisais was simply a gift voted him by the army and demanded of him by his evil king to save face for having to give his prize back to her father according to a vote of the army sponsored by Achilles.
In the absence of Achilles the Argives and other Greeks do poorly against the Trojans and their allies. Then Athena inspires Diomedes to heights of rage and he slays no less then 12 heroes, cuts down Aeneas among them, wounds Aphrodite and mortally wounds Ares, who would have died of his wound if not for Zeus, who declares that he hates his son, god of War, even as he heals him.
It is clear here that War himself is a tool of at least three goddesses in their various quests to drive some men onto the genocide of other men. Eventually Zeus has had enough of the goddesses driving men to war for ethnic cleansing rather than honor. Hector is divinely inspired to challenge any man of the Greeks to a duel and Ajax takes up the spear. The men fight to a draw and are then interrupted by the heralds, their seconds, who reminds them that they have achieved honor before Zeus, [1] and that darkness was falling and men should “make way for Madam Night.”
Hector repeats this, making it no off handed comment. In the context of the war, these men are essentially fighting to acquire female slaves for their wives to boss around. It is clear that the judgment of men is clouded by the female Powers, that their judgment is clouded by competition for woman as war prizes, and that Night, that great cloaking peril, is a feminine power. This recalls that most moon deities are female, save in the earlier Sumerian mythos in which the moon, named Sin, is a male deity and the underworld is ruled by a witch.
It was odd, how this framed in this mind as that nerve in the skull flamed like tiny spider-lightning, that I took a night crew gig to make the extra money to buy a house for a wife, a wife that would one day tell me to leave, who served to bind me like a slave to my masters. I recall hearing a news bit at midnight in which a radio medical report announced that people who worked night shift died 5 years earlier than others. One of the black guys on the crew, stepped down off his milk crate from the top shelf he was leveling and said, “Fuck that,” and quit, as I let him out the front door. I still have great respect for that man.
That soulless fellow on a grocery night crew I have been, will ever be, and he is many, as I have known him by the hundred. I think he is what we are supposed to become, until we retire, to edge a lawn for some frigid bitch so that she can feel like Queen Victoria, basking in the glory of owning sterile plant-life blooming in a false facade of fertility.
From Savage Clytomestra awaiting the Trojan slave girl she will wantonly kill, to the Sea Dogs of Elizabeth pillaging the Spanish Main in hopes of gaining her hand in marriage, to the Agents of British Empire addicting millions to opium and slaughtering hundreds of thousands for an abstract ideal of “Queen and Country” and down to the Christian American women who want their sons and husbands to journey around the world to slaughter Muslim men so that their women will not have to wear a veil, to the plastic news priestesses that tell us what is right and wrong, the feminine metaphysics embedded in Arуan society is like the very blood of the gods in Homer—for Ichor, the life blood of the gods has the power to kill and is ultimately corrosive.
This reader wonders, in the gods, did Homer write of some ancient, fallen human order, a great machine powered by caustic substance, fated to fall under its own insatiable hunger?
Notes
-1. The goddesses want genocide. The gods want respect. How much of this is a remainder of the jealousy of Arуan women for the brides their men took from among indigenous European women? How much of this ire might be a residual malice among the conquered women? As written by Homer, it seems that the wives of the conquerors and the goddesses on both sides are the most bloodthirsty.
