The Foundation Year Program: in itself and for itself.
MAENAD EDITION
Winter 2025 — Maenad Edition
News
The Foundation Year Program: in itself and for itself.
CONTENTS
1. Busy Being: FYP as a Dionysian Experience of the West , FYP Final Lecture, Dr. Vernon Provencal (FYP 1974-75)
4. Spinning in Circles: The Search for Certainty in FYP’s Great Debate , Darius Amanat-Markazi (FYP 2024-25)
5. Interview with Dr. Amani Whitfield, New Carnegie Chair in the History of Slavery, Aliyah Daya (FYP 2024-25)
6. On Writing in FYP, Molly Rookwood, FYP Writing Coach
6. Our Co-op Book Store , Paul MacKay, King’s Co-op Bookstore Manager (reprinted from FYP at 50)
6. Hamza Karam Ally and Aruthur Schopenhauer, Susan Dodd (FYP 1983-84)
7. On A Year of Healing, Holly Currie (FYP 2024-25)
7. On FYP and Journalistic Writing, Kendra Gannon Sneddon (FYP 2021-22)
8. Instead of Hiding in your Room—Read Now!, Noah S.J. Sefcik (FYP 2024-25)
8. Chapel singing: “All the intellectual food groups,” Georgia Rose Becklumb (FYP 2024-25)
9. On FYP and Creative Writing, Abigail McGhie (FYP 2024-25)
10. On Coordinating my FYP Section in 2024-25, Eli Diamond, Neil Robertson, Maria Euchner, Daniel Brandes, Susan Dodd, Tim Clarke
13. Berlin: An Opportunity to Pay Attention—Lilacs and Memorials, Anil Pinto-Gfroerer (FYP 2020-22 not a typo)
14. FYP Pets! Heather Page, Taidgh Srivastava & Roan Wilder, Mitch Cait-Goldenthal (FYP 2024-25), Kenzie Saulnier
16. Night FYP: The Unmitigated Pleasure of Mozart , Elisabeth Stones, FYP Administrative Assistant and Deadly Soprano
18. Intolerably Stupid No More, Jane Austen Live! The Halifax Humanities Reads Northanger Abbey, Kate Lawson
19. Night FYP: “How the World Became this Way” Review of Gilgamesh at the Neptune Theatre , Aubree Field (FYP 2024-25)
20. School Prayer, Christopher Snook, Poet and Dalhousie Classics
20. A Tribute to Harry Critchley (1993-2025), Mary Lu Redden (Doctoris in jure civili)
21. To Love and to be Wise: The Humanities in Prison , Harry Critchley (a Friday Meditation in the King’s Chapel from 2017)
22. “Dreaming of Medusa,” Kate Lawson
23. Ideas Worth Sharing: How FYP Gave me a Love for Translation , Lauren Konok (FYP 2022-23 and Lil’ Buddy’s buddy)
Message from the Director of FYP
NEIL ROBERTSON (FYP 1982-83)
There is something both joyous and melancholic about coming to the end of the Foundation Year Program. I am so grateful to each of you for what you have brought to and made of this year. This moment is at once a magnificent accomplishment that you have made through this daunting and demanding program of study and yet in that accomplishment is also its conclusion. The friendships of person and intellect that have found there first life in and for you here are certainly not over, nor is the companionship of those books and figures from the past that have been discovered this year. That will all go with you and stay with you. Nonetheless the place and context, of that first connection, the Foundation Year class
of 2024-2025, is now entering into the Hades of memory, only brought to life by the living blood of your own and your fellow classmates’ powers of recollection (with perhaps the help of this edition of FYP News). However, as Odysseus teaches us the ghosts of departed souls, with which our living community is joined, can provide for us not only the continuity of memory, but also the ground and basis to know the present we inhabit and choose the future we reach out to. It is really this present and future orientation that define the project of FYP. As Augustine and Dante suggest, it is in memory that hope finds its basis: only then can change and transformation be real and sustaining. That journey you have been on has exposed
Editors: Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) Maria Euchner (FYP 1995–96)
Student Editor: Abigail McGhie (FYP 2024–25)
EDITORS’ NOTE: WHY MAENADS?
SUSAN DODD AND MARIA EUCHNER
As we put together this FYP News, it became clear that, just like the maenads, this issue was firmly under the power of Dionysus. These frenzied women broke free from their conventional confinements and became followers of the category-defying god of transformation, wine, intoxication, ecstasy, and theatre. We leave it to you, esteemed reader, to locate Dionysus’ creative power in the works collated here, and we encour-
age you to attune yourself to the seemingly irrational, and not always explicable veneration of the Beautiful that permeates these pages. Animated by a diversity of passions – and perhaps by love above all – this eclectic assembly of our community’s reflections provides a snapshot of our shared experience of FYP that will hopefully resonate with you, and maybe even inspire you to join us in our maenadic dance celebrating the conclusion
Nous praktikos: Elisabeth Stones (FYP 2005–06)
Design: Co. & Co.
24. FYP Crossword , Ava Austin (FYP 2024-25)
25. FYP Section Personality Test , Eva Bisal, Anna Hartley and Ellie Rainnie (FYP 2024-25)
26. The Death and Resurrection of the Biopic: Bob Dylan, Robbie Williams, and Divine Inspiration , Matthew Vanderkwaak
29. Representations of Disability Lecture Series, Michelle Mahoney, King’s Accessibility Officer
36. If you liked this, try these!, Abigail McGhie (FYP 2024-25)
36. Answers to the FYP Crossword , Ava Austin
37. To Caravaggio, my beloved…, Maria Euchner
FYP Valentines (throughout the edition), Catherine Fullarton (FYP 2005-06)
you to not only sources of growth and renewal, but also, and perhaps inextricably bound with those green shoots, moments and deep structures of oppression and suffering that may have wounded your soul. The Foundation Year Program does not seek to bring about a specific political result, whether progressive or conservative, revolutionary or reactionary. Rather, it seeks to encourage thoughtfulness. If it has provoked in you, even in your dissatisfactions with it, a deeper thoughtfulness it has done its task. It encourages you to arrive in this moment of conclusion at your “beginning and know it for the first time.” In other words: it is all there in the circle and the centre. ❧
of a wonderfully rich year. Whether or not you see the FYP curriculum through the lens of the circle and the centre, we suggest embracing an entirely different shape: the . Congratulations on navigating the stormy seas of FYP, and all the very best for your future endeavours!
Warning: Imbibing the Dionysian spirit can lead to long-term intoxication! ❧
Front cover: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Bacchus, c. 1596, Oil on canvas, 95 x 85 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence Back cover photo: Ava Austin
From left, Editors Susan Dodd, Maria Euchner, and Student Editor Abigail McGhie
Busy Being: (FYP
AS) A DIONYSIAN EXPERIENCE OF THE WEST
2025 FYP FINAL LECTURE BY VERNON L. PROVENCAL
“My lecture assumes your familiarity with most of this material through readings, lectures, and tutorial discussions. My aim is to evoke a summary recollection of your study of Western civilization by revisiting how it evolved by way of individuals having what I am provocatively characterizing as a “Dionysian experience.” To explain what I mean by Dionysian experience, we need to revisit the Dionysian experience of Dionysus in the Bacchae.”
Dionysus God of Transformation
In Euripides’ Bacchae, the dramatic Dionysian experience of Dionysus as a god of transformation begins straightway with the god appearing on stage to explain “why I’ve transformed myself, assumed a mortal shape, altered my looks, so I resemble any human being.” He begins by citing the unique circumstances of his birth in the city of Thebes:
I have arrived here in the land of Thebes, I, Dionysus, son of Zeus, born to him from Semele, Cadmus’ daughter, delivered by a fiery midwife—Zeus’s lightning flash.
At the end of one of the Homeric Hymns that was likely recited in Dionysian rituals, Dionysus is celebrated as the ‘Insewn god:’
Be favorable, O Insewn, Inspirer of frenzied women!
Insewn refers to the unique feature of Dionysus as the twice-born god whom the Chorus of Asian Bacchants celebrate as they parade on stage:
with women to give birth to Dionysus, Heracles and other heroes: the passion to unite the Olympians and their mortal worshippers, to unite the human and divine. So the god who appears on stage transformed into a mortal is the god who was originally transformed at the time of his rebirth from a mortal hero into an immortal god. It is the unusual provenance of his birth that causes the Theban women led by his mother’s sisters to deny his divinity, which we’ll come back to in a moment. But first let’s have a broader look at the divinity of Dionysus.
His mother dropped him early, as her womb, in forceful birth pangs, was struck by Zeus’s flying lightning bolt, a blast which took her life. Then Zeus, son of Cronos, at once hid him away in a secret birthing chamber, buried in his thigh, shut in with golden clasps, concealed from Hera.
Dionysus is unique among the Olympians as the only god born of the union of god and mortal. Like Athene born from the head of Zeus as a goddess whose divinity manifests the mind of Zeus as active in the world, so the divinity of Dionysus re-born from the thigh of Zeus manifests the passion of Zeus as active in the world. The passion of Zeus manifest in Dionysus is the same passion by which Zeus united
Dionysus God of Wine
Dionysus is best known as the Greek god of wine. In the Bacchae , Teiresias advises Pentheus that, as the wine god, Dionysus “is poured out to the gods, so human beings receive fine benefits as gifts from him,” which introduces the crucial function of Dionysus’s divinity in all of its different aspects, which is to be a mediator between gods and mortals, a way of uniting them.
As the god of wine, his divinity was celebrated in symposia or private drinking parties, and civic wine festivals. The oldest wine festival in Athens was the Anthesteria, a three-day drinking festival celebrating the opening of new wine in the spring. According to Nancy Evans’ 2010 book, Civic Rites: Democracy and Religion in Ancient Athens ,
The transformative power of Dionysus linked the city back to the vineyard and civilized all the residents of Athens … Citizens [male and female] drank with slaves and children… The dead momentarily crossed the boundary that normally separated them from the living. The ancient rites of the Anthesteria brought the entire community together, and everybody celebrated the god of the vineyard who was also the quintessential god in the city.
Furious Maenad, 490–480 BCE, Vulci, Italy
In Athens, especially, Dionysus was celebrated as the god of theater, of masks and drama. Euripides presented the Bacchae in the Theater of Dionysus during the Athenian religious festival of the City Dionysia, as well as his comic Dionysian satyr play, Cyclops
Not long after Euripides died near the end of the fifth century BCE, Aristophanes presented Frogs , a comedy in which a rather cowardly Dionysus descends into Hades to retrieve the dead Euripides but instead decides to bring back the earlier tragedian, Aeschylus. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, held that the intrinsic purpose of tragedy was to arouse in the audience the tragic emotions of pity (for the suffering protagonist) and fear (of the wrath of the gods) so as to effect at the end of the play a katharsis —a purgation—of those emotions, and thereby enable the spectators to renew their customary reverence for the gods on whom human life depended.
This Dionysian experience of katharsis was no doubt an aspect of the ecstatic rituals of the cult of Dionysus , including separate private ritual celebrations for women and men of which we know little save that, as with all Dionysian celebrations, the participants experienced enthusiasmos, mystic union with the god en theos , of the god dwelling within, by way of Bacchic frenzy or madness, the ecstatic state of Dionysian mania , perhaps in imitation of the mythic Dionysian thiasos , the band of Dionysian attendants, female maenads and male satyrs.
As E. Simon notes in The Gods of the Greeks (2021):
Dionysiac doctrine differentiated two kinds of madness: on the one hand, the indiscriminate rage inflicted by the god on opponents who refused to acknowledge him, such as Lycurgus, Pentheus, and many others, especially women of royal birth; on the other, madness as the holy rapture of the pious. Euripides depicts both kinds in the Bacchae.
In the Bacchae , the Theban women manifest the involuntary mania provoked by the god:
Theban women & Asian Bacchants
DIONYSUS: “I’ve driven those women from their homes in a frenzy [mania]—they now live in the mountains, out of their minds. I’ve made them put on costumes, outfits appropriate for my mysteries … For this city must learn against its will, that it has yet to be initiated into my Dionysian rites.”
The chorus of Asian Bacchants manifest the voluntary mania of the enthused participant in Dionysian ritual:
Dionysus! He’s welcome in the mountains … he dances, he runs, here and there … thick hair rippling in the breeze. Among the Maenads’ shouts his voice reverberates:
“On Bacchants, on... chant songs to Dionysus, to the loud beat of our drums! Celebrate the god of joy with your own joy, with Phrygian cries and shouts! When sweet sacred pipes play out their rhythmic holy song, in time to the dancing wanderers, then to the mountains, on, on to the mountains.”
Dionysus God of Underworld/Afterlife
Another aspect of the divinity of Dionysus is his connection to Hades and the afterlife, by which the Greek historian Herodotus identified Dionysus with Osiris, the Egyptian god of wine and the underworld. For Athenians, the main connection with Dionysus as a god of the underworld was the Eleusinian mysteries In the Eleusinian mysteries held not far from Athens, Dionysus was associated with Demeter and her daughter Persephone, fathered by Zeus and married to Hades. In the Bacchae , Teiresias associates Dionysus with Demeter as gods of bread and wine, natural and spiritual nourishment necessary to human life (the immortal gods eat ambrosia and drink nectar):
born of Semele, Dionysus brought with him liquor from the grape, something to match the bread from Demeter. He introduced it among mortal men. When they can drink up what streams off the vine, unhappy mortals are released from pain. It grants them sleep, allows them to forget their daily troubles. Apart from wine, there is no cure for human hardship.
The Eleusinian mysteries introduced initiates to Hades and Persephone as gods of the underworld and prepared them to accept their journey to the underworld where they would forever abide in the afterlife. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter recited at the Eleusinian mysteries recounts the reconciliation of Demeter (representing the realm of mortal life on earth), Zeus (representing the immortal life of the gods on Olympus) and Hades (representing the afterlife of the dead in the underworld) in the agreement that Persephone, fathered by Zeus and married to Hades, would spend part of each year with her mother Demeter in the upper world and the rest of the year with Hades in the underworld, thus uniting the separate spheres by which human life is divided. Experiencing Dionysus as a god of the underworld, the Dionysian ecstasy of the initiates would most likely effect a sense of transcendence freed from the division of the realms of Zeus, Demeter and Hades by which the initiates were purged of their fear of the afterlife and came to accept it as something belonging to the human and the human as belonging as much to the realm of Hades as to the realm of Demeter and Dionysus.
Satyr giving a grapevine to Bacchus as a child; cameo glass, first half of the first century AD; from Italy
Bacchante on a Sea Tiger (1839) by Christen Købke, based on the mural Nereide su pantera marina from Villa Arianna, Stabiae. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.
Richard Seaford sums up the many aspects of the divinity of Dionysus as essentially belonging to a god of transcendence and transformation:
[T]he cult of Dionysos had flourished throughout the recorded history of the Greeks, for a thousand years, always having at its heart the power of Dionysos to bridge the gaps between the three spheres of the world – nature, humanity, and divinity. Humanity emerges from nature and aspires to divinity.
Dionysos, by transcending these fundamental divisions, may transform the identity of an individual into animal and god. And it is by his presence that he liberates the individual from the circumstances of this life.
It is the joyful transformation of identity that underlies the importance of Dionysos in various spheres – notably the spheres of wine, mystery-cult, the underworld, politics, theatre, poetry, philosophy, and visual art.
R. Seaford, Dionysos (2006)
Socratic Dionysus: God of Ideas
How, then, does any of what we have said about the Dionysian experience of transformation and transcendence have anything to do with our study of texts in Foundation Year Program? Perhaps the best segue into that explanation is to consider one other aspect of Dionysus that is overlooked by scholars—Plato’s Socratic Dionysus in the Symposium . As we noted earlier, Dionysus was the patron god of the symposion , the private drinking party, which, as the Dionysian setting for the recitation of lyric poetry and philosophical discussion, was not just about drinking wine. Plato’s account of Socrates’ attendance at a Dionysian symposion to honor the winner for tragedy at the City Dionysia ends, I would argue, with his being crowned avatar of Dionysus as a god of ideas Symposium thus begins with a prologue in which its narrator, Apollodorus, drapes Socrates in the aura of a Dionysian mania for ideas:
Apollodorus
I take an immense delight in philosophic discourses … whereas in the case of other sorts of talk—especially that of your wealthy, money-bag associates—I am not only annoyed myself but sorry for dear friends like you, who think you are doing a great deal when you really do nothing at all.
Companion
You are the same as ever, Apollodorus,—always defaming yourself and everyone else! Your view, I take it, is that all men alike are miserable, save Socrates, and that your own plight is the worst. Apollodorus
It’s obvious that since I think this way about all of you and myself I must be manic/mad ( μαίνομαι) and infatuated [about Socrates and philosophy].
I must confess that my own experience of FYP exactly fifty years ago was very much a Dionysian experience of joyful transcendence, personal transformation and, I dare to say, profound enlightenment. It changed my life. Completely. FYP introduced me to the Socratic Dionysian experience of an intoxication with ideas . Like Apollodorus, I was absolutely manic about the Dionysian experience of ideas, and I still am.
Dionysian Experience in FYP
So, I am hoping that now that you have reached the end of your trip through FYP that you can appreciate how all the works selected for study serve to mark and explain dynamic transitions within a continuous development that we look back on from our global millennial perspective as the ‘Western Tradition.’ In most of these works, the ‘Dionysian experience’, as it were, of transcendence and transformation is recounted by an individual, whether mythic (Gilgamesh), poetic (Dante), or philosophic (Nietzsche). Each of these ‘Dionysian individuals’ envision a way of living in the world, a way answering more deeply to the possibility of the human, visions in which a new world is ‘busy being born’ within a world ‘busy dying’ to cite the phrase U.S. President Jimmy Carter repeated from Bob Dylan’s ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. Ironically, the common Dionysian experience of FYP is to realize that what sums up one age proves prophetic of the age that follows.
Ancient Dionysian Experience of Gilgamesh
Every year of FYP begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh , which sets this ironic pattern of summing up an age in a transformative vision that proves seminal for our understanding the age that follows. In this case, as marking the transition from the temple state of the ancient near east to the Greek polis that is the beginning of what the Greeks saw as the division of East and West. And so the Epic of Gilgamesh served also to preparing the way to the study of ancient Greece as the beginning of the Western tradition.
(Continued on page 30)
Maenad and Cupid, fresco from Pompeii, 1st century AD
Bacchus by Michelangelo (1497), Bargello National Museum, Florence
THE SEARCH FOR CERTAINTY IN FYP’S GREAT DEBATE
DARIUS AMANAT-MARKAZI (FYP 2024–25)
The Foundation Year Program’s annual Great Debate is, in essence, an exercise in rhetorical swagger, theatrical absurdity, and a thinly veiled excuse for students and faculty to hurl artfully disguised jabs at one another under the guise of civilized discourse. This year’s topic—whether the analogy of the centre and the circle could explain the entirety of FYP—was, to put it lightly, ambitious. But what is the Foundation Year Program if not an excuse for discussion that exceeds the bounds of common sensibility?
In regard to preparation, our team largely focused on acquiring hula hoops and halos. As for the actual speeches, we agreed to prepare them individually, each in our own way. Naturally, the interpretation of this agreement varied. Most distinct was the case of Dr. Robertson, who arrived with only a pen and blank sheets of paper, upon which he began to compose his thoughts a mere ten minutes before the debate was set to begin.
Regardless, by summoning all of his improvisational power, Dr. Robertson presented a dazzling overview of the Foundation Year Program, making sure to point out the circularity of the images which define the curriculum, and the profound implications of the centre and the circle as a representation of oppression as well as the key to its destruction. Clara produced a powerful response, combining an emphasis on the dynamic nature of the present and a scathing critique of the nauseating effect of the
centre and the circle with a stage presence that gave Dr. Robertson a run for his money.
Next up was Dr. Sully-Stendahl. Drawing on her art-historical expertise, she put forward a rigorous historical and visual analysis of the art which surrounds FYP. Her presentation featured a playful (and mildly scandalous) interpretation of Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses sœurs —suggesting a rather intimate take on the centre and the circle—but quickly transitioned into a more philosophical reflection on eyes as the “threshold between the inner self and the external world”. Meir followed up with a punchy rebuttal. While he may have briefly gotten “lost in the sauce”, he proposed some earnest and intriguing alternatives to the centre and the circle; most famously, the diagonal line.
Armed with metaphysical certainty and just a hint of righteous indignation, I took to the stage to rescue my opponents from their pit of nihilistic despair—which I may have mentioned a few times—emphasizing the tension between the infinite and the finite as the fundamental reality of the human experience. Dr. Lawson returned the favour with a retaliatory threat to my S5P2 (which thankfully wasn’t acted upon), proceeded by a philosophical investigation into some of FYP’s most significant thinkers. She concluded that despite their apparent alignment to the centre and the circle, deeper analysis exposes their incompatibility with the concept. Finally, the anchor of our team, Azadi, emerged in all her glory to provide a heartfelt and illuminating account of the human disposition: one of being lost and in a constant search for certainty. She pleaded (on her knees, one might say) for the metaphor of the centre and the circle to be understood symbolically , as a representation of the belief systems we study in FYP and the certainty we derive from them. To close, Dr. Brandes provided a summary of the debate and generously cleared up some baseless accusations that
had supposedly been made against my team. He proceeded to dismantle our arguments (except for Azadi’s), unfettered by my accusation of his team having waged “intellectual terrorism” against the framework of reality itself. Unfortunately, as he neared the end of his response, it became clear that very little time was left for his own argument, although I’m sure it would have been a sight to behold. In the end, whether you saw the centre and the circle as a profound existential truth, a convenient rhetorical device, or just an excuse to bring up Renaissance nudes, one thing was certain: the debate brought some much-needed joy to Alumni Hall. In a program where most discussions teeter on the edge of an intellectual (and sometimes existential) crisis, it was refreshing to swap tutorial notes for theatrics and indulge in some philosophical grandstanding. And while some may continue to resist the truth—clinging stubbornly to their pit of despair—we can rest easy knowing that at least for one night, the centre held. ❧
Team Circle
Darius Amanat-Markazi
Interview with Dr. Amani Whitfield, New Carnegie Chair in the History of Slavery.
ALIYAH DAYA (FYP 2024–25)
In 2023, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of King’s and Dalhousie’s association, Dalhousie and King’s administration came together to create the Centennial Carnegie Chair in the History of Slavery in Canada. The position was a major step forward for the universities, promoting diversity within their curriculum and funding research that directly pertains to the history of African Nova Scotian communities.
Dr. Harvey Amani Whitfield, a prominent scholar on the history of slavery in Canada and America, was chosen to fill this position. As a Dalhousie alum, Dr. Whitfield had been a member of the King’s-Dalhousie community long before his appointment. He currently teaches classes at Dalhousie such as Slavery & Freedom in Americas and recently lectured in Foundation Year Program about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. We sat down with him to learn more about him, his thoughts and experiences in his new role, and his plans for the next year.
A Past in Halifax
Although originally from Chicago, Dr. Whitfield was no stranger to Canada or the East Coast prior to his return to Halifax. He spent six years at Dalhousie completing both his Master’s of Arts and PhD in History,
but despite living in Halifax for over half a decade, the city still feels new in a lot of ways. “Amazingly, the roads are the same [...], [but] it’s incredibly more diverse than it was when I was here the first time.” Just as the city has changed with time, so has he. In addition to now being a professor, he is also a father to a nine-year-old daughter named Hope. He remarks, “I’m at such a different stage in my life [now] that it’s very hard to compare.”
History While in Halifax
Dr. Whitfield is an absolutely phenomenal scholar. In addition to his long list of peer-reviewed publications spanning over 20 years, he has authored a number of books such as Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 and North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes . His research interests are wide reaching, spanning several states and provinces, allowing him to take a global look at the realities and legacy of slavery in the Americas. “I don’t think you can understand slavery in the maritimes or Atlantic colonies without understanding their connections to slavery in New England, New York, [and] the greater Caribbean.” Halifax’s library collections and their sources on slavery in Nova Scotia were “a
major reason” he took on The Chair, and will certainly inform his future research. These resources will be most applicable during the summer when he can travel to nearby cities and towns to sift through their archives and records. “I do think it’ll make a huge difference [...] because our archives are right there” says Dr. Whitfield.
Future at King’s and Dalhousie
Looking forward, Dr. Whitfield is excited to spend time teaching, researching, and working with students. “I see myself giving talks, teaching classes. [...] Mentoring is a big thing for me. I’ve really enjoyed that through my career.” He wants to facilitate change and opportunities that center student needs and interests. “I want to be supportive of the students at King’s, And if they think I can help out with something then I would.” ❧
Dr. Amani Whitfield
Pentheus torn apart by Agave and Ino. Attic red-figure lekanis (cosmetics bowl) lid, c. 450–425 BC (Louvre)
On Writing in FYP
MOLLY ROOKWOOD, FYP WRITING COACH
The Foundation Year Program can, at times, feel like a gauntlet, an endless rotation of readings and essays. I remember—and I see in my students now—the Sisyphean feel of it, the sense that you will be steeped in this torrent of philosophy and history and literature for the rest of time.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved that feeling. It was incredible being surrounded constantly by all that knowledge, day in and day out. I remember a real feeling of loss as my first year drew to a close—I knew that never again would I experience something as all-encompassing, as intellectually overwhelming, as constantly reorienting as FYP.
When I run into other King’s graduates, the question we ask is never “What year did you graduate?” Instead we ask, “What was your FYP year?” King’s students orient themselves around FYP, even long after they finish the program. It provides, as intended, a foundation for our future academic lives.
I never thought I would return to FYP. I chose, upon graduating from King’s, to pursue a publishing degree rather than stay in academia. My journey through the book world has been exciting and rewarding, and last summer, it unexpectedly led me back to
King’s when I came across the posting for the FYP Writing Coach position.
I have loved working as the writing coach this year, and I can’t wait to continue this work in the year to come. I have learned so much through my students and through this opportunity to teach writing in a very different way than I have before. I have learned where in the process students think they need the most help (invariably thesis statements) and where they need more help than they expect (invariably grammar and sentence structure). I have listened as students fretted over their marks, worried they weren’t smart enough, or adjusted to living away from home for the first time.
Writing is never just the act of putting pen to paper (or, more realistically, fingers to keyboard, which does not have nearly as nice an alliterative ring to it). I try to teach my students that writing their papers begins long before they come to see me. Writing involves engaging in the material through tutorials and lectures. It involves not just reading, but paying attention —highlighting and underlining and using sticky notes so they don’t have to read through all of Plato’s Republic again when it comes time to write about it. Writing requires taking the time to plan, to think, to wonder. It starts with asking questions and then more questions until you find your way to the question at the heart of your idea—the so what of the essay.
And more than anything, writing requires that you try. The blank page can be so difficult for FYP students to overcome,
THE RIGHT BOOK…
PAUL MACKAY, KING’S CO-OP BOOKSTORE MANAGER
Operating a bookstore is difficult work under the best of circumstances: heaving heavy boxes of books wreaks havoc on your back, profit margins are slim, and there just never seems to be enough room for them. Every summer our unique location fills to bursting with just under 10,000 books— enough to ensure we have copies for every student in the program. But all that planning and effort is rewarded each year when I’m reminded that these aren’t just boxes of some disposable commodity: they represent a sizable portion of the collected wisdom of humanity spanning as far back as “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, one of the world’s most ancient texts. After school starts I’ll see students all over Halifax reading these books on their porches, in coffeeshops, or under the comfortable shade of a tree on the King’s campus. As they work their way through the Foundation Year Programme and the texts we provide, I’m reminded of how much the right book can change someone’s life and why I love running a bookstore. ❧
but if there is anything I want to impart to my students, it’s that they can only improve by trying. That’s why we write so many papers in FYP. That’s the point of the gauntlet. FYP lets us try over and over and over, and it has been so rewarding to see my students grow and develop—as writers and as people— over the course of this year. Being their writing coach has been an honour, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. ❧
Molly Rookwood
On A Year of Healing
BY HOLLY CURRIE (FYP 2024–25)
Hello friends, my name is Holly Currie and I’m a first year journalism student. One thing I lack at sharing is that I’m an author of a poetry book, which still shocks me to this day. My book is called A Year of Healing , and the idea to write this came to me on a whim. In January of 2023 I was writing poetry for my English class, and I hated each word I wrote. During this time I was also diagnosed with depression, and I didn’t know how to control my feelings. I went down to my highschool library one afternoon and the librarian, whose name is Katleyn, asked me what I was doing in English class. I told her we were doing poetry, and she asked to see my poems. I decided to show her the poems, convinced they were terrible and just a horrible display of my feelings. When she finished reading them, she looked at me in shock. She told me they were amazing, and that she could feel what I was feeling, relating deeply to the words on the page. I couldn’t believe what she was saying, so I reread the poems. That’s when I saw the potential.
On FYP and Journalistic Writing
KENDRA GANNON SNEDDON
“Writing is so easy. I barely have to try during English class,” naive high school me said before my first FYP essay. I was a student who never got below a 90 in English and never worried about passing the English exam. My friends came to me to proofread their essays and fix any typos or mistakes. I was confident that I was the most fantastic writer and that the FYP would be a breeze. And then, I got my grade back for my first FYP essay… Boy, was I wrong.
When my first FYP lecture ended, I was lost. I couldn’t keep up my notes as the lecturer was talking. I read the chapters the night before, but I didn’t know what any of those words meant. Then, it was time to go to
The next day I sat in the library and made a plan: I would write poems consistently for a year, after being diagnosed with depression, working through my emotions with words. It is my journey through a year of prioritizing myself—my mind, my body, and my soul. Depression doesn’t just go away, and that is the sad reality. I struggle with it every single day, and in my book you can see the variety of those feelings. It’s not just being sad, it’s feeling unworthy of life and hating your body with every breath. There’s many reasons why I wrote this book, but the main one is that I want people to know that they are not alone. That what they are feeling is valid no matter if you have depression or not, there is someone else going through something similar.
Finally, in October of 2024 I self-published my book on Amazon. When I submitted my book to be reviewed and authorized by Amazon to be published it was the most agonizing feeling of my life. It took 3 days to premier on Amazon after submitting, and then I was constantly checking my phone to see if it got approved. As a first time author, Amazon was a great way to get my work out there, and I even have my book on the shelf of my favorite local bookstore, Pages & Pieces Boutique. This is my first book ever written, and it certainly won’t be my last. I
tutorial and boast about what I had read. In simpler words, I was screwed. Before I knew it, it was time for the first FYP essay. I put together my thesis, included my evidence, and wrote confidently. I felt good about the submission. I opened my evaluated essay and scrolled down to the bottom for the grade. “It’s my first essay. I should expect a B- or even a C+,” I said, setting my expectations low. Imagine my disappointment when I received a C-!
I had some work to do if I wanted to improve my grades for the following essays. But that can be hard when, every Tuesday, you are learning to do the exact opposite for journalism. Yup, everything my tutor advised me to do, my journalism professors told me to do the opposite, and vice versa. I was stuck.
I kept getting comments like “Too much like an essay” and “Needs more substance and better vocabulary.” Although these two writing styles seem contradictory, eventually, they have made me a better writer.
I learned that evidence in both essays and journalism articles is essential. You can’t have enough evidence in both. I also learned a lot of synonyms and words that were the same but different for both mediums. I honed in on the inverted pyramid and flipped it while writing my FYP essays. I started to read quickly and pick out the important facts like nobody’s business. Ultimately, I could write a FYP essay in less than five hours (I may have chosen to go downtown over writing that weekend) and became even more prepared to write journalism articles. As I near the end of my four
already have book 2 and 3 on the go, and I can’t wait to see what this journey has in store for me. If you want to keep updated on the progress of my next books you can follow me on instagram @holly2006511, and as always, you are worthy. ❧
years at King’s with only a couple of months left to go, I have to thank FYP because it’s one of the only reasons I made it this far. I am one hundred per cent a more substantial writer because of it. My journalism is more vigorous because of it. I am stronger because of FYP and the thick skin I gained from having my essays dragged through the mud. Yes, FYP can be hell sometimes, but looking back, I wouldn’t choose to do any other program. ❧
Kendra Gannon Sneddon
Kendra Gannon Sneddon
INSTEAD OF HIDING IN YOUR ROOM—READ NOW!
NOAH. S.J. SEFCIK (FYP 2024–25)
The Read Now Events at King’s is a great way to complete your readings for the plays and performances as it is engaging and fun. It does not matter if you are an actor or have never done acting before; you can simply choose a character and voice them. Everyone is patient with you and while I have struggled with a couple words here and there, everyone is always supportive and encouraging.
It’s also a great place to attend even if you aren’t particularly interested in reading the work or uncomfortable with acting. Watching is just as fun, especially since some students who participate really give it their all. I have watched friends practically yelling at each other while reading because they are in character. It is an amazing sight to behold and even better when you are the
Chapel singing, “All
the intellectual food groups”
GEORGIA ROSE BECKLUMB (FYP 2024–25)
I didn’t come to King’s for FYP.
Don’t get me wrong; FYP is awesome, but a bigger draw for me was something even more unique about King’s than the Foundation Year Program; I’m here for the Chapel Choir.
I spent hours going through viewbooks last year. I’m pretty sure this choir is the only one of its kind in Canada.
The Chapel Choir is unique because it’s a working choir. We sing in service twice a week, different music every service. We sing alongside professionals. It’s the ultimate musical apprenticeship. It’s also reliably the best part of my week.
Understanding the FYP texts is careful, quiet work for me, involving highlighters and silent spaces and notepads. There’s something deeply satisfying about it, about making sense of things and reasoning it through. I love it, but I need choir in my life too.
There’s something so freeing, after a day of lecture halls and hushed libraries, about going to choir and opening my mouth and making sound, and making it as emotionally
one standing up and monologuing, while your fellow student waits patiently to retort their response. Many students fully embrace their roles, and it’s incredible to see those who might feel uncomfortable step out of their shell with confidence. This is excellent because you have people who come to the events feeling awkward or overwhelmed and come out confident and happy because they took the time to show up and put themselves out there.
Between each major scene or act we often review what has happened. We did this when we read Hamlet since it can sometimes be difficult to discern what is actually being said. This is very helpful to make sense of the piece. Maria Euchner also brings candy and offers it upon entering and leaving, which is amazing since my friends, and I all have a sweet tooth.
One of my friends has thoroughly enjoyed the Read Now Events and says that they are, “fun and a good way to get the reading done.”
Another one of my friends says, “The Read Now’s are very engaging, and it is very fun to act in them.”
I also recognize a lot of the same people going to the events. Sometimes they can’t
and generously as possible, about doing it with people, about doing it for people, about feeling together.
Not that it’s all touchy feely artsy fartsy all the time. I spend a very good chunk of my time in choir learning to count to four under pressure. Then there’s the Latin, and watching the director, and figuring out the intervals and paying attention to how Hillary, the other soprano, is pronouncing the ‘ai’ in ‘saint’. I tend to go more ‘eh’, and she tends to go more ‘aih’, and I’ve been trying to do more of an ‘aih’ thing too, but I keep forgetting, and my point is, when I’m singing, my whole brain has to be on the job, or else I get hopelessly lost.
I can worry about my FYP essay while swimming at the Dalplex, I can feel guilty about not reading ahead while scrolling through Instagram, I can think about Dante while on the phone with my mum, listening to her tell me about her adventures in wainscotting installation, but I can’t do choir and FYP at the same time.
Choir gives me real brain break, and it’s
stay long but they always make an effort to show up, even if it’s only for 30 minutes. The other people that attend are very friendly and I have made friends with some of them either before or after meeting them at the events.
As I mentioned, the event is a fantastic way to complete the readings. Instead of hiding in your room for hours, you get to go out, socialize, and act out the characters in a positive environment that is both supportive and fun. ❧
a break I can’t miss.
Chapel Choir has been jokingly called slave labour. Maybe pleasant, indentured labour would be more accurate. At the start of the year, I was given a scholarship through the Chapel Choir. The time commitment was laid out. I took the money. I can’t back out now. I can’t not feel like it today
I think this is one of the main differences between choir and other extracurriculars. Choir isn’t just a break from the world of FYP going on in the Quad. It’s an imposed recess, as fixedly unmissable in my mind as a class. Maybe more unmissable.
If I miss tutorial, conversation may be slightly less animated. If I miss choir, chords could be missing their identifying notes! That just won’t do!
Choir forces my brain to take a break from FYP, and my thinking is all the better for it. Between FYP’s quiet, private reasoning, and choir’s loud, public feeling, I feel like I’m hitting all the major intellectual food groups, and I’m loving it. I couldn’t think of a more complimentary pairing. ❧
Members of the choir outside the pit, getting ready for a service
Noah. S.J. Sefcik
ON FYP AND CREATIVE WRITING
ABIGAIL MCGHIE (FYP 2024–25)
I have always been a writer. My first foray into writing, penned at some point during my early years, was a short poem entitled ‘Fleece for Lease’. I believe the premise is self explanatory. Since this time, I have branched away from this sort of deep, soul searching poetry and discovered my real affinity for short fiction. I attended Canterbury High School in Ottawa for their literary arts program, getting the truly amazing opportunity to learn and write alongside a class of other people doing exactly the same thing as me. At some point over the course of these four years I personally like to think that I became a good writer, shaped through the influence of classmates, teachers, and friends.
In the fall of 2023, I submitted a piece to the youth short story section of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award (AFNA), hosted by The Walrus . The award invites students between the ages of 13-17 to submit their short fiction under 3000 words. A sentiment I’m sure other creatives can relate to—I felt that my piece was simultaneously the worst and best thing anyone has ever created. This to say I was incredibly surprised when I learned that I was one of six national finalists for this prize, and yet also not at all.
The awards ceremony took place in Toronto in June 2024. Long story short, I didn’t win the grand prize. Still, I can’t bring myself to feel shortchanged in any way. All of the short stories nominated were incredible, I got a copy of each of the novels short-
listed in the main category, and a free trip to Toronto plus runner-up prize money. Seriously, if there are any young writers reading, you should try your hand—it was a great experience. Not only that, but the feeling of having my work recognised in this way is something I will truly never forget.
Having written creatively for pretty much my entire life, the process of switching to academic essay writing at King’s was a little bumpy. Creative writing is largely about painting a picture, and writing essays requires a different brush. It’s been hard for me to kick the habit of persuasion over decoration. In FYP, every sentence written needs to contribute to the point of the paper. No longer am I allowed to wax poetic about the way the moon looks—that job belongs to the source I’m analysing.
FYP itself has also been extremely influential in my writing. In reading all of these texts from across the Western canon, I’m seeing firsthand the origins of some of my favourite tropes, styles, and genres. I see
FYP reflected in everything I have written, including my piece shortlisted for AFNA. It is about a man in dialogue with God, worried he has made the wrong decisions in his life. As I read St. Augustine’s Confessions earlier this year, I was struck with the similarity and reminded again and again of how humanity will continue to have the same questions for the rest of time—just phrased in slightly different ways. Creative writing and essay writing have the same goal in this aspect: to answer these ever-present questions however possible.
If you’d like to read the shortlist of AFNA youth short stories, for the first time in the award’s history they have all been published on The Walrus’ website. I have continued to write fiction throughout this year at King’s, and I have continued to try and answer as many questions as I can. Still, I doubt anything can top the mastery I demonstrated in my magnum opus, ‘Fleece for Lease.’ ❧
Doodle by Abigail McGhie
Abigail McGhie
Marble relief of a Maenad and two satyrs in a Bacchic procession. AD 100, British Museum, London.
On Coordinating My FYP Section
ELI DIAMOND SECTION I: THE ANCIENT WORLD
This year I was simply filling in for Kyle Fraser on sabbatical, and so for the most part I stuck with his superb choices from the previous year. There was nonetheless a bit of space for some exciting additions to our study of antiquity. The first Night FYP of the year was a solo folk opera entitled Sappho’s Garden , written and performed by FYP alumna Nicole Harris of the Spare Key Collective. This marvellous play rediscovers the fragmented remains of Sappho’s poetry through a contemporary lens, and I introduced the evening with a lecture on Sappho and Greek lyric poetry which primed the audience for Nicole’s performance, bringing King’s perennial Sappho-mania to new
heights. Another exciting innovation was having the Fountain School’s Dr. Roberta Barker lecture on Euripides’ Bacchae, re-introducing a Dionysian thread into FYP which will be taken up by my Prince lecture in March as well as the final FYP lecture of the year by Dr. Vernon Provencal. Finally, following the excellent idea which emerged in planning FYP this year that every section should have a devoted art lecture, I asked my Classics colleague Dr. Peter O’Brien to give a sweeping overview of ancient art, and he offered students a wondrous whirlwind tour through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.
NEIL ROBERSTON SECTION II: THE MIDDLE AGES
There is a tension at the heart of coordinating Section Two: The Middle Ages. The section covers over a thousand years of historical and cultural development that is longer than the four subsequent sections combined. It takes FYP from the Mediterranean world of the Ancient Section to the Modern World of sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 focused on Europe and especially Western Europe as the centre of what comes to be called “the West.” The sensible thing would seemingly be to have as many lectures on as many topics as possible to simply try to do justice to the range and complexity of this era. The contemporary demands of diversity would seem to require such a decision even more so. Look at what is being left out or marginalized. Why expend half of the lectures in the section on two works and two works of specifically Christian, indeed Western or Latin Christian, reflection? Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Divine Comedy , framing either end of the Medieval World, can hardly be said to capture the many aspects of the Middle Ages. Of course, a similar act of discrimination occurs in Section One in its focus on Hellenic Culture or in fact in the foci of other sections. But because of its definite and specific religious character, the time spent on these two Christian texts can seem misguided and disproportionate. So what justifies this outrage? Certainly not the notion that Latin Christianity and its development on the Middle Ages is truer or more inherently valuable. The only possible justification is that it is
integral to grasping the explicit object of study of the Foundation Year Program: the development of “the West.” Just as we need to enter deeply into the Hellenic world through Homer and Plato, so we need to enter deeply into the Medieval world and Augustine and Dante are wonderful and powerful agents for such an experience and exposure. It is for this reason that they have been the fundamental to this section of FYP. But it is equally important to bring diversity and disruption to these intellectual and spiritual figures by bringing to light the ways in which the Medieval World is also the Jewish and Islamic Middle Ages. It is also the world of alternative spiritualities and beliefs: the enchanted or magical world of fairies and green knights. That that Medieval Development is unthinkable without the interactions, both with the more advanced civilizations of Medieval Islam and Medieval Judaism and the pagan and pre-Christian worlds is undeniable. Medieval Christendom, as it often thought of itself, defined itself through a complex interaction of positive influence and coexistence and negative misunderstanding and violence with these other cultures. There is no Middle Ages without them. Undoubtedly any given effort to balance coherence and disruption is open to challenge. This year’s section two was just one effort at this task of trying to make open to us this period that is crucial to the modern world in which we live and move and have our being.
Dido and Aeneas, from a Roman fresco, 10 BC–45 AD), Pompeii, Italy
Dante: Divina Commedia 1380–1400 Manuscript (Cod. It. IX. 276) Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice
Being tasked with the coordination of Section III was an exciting challenge. Although the Renaissance is not my “home” section, i.e., it’s not the period in which the majority of my scholarly work is concentrated, it is a period that has actually been closer to my heart than I initially realized. I have loved Shakespeare ever since I encountered him in school (albeit in German translation), and then more profoundly in a Shakespeare seminar during my undergraduate degree at King’s – this also marks the beginning of my intense love affair with Hamlet that is still ongoing – and I taught a course on “Love, Lust, and Desire in Italian Renaissance Art” for EMSP in 2024. The beautiful thing about FYP is that nothing comes from nothing, and the conception of a section is always in dialogue with previous iterations, as well as the other sections. I thought about how the section could make best sense within the larger narrative of the curriculum, and which texts might correspond well with those from Sections 1 and 2,
as well as look forward to what still lay ahead in Sections 4, 5, and 6. A balance of various access points was important to me: philosophy, literature, art, music, and science, and certain factors seemed non-negotiable. I thought the section needed to address the Reformation/Counter-Reformation, politics, different forms of colonization, women’s perspectives, the new centrality of the human subject, a discussion of social class, and the prevalence of the theatrum mundi (theatre of the world) trope. The latter aspect, which affected so much more than the theatrical stage – think of the important convergence of statecraft and stagecraft we see in Machiavelli’s The Prince and Elizabeth I’s carefully crafted public persona –motivated me to assign three very different plays: a comedy, a tragedy, and a tragicomedy. While this decision is potentially controversial, I am convinced that each of the plays offers us unique and distinct opportunities for ek-stasis , sharpening our willingness and capacity to seriously consider viewpoints
DANIEL BRANDES SECTION IV: THE AGE OF REASON
What to do with all the philosophy? This is the great and abiding problem that confronts every incoming coordinator of Section IV. In my time in FYP, there have been various strategies for dealing with the theoretical weight of the period, and colleagues were generous with advice: reduce Descartes to two lectures! Streamline the social contract theorists by leaving out the social contract theory! Eliminate the amenable Hume altogether! (I decided to pass on options A and B, but alas, I did put the kibosh on the gentle Scotsman.) I was also urged to get creative: Couple Leibniz with the Emperor of China and Locke with John Marshall, and thereby leaven the theory with
history and politics! Boom. Done! I knew I wanted to replace Voltaire with Molière (and thereby dramatically elevate the quality of Frenchman in the section), and Newton and Mozart were indispensable anchors. Cugoano has long been a staple (and a favorite), so there was no room for maneuvering there. Given all these givens, there was only so much room for genuine innovation, and I’m pleased with the two departures we made this year: the introduction of Spinoza (as a Maranno and biblical critic, as well as the first ‘secular’ man); and the return to FYP of the
magnificent Jane Austen (by way of
wholly different from our own, and maybe even enabling us to embrace discomfort or moral ambiguity. Invariably, one’s vision of a section will never please everyone, and it is always an experiment, the result of which is unpredictable, but that’s what makes teaching in FYP so exciting. I feel eternally grateful to have had the most amazing lecturers bring my particular vision of the section to life, and make it the success that I believe it was.
a banger of a novel likely unencountered by students in high school or on Netflix). To be sure, I second-guessed every cut, every Thursday lecture, every bump up (or down) in pages… and I’m still peeved about the absence of Dr. Samuel Johnson (the literary critic’s literary critic). Who cries for the good Doctor? Happily, there is always next year!...
Kenneth Brannagh as Hamlet
By Prospero Intorcetta, Philippe Couplet, et al. - Confucius Sinarum Philosophus
Section Coordinators Cont’d
SUSAN DODD SECTION V: THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” Marx wrote in 1845. We are called to action in Section V, to put flesh onto the ideals of earlier times. The French Revolution executed change: the king and queen are guillotined as ordinary citizens (killed in a way both efficient and “humane”), measurements are rationalized, time itself is inscribed in reason’s terms— overwriting superstitions of old. Reason itself is revered, society sacralised, morality humanised. New freedoms and new oppressions arise, along with new systems of social organization, and new resistances to them. The “West” becomes self-conscious in ways both monstrous and glorious, routinized and ingenious, scientific and poetical. My
TIM CLARKE SECTION VI: THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
It is late in the long day and we find ourselves in the middle of a broad stream. Between us and the farther shore, the expanse of water widens, and the bottom that seemed as shallow as a footstep recedes to a depth we cannot touch. We have traveled far in one direction, but now the river cuts another, and we are at every moment in this crossing
task was to draw us into the most fundamental contradictions of the “long 19th century,” to look behind the extremes of the “isms” of the era to the common aspiration for rationalized change: liberalism, utilitarianism, positivism, early feminism, capitalism, communism, conservatism, colonialism, racism, anti-racism, progressivism, scientism, romanticism, impressionism, expressionism, even nihilism—all in their various ways reach for authenticity and freedom. From the austere rationality of Robespierre to the anti-rationalism of the Underground Man, the diverse achievements and pitfalls of Section V resist reduction to simple themes or outcomes, though the energy of the time continues to disrupt and inspire.
borne downstream. The only way across is through.
This is the problem posed to us of the contemporary world in section VI: what seemed familiar and accessible is stranger than imagined. It may be tempting to read this section, which finds “the West” reimagining older narratives of human progress and perfectibility amid a litany of tragedies, including two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the ongoing violence of colonialism, as an immersion into chaos. To some, no doubt, section VI will appear as the cartography of a world that has stopped making sense. To others, though, the collapse of earlier “grand narratives” clears space for alternative stories and a different kind of sense. In a few short weeks, we will explore the tensions between these two visions of modernity as they appear in the representational strate gies of literary modernism, the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis, the growing fissures between the “continental” and “analytic” schools of philosophy, reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War, the development of anti- and post-colonial literatures and theory, the legacies of second-wave and
later intersectional feminisms, the development of new styles in the visual arts as well as new art forms such as cinema, the emergence of environmentalism, the civil rights movement in the United States, and Indigenous demands for the Canadian government to recognize its complicity in the violence of the colonial project. By the year’s end, having gotten across by going through, we will have gained—among other things—the critical distance necessary to begin making sense of a world whose very nearness makes it hard to know.
“Liberty Leading the People” (1830), Eugène Delacroix, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Banksy, Flower Thrower, mural, Beit Sahour
Berlin: An Opportunity to Pay Attention — Lilacs and Memorials
ANIL PINTO-GFROERER (FYP 2020–22)
This afternoon I received a message from a friend saying that he was currently on a bus from Poland to Berlin — upon reading his message my mind immediately filled with places I wanted him to see and visit, burgers he should eat, streets he should walk down, parks he should sit it. My enthusiasm is grounded, I think, in a profound sense of respect and gratitude to the city which so generously held my restless and seeking self for that month two years ago.
Berlin was not an easy love for me, I was not instantaneously enthralled with her beauty and charm, she was fast and broken and grey. I remember the first moment I stepped out of the U-Bahn station and into the dead centre of Rosenthaler Platz. I was immediately surrounded by hostels and restaurants somehow unable in the fog of jet lag to locate which was mine. I finally located the Circus Hostel tucked behind a pharmacy on a beautiful tree lined street just off the Platz and stumbled through the doors and up to my room where I was greeted by faces I knew well from King’s. It was a strange but very welcome sensation to be greeted by this motley crew of friends from what I had already begun to consider my home after two years in University. We joked and hugged and gleefully recounted the events of the brief time we had spent apart and then inevitably all found our way to our bunks and were struck by some unbeatable wave of fatigue.
The next day we arose early, elated to discover that we were really and truly in each-other’s company, and made our way down to the café below. I can still keenly remember the warmth of the Brötchen
on offer, the cool and bright sensation of stepping out onto the patio to see anew the Platz I had been so befuddled by. It is always humbling to perceive these things in the light of day, because when I looked, I saw that the station exit was in fact mere steps away from the door of the Circus.
That first afternoon we met in what would be our classroom, the dimly lit bar below the hostel — a place where I would hear words and have conversations which are burned into my mind and which have profoundly shaped the way in which I engage with the world.
Part of my reason for attending this program, which is important to acknowledge, was my desire to grapple with the reality of what it means to have German heritage. I can claim no personal suffering or any virtue in this regard, this act of engagement with my family’s past (which this program allowed for) was fundamentally made possible through the interactions which I had with friends and the people who we encountered on our journey. Despite having taken some German history and CSP classes that year which talked at length about the mangled past of Berlin, it was impossible to understand the gravity of the suffering which the city bore from a distance. And although it was easier to feel this weight staying there, even in those places where the marks of that suffering were apparent and present as gaping wounds, the pain was too great to wholly comprehend.
These gaping wounds were made evident that very first day when we emerged from our basement cavern to walk together through an old Jewish neighbourhood in Berlin’s Mitte, where we encountered budding lilacs, memorials (the poignant Deserted Room in
Koppenplatz), and stones laid to signify collective grief. As you spend more time in Berlin it can become easy to forget where you are, until your foot hits a Stolpersteine (a brick out of place stating the name, and life dates of a victim of the Holocaust who lived where you stand) and your body forces your mind to engage. I think in many ways that was what Berlin offered me most generously, the demand of her embodied presence to engage with her broken and fragmented self, guided by the caring hands and brilliant minds of those who surrounded me.
When walking in the company of friends and mentors in this way, one can learn a place and in this process of learning can foster attention. Attention, which as stated in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is in many ways synonymous with the act of loving. To be in this place is to learn to acknowledge its fragmentation and in this attention to brokenness it is quite possible to find yourself in a position of love. ❧
Anil Pinto-Gfroerer
Berlin
Heather Page:
To be honest, the initial idea of having a cat in a shared dorm seemed hard to manage, but after a whole semester it’s proven to be much easier and more worthwhile than I would have ever thought. Sure there’s less space, the smell of the litter box and being woken up in the middle of the night, but I think without this cat I’d feel so much less at home in residence because I grew up with cats and never want to stop owning them. She’s a rescue that my roommate and I adopted for the dorm, so it was so lovely to get to know both a person and a cat during my introduction to residence and university life. Unexpectedly, she is super playful and affectionate despite being an older cat and there’s never been a dull moment because she’s such a diva. Despite not being a trained emotional support animal, she’s extremely in tune with human emotions, which cats are less recognized for but apparently so good at! I’m convinced that I’d be way more stressed without her. Overall I’ve loved getting to have a pet in residence and the pros far outweigh the cons!
F Y P Pet s!
Taidgh Srivastava and Roan Wilder:
My roommate and I recently made the big decision to adopt a….fish! A betta fish to be precise. We knew something was missing from our room and our little baby G Force filled that void. We decided to take the big leap and provide him with a loving home as we wanted to experience the joys of parenthood and make our house a home with the love that we knew our lil G would provide us. Our journey originally began with this sense of longing for something more, after long nights of discussing what would be the right fit for us and what would abide by Alex Hall Residence guidelines, we found that pets must be non-walking aquatic animals thus our original idea of adopting a lobster or crab was no longer a go :(, so a fish was the only option, and what a great option it was! Our baby G-force is a silly, introverted young fella who loves late night talks and has a big appetite! He tends to hide away in the
plants of his tank during the day but during the night he loves to eat and swim around. G Force is named after the 2009 cinematic masterpiece made by Disney featuring Nick Cage and Steve Buscemi of the same name. We were inspired by the bravery and virtues that each of the highly trained FBI agent guinea pigs have in the film and wanted our own little ball of sunshine to fully embody these virtues that we believe will make the world a better place. When he is old enough we want him to follow in his parents footsteps and attend Kings for FYP as we full heartedly believe that he has what it takes to change the world and that FYP is the first step in doing so.
Lil G has been a great addition to our room and has truly made this house a home. P.S. King’s Alum and Students; be on the lookout for King’s first non-walking aquatic student, he’s very excited to meet you!
Ava Austin and Peggy
Imogen Bhaneja with Finnegan
Normally, at around six in the morning, as the sun starts to enter my bedroom, I can hear scattering on the floor. If this were in my old house, I would probably be a little bit frightened, as this was a sure sign that mice had broken into the room. But now, all I can think of is the excitement of waking up to the beautiful brown eyes of my cat, Virgil Living with Vergil (people use Vergil and Virgil interchangeably) has brought a profound importance to life on campus. When I think about the first couple of nights after he arrived, I can explain the experience only in terms of what a father experiences while looking at his newborn child. Except my child is one born of soft fur and can’t seem to understand the world except in terms of amazement at long, string-like objects, and finds the most solace in resting his toasty body against my neck, kneading his paws on my throat, and sucking on my earlobes for some unexplainable reason.
This being said, there is a guilt that comes with him. My roommate sometimes is the victim of Virgil’s morning frenzy, where he latches on and attacks him in a manner I would liken to a swarm of Great Burdocks conjoining with a piece of clothing after a stroll through the woods. Yet, in the end, he is a beautiful and loving creature who expresses something that is all too rare on campus—an infatuation with the daily humdrum of life, expecting no more than the present realities he faces, and for this, I admire him and learn a great sum as well. He is always in the act of creating something within the confines of his narrow existence, not wallowing in the impossibility of leaving on some hypothetical trip to Europe or some great adventure yet unplanned. His adventure is in the pure tactile experience of anything from a towel to my toes (which have been the victim of his nibbles), and for that, whenever I feel as though the world is static, he provides the elasticity.
Bringing my cat, Joey, onto campus was honestly one of the best decisions I’ve made. I was having a hard time adjusting to university life—the new environment, meeting new people, and settling into residence were all incredibly overwhelming. After researching the benefits of having an emotional support animal, I realized that having Joey with me would be a great way to cope. Joey is truly the best cat I could’ve asked for. He’s outgoing, playful, and always excited to meet new people. He especially enjoyed his trip to the NAB and meeting Dr. Brandes!
Of course, there are some challenges to having a cat on campus. I’m not exactly fond of keeping a litter box in my room, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s completely worth it. It’s comforting to think that Joey has been with me during this pivotal period of my life. I can’t wait to look back on FYP and all the adventures we had.
Kenzie Saulnier:
Mitch Cait-Goldenthal:
Lil’ Buddy on Darwin Day with Tutorial 9
Frenemies, chillin’
Night FYP
FOUNDATION YEAR PROGRAM
2024–2025
“Sappho’s Garden” (A one-woman folk opera by the Spare Key Collective)
Thursday, September 12, 2024
7:00 pm – KTS Lecture Hall
Neptune Theatre – Gilgamesh & The Man of the Wild
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
7:30 pm – Neptune Theatre, Scotiabank Stage
100 tickets purchased for FYP students.
Hildegard of Bingen & the World of Medieval Chant
Monday, Oct 21, 2024
7:30 pm – King’s College Chapel
Songs & Madrigals of the Renaissance, with Helios Vocal Ensemble
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
7:30 pm – King’s College Chapel
An Evening with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
7:30 pm – President’s Lodge
The Great Debate: “Be it resolved: That all of the Foundation Year Program can be understood through the concept of the Circle and the Centre.”
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
7:00 pm – Alumni Hall
Eli Diamond, “Prince and the Revolution: A Dionysian Christianity for the 20th Century”
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
7: 30 pm – Alumni Hall
At the Super Bowl, 2007: ‘I practise a lot.’ Photograph: Evan Agostini/Getty Images
The Unmitigated Pleasure of Mozart
ELISABETH STONES
My role in FYP is pretty behind-the-scenes, and that’s usually where I like to stay, with two-to-four screens full of information to juggle and compare, and always a chance to double-check something before I make any definitive statements. But I’ve got this other gig, too…
Singing Mozart is an unmitigated pleasure, and I had the extraordinary good fortune to be asked to sing in the President’s Lodge, for this year’s FYP class. You could not dream up a more supportive crowd than the FYPers, but still I was terrified! I had been singing since forever, and performing solos since my King’s Chapel Choir days, but opera – with its added dimension of acting
– still felt like something “other people” do. Surely everyone would see what a fraud I was! Hey everybody, Oratorio Girl thinks she can sing a flirty duet!
In the weeks leading up to the Marriage of Figaro Night FYP event, I was singing nonstop. I knew the best thing I could do was plug that music deep inside so that when the moment came to stand in front of everyone and actually make the noises, my body would take over while my brain panicked. This meant I sang while I did the dishes, folded laundry, biked to and from work, and shoveled snow. My two-year-old, Felix, took a dim view to this method, and on one occasion he tenderly cradled my face in his sticky hands, and implored, “Mummy, STOP.”
The evening started with the famous opening duet from Figaro . J.P. Decosse was playing the titular baritone barber, and I, his fiancé Susanna. A duet is an act of trust, and I was desperate not to let the veteran J.P. down. As he wove his way through the audience, measuring, counting, at ease in character, I gripped my iPad, where my sheet music glowed up at me. I knew I didn’t want to keep my eyes on the notes – that’s why I had practiced so much at the expense of my family’s peace – but I felt very unprepared to
actually do the thing. Maybe we should have scheduled six or seven more rehearsals? Was it too late to ask Neil to sing this part?
Eek, it was time! Somehow, I caught my cue and came in. My brain screamed: Try to get a deep enough breath. Is it drier in here than normal? Remember, Susanna is very excited about her hat. Show them the hat! Yikes, were those the right words? Don’t think about it, keep moving… BREATHE! Don’t miss your chance to say “cappellino;” is there a better word in the world? Are you breathing?
I lost my spot on the page. My mouth made Italianesque noises in rhythm, but I knew I was barely keeping up. It was time to put the iPad down, and pretend I was a real Opera Girl. The worst I could do was catastrophically fail.
I offered my best reflection of J.P.’s sparkle and accepted his invitation into the whirlwind. And, somehow, every word was there, every note right in front of me, after all. ❧
Elisabeth Stones as Susanna
Performance of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. From left, Brittany Cann, Tara Scott, Elisabeth Stones, J.P. Decosse, Marija Euchner, Neil Robertson, Roberta Barker.
INTOLERABLY STUPID NO MORE
KATE LAWSON
Jane Austen Live! The Halifax Humanities Marathon takes on Northanger Abbey
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
I must begin with a confession that mere months ago, I myself may have been this intolerably stupid person when it came to reading the beloved author, Jane Austen. For numerous reasons, I could never find a way into Austen’s works. Part of Austen’s genius, her ability to incite either our distain or devotion for her characters was often what led me to throw down her novels in exasperation. I admit this rather sheepishly with the hindsight of my experience reading Northanger Abbey with Halifax Humanities’ incredible annual fundraiser this past November.
A marathon reading of a classic work of literature is the biggest annual fundraising event for the Halifax Humanities Society. Teams of readers take on the responsibility of performing a section of the text and collecting donations in support of their participation. By the end of the event, the whole text has been read from start to finish.
The Halifax Humanities Society, under the direction of Amy Bird, is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing educational opportunities and engagement with the arts to those who would otherwise lack such access. Students include, but are not limited to, those who live on assistance, disability, pension, or those who face other economic, physical, and social challenges to educational advancement and community inclusion. Halifax Humanities 101 is based loosely on the curriculum developed in King’s Foundation Year Program.
As a researcher in the field of philosophy, I focus predominately on the 20th century philosopher Simone Weil, and I believe, along with Weil, that the humanities should belong to everyone, not just those who attend liberal arts universities. Weil taught texts like the Upanishads , The Iliad , and Antigone to rural children, factory workers, and those marginalized by society. The consolation of philosophy, literature, and history has been immense in my own life, and I would go so far as to argue that these texts constitute a substantial part of what Weil refers to as the “needs of the soul” in her final book The Need for Roots . Halifax Humanities recognizes this richness and promotes democratizing that consolation.
And so, this past November, alongside my fellow FYP Tutors, Daniel Brandes, Veronica Curran, Maria Euchner, and Samuel Gillis Hogan, we read Chapters 15 and 16 of Austen’s Northanger Abbey for the 2024 Jane Austen Live! Marathon. I was cast as the deliciously materialistic Isabella, truly an embarrassment of riches for any performer.
Reading texts aloud has an almost miraculous effect, in my opinion, particularly with other lovers of literature and in the name of a cause so worthy. By joining together to explore the rich characters of the novel, finding the humor, heart ache, and even the underlying sociopolitical commentary, something opened up and I
began to finally understand Austen. In her book on the Human Condition , the philosopher Hannah Arendt claims that theatre is the political art par excellence. Reading out loud together, sharing in the surprises and possibilities of the life of the mind, reminded me of the necessity of sharing in the humanities as a step toward a society that thinks critically and supports an open dialogue. The marvelous surprise for me from this particular instance of communal thought is my deepening appreciation for Jane Austen and her tremendous writing (an appreciation further assisted by the superb FYP lectures on Emma from Dr. Kait Pinder). This newfound admiration for Austen emphasizes the ability to discover texts anew, to change one’s mind, to never cease in the pursuit of understanding, and to share that exploration with others whenever possible. Coincidentally, one excellent way to do this is by supporting the Halifax Humanities or perhaps next year, forming your own team and joining in the next literary marathon. ❧
—Intolerably Stupid No More (at least in regard to Austen), Dr. Kate Lawson, FYP Tutor. For more: halifaxhumanitiessociety.ca
Kate Lawson
“HOW THE WORLD BECAME THIS WAY”, GILGAMESH AT THE NEPTUNE THEATRE
REVIEW BY AUBREE FIELD (FYP 2024–25)
Getting the opportunity to see the ancient Mesopotamian text of Gilgamesh live within a current story brought me into a completely new way of thinking about the text. I had previously assumed our society rewarded ‘great nations’ for their ability to last in time. Yet seeing the story realized into a play I got a chance to interact with the geography of the story and what ancient Mesopotamia is sitting on today. This surprised me how the most ancient civilization we know of is now in conflict caused by the effects of colonialism. It introduced the thought process of not only being able to appreciate a great civilization, but also to study how it fell, why it fell, and what it gave way to. The artistry of this performance was by far my favourite part of the experience. The stage was outfitted with only a piano, some chairs and one main table. Yet it became the coffee shop, the place back home, and the audition room
with just a turn in lighting. The physicality that was able to be upheld by the two main actors was astonishing. They were tasked to play two or more roles each, not every one of them human, and successfully they illustrated the different lives with truthful body language. The live orchestra also came from the back out into the front of the stage becoming interchangeable characters in the story which was fascinating. I believe stories like these are so important because where they take place often only lives in history books and becomes inaccessible. Using the story of two men from different parts of the world not only portrayed the relationship of these societies today but how the world became this way. ❧
Gilgamesh and the Man of the Wild, Neptune Theatre
Old Babylonian terracotta plaque depicting Humbaba from the Louvre
SCHOOL PRAYER
CHRISTOPHER SNOOK (forthcoming, Commonweal 2025)
It couldn’t mean anything in the end all of us disheveled and lined up disorderly singing O Canada to the muzak pumped through the PA system otherwise reserved for trouble trouble trouble then silence and Mrs. S intoning the prayer
And we said something about our hollow fathers (they were hungry even them)
And Jesus lived in Calgary with half the Island beautiful in black tea sartorial tar sand streaks of wet charcoal and the boys in their boats
And who wanted anything to do with forgiveness if it meant not getting Timmy after school?
What could it mean O what could it mean for kids on the Eastern shore forty years ago, the Lord’s Prayer before arithmetic? Except now daily daily daily the stone-filled stomach and what bread?
A Tribute to Harry Critchley (1993–2025)
MARY LU REDDEN
As the director of Halifax Humanities from 2006 until my retirement in 2017, I was fortunate to have many King’s students volunteer with the program. They were all intrigued by a version of FYP, with classes led by many King’s professors, that was not for credit and offered free of charge to adults facing life difficulties of income, health, and family stress.
I deeply appreciated all of the King’s students who came to volunteer but one stood out for me, not simply because of his intellect, intensity, and imagination, but because, in his own words, Halifax Humanities deeply affected his own education and career direction.
In 2021, Harry Critchley was profiled on the King’s website as he was studying for his law degree.
“After his first two years at King’s Harry spent the next year studying at Oxford University. He came back to King’s to finish up his degree, but he says his enthusiasm for the liberal arts had waned. At least it had until a friend suggested he volunteer with the Halifax Humanities Society. It offers university level non-credit courses for people on low incomes.”
“That turned things around for me in a big way. People who were isolated by illness or by poverty were able to read these texts and come together and have really powerful conversations.”
What I think Harry took away from his time volunteering with Halifax Humanities was a powerful appreciation for the way in which a text offers a welcome to those willing to engage its words and thoughts with care and attention. Many students of Halifax Humanities were astonished to discover that their opinions and thoughts mattered and that the professors who came to teach were genuinely interested in their thoughtful perspectives.
Harry experienced a profound instance of that welcoming when he took the core idea of FYP and Halifax Humanities and its focus on deeply engaging texts and dialogue to the Burnside Prison in Dartmouth. He spoke very movingly of how prisoners, isolated, lonely, and often profoundly sad, could find common ground and perhaps even comfort in Greek tragedy and ancient epic poetry. Harry knew well that a study of the Humanities was no quick fix for the deep problems facing the prison system and its staff and inmates. But he also knew, from experience, that a discussion about a text such as Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics could create community even in the darkness of a prison and that those who were incarcerated could rediscover a sense of their own humanity in that dialogue. In a 2016 piece for The Literary Review of Canada Harry wrote: “So when I bring a university professor in (to the Burnside jail) who says ‘ I’m really interested in your opinion’ that can be a tremendously positive experience. When I come to you and I take you seriously, you take your own opinion seriously.”
Harry went on from his time at King’s to do so much good in the world with his focus on criminal justice, the rights of the incarcerated, policing reforms, and legal aid. His sudden death at such a young age has shocked me deeply. I take some comfort from the fact that so much good came from Harry’s year of volunteering with Halifax Humanities. ❧
Harry Critchley
Mary Lu Redden
Christopher Snook
TO LOVE AND TO BE WISE
HARRY CRITCHLEY
A much smarter man than I once told me that education—and particularly education in the liberal arts—represents an opportunity for people to come together in dialogue with one another so as to learn to know, love and live fully within the world. However, what I want to talk about now is the opposite of that: the profound suffering and alienation experienced by those who feel cut off from or hurt by the world and for whom there is little to no possibility of anything like a life of dialogue with others.
I’m here today as the founder and director of the Burnside Prison Education Program, a Dalhousie program which offers free courses in the Arts and Social Sciences for men and women at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Burnside, Nova Scotia. We’re one of two university-affiliated correctional education program in the country and all our instructors are faculty and graduate students working here in Halifax. We’re in our second year of operation now and offer about twelve to fifteen courses per year at the correctional facility. We’re also working with the Department of Justice and Literacy NS right now to develop a literacy tutoring program to help meet the needs of the large numbers of incarcerated men and women with limited reading skills.
You’ve likely guessed that I’m here to talk about prisons, and particularly the potentially transformative power of liberal arts education in prison. I should say that I understand the prison system can be a topic that many of us would prefer simply never to have to think about. Angela Davis writes
that prisons are intimately tied up with and yet disconnected from our daily lives. We take them for granted as a grim yet necessary control mechanism on society, but are often afraid to face the realities they produce. As a result, we fail to come to terms with the possibility that anyone, ourselves included, could end up there, and instead reserve such a fate for ‘others,’ or even just for ‘evildoers.’
However, we can’t afford to continue along this track. Canadian society has been ravaged by over a decade of draconian “tough on crime” policies, which have contributed to a dramatic growth in the overall prison population and record high incarceration rates amongst Indigenous people, women, and African-Canadians.
Here in Nova Scotia, inmate overcrowding and chronic understaffing have led to a serious spike in violent incidents, with
assaults—especially those on staff—increasing dramatically in recent years. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 8,500 reported cases of the use of solitary confinement in this province. Conditions for women incarcerated in the provincial system are especially bad. A combination of high security conditions and a lack of programming have led to the phenomenon of ‘pleading up.’ Many women actively request longer sentences so they can be sent to the federal women’s prison in Truro, where inmates have more frequent access to their families, better counselling and work training programs, and less restricted living quarters. You may also have heard recently about Fliss Cramman, who —despite living in Canada since she was eight—is currently on the docket for deportation, and who was also only un-shackled (Continued next page)
Harry Critchley
Burnside Prison. Photo by Ben McLeod, Wikicommons
Photo by Susan Dodd
(Continued from previous page) from her hospital bed at Dartmouth General after the intervention of our provincial Justice Minister, Diana Whalen.
What I want to argue today is that the policies of mass incarceration and all that they entail— systemic racism and sexism, the criminalization of mental health and, more generally, the false division between ‘criminals’ and ‘victims’—threaten to undermine the very conditions under which our world can be something we share together. From the inside looking out through the bars, they cast the world in a brutal, alienating light, as that by which one is judged, but of which one has no part. From the outside looking in on the prison, they represent a black mark on our society—that in which one is implicated, but of which one wants no part.
However, it is my conviction that, despite all this, we can still reconstitute our common world and that the liberal arts can and perhaps must play a role on this. So, I know I’ve already said a lot, but I’d like to end quickly with a story that I think exemplifies what I’m getting at here.
Last year we offered a seminar at Burnside on Sophocles’s Philoctetes with Dr. Eli Diamond of Dalhousie’s Classics department. The play tells the story of a Greek archer, who, en route to Troy, is abandoned by his comrades on a deserted island after contracting a terrible illness. Ten years later, the Greeks return to the island, heeding a prophecy that the Trojan war will never end without Philoctetes’s return to battle. During our discussion of the play, one of the older men in the class asked to read a passage that had resonated with him:
This man was born nobility, From a house second to none. Now he has lost everything, Alone without a friend in the world, Living among the beasts in the wilds— Miserable, hungry, and desperate, Suffering incurable, endless agony. The only answer to his hopeless cries Is the perpetual call of Echo, Far, far away in the distance.
He commented simply: “That is us. He could be describing life in here.” Many of the other students felt the same and acknowledged that they too often felt they had no one to turn to.
Philoctetes’s hatred and desire for revenge lead him to totally reject the possibility of communion with the world and with others—a radical, life-denying skepticism reflected in the rocky crags and barren landscape of Philoctetes’s island prison. The fluorescent lights, stale air, and very walls of our own prisons here in Canada likewise seem haunted by a deep, and oftentimes suffocating sadness. Despite the daily realities of overcrowding, and even double bunking in segregation cells, this sadness can and often does harden into a overwhelming sense of isolation—what Kierkegaard calls a “demonic despair” that rages against all of existence.
That this despair can be generated within and even perpetuated by the institutions that structure our common way of life—and so produce a kind of radical marginalization that calls into question the very possibility that this life could be something ‘common’—was a persistent concern for the Greeks. This isn’t something that
we’ve left behind, however—we might think of Adam Capay, for instance, rotting away in solitary without even so much as a trial for four years in the Thunder Bay District Jail. Reforming our public perception of prisons means changing how we think about the people in them. This does not mean exempting people from the things they have done, but simply affording them the basic dignity Hannah Arendt calls “the right to have rights”—the right to appear and be counted as one amongst many and to have one’s thoughts and opinions recognized as meaningful within our public discourse. When ten men in orange jumpsuits shuffle into a cramped room to discuss Homer’s Odyssey or a poem by Audre Lorde, each reveals aspects of the world the others could not have imagined. There’s an old Latin saying I’ve always liked: amare et sapere vix deo conceditur — even a god finds it difficult to love and to be wise. Though often extremely painful, the revelation I’m talking about here is vital if we are to affirm the world in the fullness of its delights and sorrows, and so reestablish it as something shared between people who both do harm and are harmed, but who never lose the ability to start anew. ❧
—A Friday Meditation in the King’s Chapel, March 31, 2017 (Taken from https:// www.kingschapel.ca/blog/2017/3/31/ friday-meditation-harry-critchley. This talk builds on Harry’s Final FYP lecture of 2016 which he delivered jointly with Mary Lu Redden, then Director of Halifax Humanities).
Dreaming of Medusa, Kate Lawson
IDEAS WORTH
SHARING: HOW FYP GAVE ME A LOVE FOR TRANSLATION
LAUREN KONOK
One of my favourite aspects of the University of King’s College is the opportunity provided to students to showcase their academic work in student journals and conferences. While I was rifling through past essays to find one worthy of submission to the student journal Babel , I stumbled across a translation project from the year prior where I translated a letter from the correspondence of Erzsébet Báthory, a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman. The project was inspired by the 2023 Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture speaker Dr. Emily Wilson, who is the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English. Her version of The Iliad was published in 2024. Listening to her talk, I was transported back to my first year of FYP, all the way back to section one. During our lecture on the Book of Genesis, it was emphasized that there are many interpretations of the Bible, owing to the ambiguity of translation. While I understood this concept from an academic perspective, watching it come into play in my own translation work revealed a world of nuance and a never-ending quest for historical and literary context. Dr. Wilson’s lecture combined with FYP scholarship led me to begin to collect different translations of various works, primarily the Iliad . Each text
originated from the same primary source material, yet interpreted it completely differently. Some emphasised the rhythm of the poetry, others favoured word-to-word translation. I began to realise the extent to which translation creates something unique and personal for each translator. This breakdown of the correct versus incorrect or accurate versus inaccurate binary expressed itself early on in my first translation project.
This endeavour was both frustrating and enlightening. Archaic language made in-depth research necessary, and it took me hours to be able to decipher Báthory’s penmanship. I felt a particular connection to the author; decoding her unique handwriting, familiarizing myself with her writing style, and inscribing the intention of every pen stroke in my memory. The feeling I experienced every time a word slid into place was addictive, and I became hooked on the process. I’ve since taken on two other translation projects which are currently in progress: Marie Meurdrac’s seventeenth century treatise La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames , and two papers on physical chemistry by Clara Immerwahr, an early twentieth century German chemist. Deciphering these texts has not only expanded my language skills and improved my research techniques, but it has given me a space where I can actively apply what I’ve learned in the Foundation Year Program. Not only do I find relevance in what I was taught, but I get to live the teachings in a particularly meaningful way. From critically examining each phrase with a historical, social, cultural, and linguistic lens to selecting language that will best express what I interpret to be the intent behind the
original words, I find myself contributing to a very long and extensive tradition of the propagation of knowledge. Even if my translations are never read by anyone outside of a handful of professors and certain friends who are roped into proofreading my work after watching me ponder a single word for several hours, every time I look over what I’ve pieced together I find myself transported back to mornings in Alumni Hall, eagerly awaiting the beginning of lecture and feeling an abstract gratitude towards the person who made accessible the text in front of me, and in so doing greatly enriched the minds of myself and my peers. ❧
Lauren and Lil’ Buddy
Double rainbow leading to the Library. Photo Anna Hartley (FYP
Ava Austin
Ava Austin
FYP section personality test
EVA BISAL, ANNA HARTLEY, AND ELLIE RAINNIE FYP 2024–25
WHETHER YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE ENKIDU TO YOUR GILGAMESH, IMPRISONED FOR AN INCIDENT INVOLVING PEARS, OR SERVING KANT THIS IS THE QUIZ FOR YOU! YOU ARE TEN QUESTIONS AWAY FROM FINDING OUT WHICH FYP SECTION BEST REPRESENTS YOUR UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE.
What are you doing on a FYP Monday?
A: Studying
B: Bed Rotting
C: Chatting with friends
D: Staying up until 2am
E: Starting Essay
F: Sleeping (9am class)
What are you wearing to lectures?
A: Dressed to the nines
B: An outfit I found on Pinterest
C: Dandy-core
D: Toga
E: PJs
F: Athleisure
Pick a section coordinator.
A: Dr. Maria Euchner
B: Dr. Tim Clarke
C: Dr. Susan Dodd
D: Dr. Eli Diamond
E: Dr. Daniel Brandes
F: Dr. Neil Robertson
What FYP-adjacent text is your favourite?
A: Dr. Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
B: The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
C: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
D: Metamorphoses - Ovid
E: Candide - Voltaire
F: The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Pick a residence building
A: Middle Bay
B: Alex Hall
C: Radical Bay
D: Cochran Bay
E: North Pole Bay/Angels Roost
F: Chapel Bay
Pick a text that we’ve read
A: The Prince
B: The Second Sex
C: On the Genealogy of Morals
D: The Odyssey
E: Meditations on the First Philosophy
F: The Divine Comedy
How much has your friend group changed since O week?
A: Pretty similar
B: I met my friends later
C: Totally different
D: All the same
E: Who needs friends
F: I met my best friend!
What is your opinion on the food in Prince Hall?
A: Not my favourite
B: I live off campus
F: I’m going to Dal 1 6 2 7 3 8 4 9 5 10
C: I have a doordash addiction
D: YUM YUM YUM!
E: Ours is a deceiving god and food isn’t real
F: I like it…
How much did you study for oral exams?
A: I studied a bit
B: I watched recap videos
C: I was locked in
D: I choose not to think about that
E: I pulled an all nighter
F: The library is my home now
Pick a King’s major?
A: Early Modern Studies
B: Contemporary studies
C: Journalism
D: FYP and Dip
E: HOST
If you answered mostly A , you are Section III - The Renaissance and The Reformation! You like the finer things in life!
If you answered mostly B you are Section VI - The Contemporary World! You know that good things come to those who wait!
If you answered mostly C you are Section V - The Era of Revolutions! You’re never afraid to say what you’re thinking!
If you answered mostly D you are Section I - The Ancient World! You’re an original and always down to have some fun!
If you answered mostly E Section IV - The Age of Reason! Quiet thinking and contemplation is your idea of a fun night!
If you answered mostly F you are Section II - The Middle Ages! You’re ready for anything, even braving the circles of hell!
The Death and Resurrection of the Biopic
BOB DYLAN, ROBBIE WILLIAMS, AND DIVINE INSPIRATION
MATTHEW VANDERKWAAK
We must be at a high watermark for biopics about musicians these days with the industry pumping out more and more hagiographic accounts of not only the dead, but also, the living. Recently, I watched the new Bob Dylan (A Complete Unknown) and Robbie Williams (Better Man) biopics in the same week. This pairing proved to be one of the more affective experiences in cinema-going I have ever experienced. Upon leaving the Dylan film, never have I felt so lost and confused about the meaning and practice of art, while a week later these feelings were completely inverted as Better Man caused me (some how) to see myself in an anthropomorphic, computer generated chimpanzee.
The problem with biopics is that they can never depict our great artists in the actual work of art. Neither the Dylan nor the Williams biopics accomplish this. It is something made impossible by the genre itself. To write a song is to engage the strange and spiritual process of bringing something into existence. By contrast, a film about an artist’s life can only unveil to the audience what they already know. In the process, biopics often become less about a human being than about some god among men.
I, for one, can only make art as a human being, and if (as I gather from A Complete Unknown), to be an artist is to be more than human, then I better quit now. Or perhaps, to be human (as Better Man tells me) means to be always already inspired. We know that art is divine. Now does this mean the artist is a god, or inspired by one?
A Complete Unknown is in so many ways a wonderful film—an exquisite tribute to a great songwriter and a truly American moment of cultural rupture and revelation. The world of the film is alive and breathing. The performances have an immediacy
that is almost without contrivance. But while it is all that, it is never about art making. I suggest that it’s not even really about an artist. The film presents a Dylan making and destroying worlds in his image. This Dylan never writes a song, he plucks them into being. Every scrap of paper and ditty on the guitar are shrouded in the sacred aura of what we know they will mean—with what they do mean to us now. And what the Timothée-Dylan brings forth is never simply a song, it is only ever THAT song (the song which is almost impossible to believe once didn’t exist since it has already made us who we are). He buys THAT whistle, plays THAT guitar, performs THAT concert, and poses for THAT photo. And none of these things really “happen” in the film. They are, as the moments enshrined in our cultural eternity, simply invoked.
I spoke with a friend who is also an artist who put into words for me what has been so puzzling about the Dylan film. “After watching it”, he said, “I felt deflated. Oh man, I thought, he’s so gifted. But it wasn’t inspiring. And what was I thinking? I was comparing myself to Bob Dylan, or at least,” my friend corrected himself, “to the character in the movie.” Those who can relate to the Timothée-Dylan are probably already unblocked, inspired artists at home in their practices and at one with their work. But what if you are a fledgling aspirant tenderly taking your first nervous steps forward and
daring to trust the process? “After I watched the film,” my friend continued, “I thought, what’s the point?”
That feeling of disorientation, thankfully, was not the end of the story for my friend. Soon after, he returned to one of his core creative practices: “I started writing morning pages again, and all of a sudden these ideas start to come. Little bits of inspiration.” Morning pages are the practice made famous by Julia Cameron who encourages blocked artists to start by just writing
A circa 3rd-c. mosaic of Virgil from modern day Tunisia. On his left and right are the muses Cleo and Melpomene. If you ask me, they look here more to me like his office admin than the divine source of his poetry.
three pages of nothing each morning. “It’s the most banal, boring crap,” my friend said. “I write whatever, and it turns into ideas coming up from God—that’s how I see it. I’m not making something up, I’m putting something down.” My friend, in other words, got a taste of what most biopics are missing: divine inspiration.
more like the Romans. There emerged in the Roman Empire a tendency for poets to claim divinity and immortality for themselves. In contrast to Homer’s petition that the god “sing in me”, Virgil begins his epic with the first-person pronouncement: “I sing.” And when the poem’s hero Aeneas performs his katabasis and is invited to see the destiny
Maybe practices like morning pages are a way to invoke the muse? That the artist who wishes to create something must first petition the god is something the Archaic Greek poets knew well. Hesiod, for example, must begin his Theogony with a hymn to the muses over a hundred lines long before he can reveal the mystery that is the generations of the gods. Homer’s Illiad likewise begins with the request that the muse “sing in me”. The poem is not the poet’s words at all. The poet is the instrument.
Plato comments on this tradition in his dialogue, Ion , which sees Socrates speaking to a professional performer of Homer’s poetry. The two are trying to understand the meaning of the poet’s knowledge. The rhapsode believes Homer to be the wisest of all men, a fact demonstrated by the beauty of his poetry which seems to contain and disclose all things. But prodded by Socrates, he finally admits that in fact, as amazing as the poems are, it would seem that the poet knows nothing at all about what he speaks. The poet is an expert in words, not in warfare, law, politics, theology, or horses. After this inversion, Socrates brings the discussion to a profound conclusion: the poet discloses truth because the poet is inspired by the god. And likewise, those who recite Homer’s poems are inspired by the poet, and their audiences too, captured by the poem’s beauty are inspired in turn. The poem, then, is like a divine lodestone, drawing reality up towards the god which is the source and end of the work. To make art, to perform art, and to enjoy art—these practices are all infused by the divine.
If I’m right and the tendency in our own cultural moment is to deify the artist rather than recognize divine source of their inspiration, we are less like the Greeks, and much
of Rome from the divine perspective of the underworld (which is really just the retrospective vision of the poet’s present!), lo and behold, there is Virgil himself at the cusp of the parade of the eternal city. Compared to the piety of Homer and Hesiod, this poetic self-possession feels almost perverse. It’s even more grotesque in Ovid who, at the end of the Metamorphosis , after paying homage to the divine Caesars, deifies himself. His poem, he claims, has made him immortal, and this is a work which “neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor consuming time will be able to destroy.” The poet has not even made himself a god among gods, but thanks to the universality of Rome, his immortality calls even the fatum of Jove into question.
way, dared not peer far enough into the same Mystery that inspired their art. In the Divine Comedy , Dante locates them, together with his beloved Virgil, in Limbo. In this place, they are not condemned to suffer but to sigh for want of something more . It’s as if their punishment is to get exactly what they wanted: an immortality sealed off in themselves.
Our popular culture seems to find itself in a moment analogous to that of the Roman poets. We live in our own limbo. In my weak moments, I live to be entertained and find myself believing that to entertain would be to really live. Mass media is a religion. How else could we comprehend the greatness of Dylan’s art other than as what bedecks the human-made heaven of our own Culture. Do we have any other sphere of meaning to locate great art? Our poets create our universe and we worship them because in this world, it is they who have given us ourselves. It is abundantly clear, I think, that we believe art comes from the god. The real question is, “Who is this god?”.
The biopic about the U.K. pop star, Robbie Williams, Better Man is another film about a living figure. But this film does not see Williams played by a younger, better looking (better singing) actor in a prosthetic nose. No, Better Man’s central conceit is far more strange: Robbie Williams is represented entirely by a computer-generated chimpanzee. The presence of a CGI animal posturing as a human amongst the otherwise actually human cast is never once acknowledged in the film. And while this sleight of hand is maybe the only thing that truly distinguishes the film from any other artist’s biopic, the result, for me, is sublime.
In an advertisement for the film, the voice of Chimp-Robbie addresses the viewer, “I know what you’re thinking: ‘What’s with the monkey?’”—a question, I want to reiterate, the film never openly asks itself— and he continues “I’ve always felt less evolved than other people.” Ostensibly, this is the
“It’s because Animals are more relatable than human beings” —Amy Bird
According to Dante, the problem with these Roman poets is that they did not dare to hope enough. Their poetry, however divine, is sealed off in the worlds of empire and the self. Their vision, to put it in another
meaning of “the monkey”: the film makes external the struggles that have defined Robbie Williams’ inner life. Chimp-Robbie has always felt less than, and yet capable of so much more. As Chimp-Robbie say
The Timothée-Dylan about to “go electric”.
in the film, “I’m stunted. I’m unevolved.” I think, though, that this is only one layer. In a promotional interview, the director, Michael Gracey, says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Whatever you think the film is about, it’s not.” In an attempt to bring all of these reflections to a conclusion, I’m going to choose to use this probably out of context quote to license a different claim about what the film has to say about art and inspiration.
In Better Man ’s opening scenes, Chimp-Robbie remembers his early years with a charismatic but neglectful father. Robbie’s dad is in love with the great entertainers of a by-gone age, especially Frank Sinatra. “They were gods to him”, Robbie remembers. And Robbie’s dad believes this. Great artists and entertainers are not really human. They are different. “You’re either born with it,” he says, “or you’re a nobody.” At the close of Act 1, in an attempt to imitate the gods (who are bound by no flesh), Robbie’s dad abandons his family to follow his dreams.
At the same time, Robbie’s nanny is there to speak the truth of the film. “You’re enough,” she tells the little boy-chimp: “There’s no such thing as a nobody”—there are only human beings. Except Chimp-Robbie isn’t a human, is he? The story of rise, fall, and recovery that unfolds is familiar, but there is something about witnessing this narrative trope experienced by an ape that transforms its meaning. Maybe, as my wife Amy pointed out, it’s because animals are ultimately more relatable than celebrities. And maybe it’s because Chimp-Robbie is, in the end, not merely an animal at all: he is an animal inspired with human nature. This is where the film, for me, becomes a deeply profound commentary on the life of the artist (id est , the life of the human being).
At the end of the film, Chimp-Robbie has regained his dignity, recovered from drug addiction, and worked to restore his human relationships (those things, again, that distinguish us from the gods). In the reenactment of the beloved performance
at Royal Albert Hall in 2001, Chimp-Robbie invites his father to the stage to join him in the closing number, “My Way”, by Frank Sinatra. At the end of the song, Chimp-Robbie’s father whispers to him, “Now look at you. You’re one of the gods.” And somehow, this time, it rings true.
The Chimp-man has been transformed, but not into a god, into a human being, and in this we see an image of the human who is also inspired, but by what is truly divine. Art makes present something that transcends what is available within the horizon of our present cultural moment. We understand this intuitively, and so we make our great artists into pseudo-divinities. But in the end, the work of art does divinize human nature, transforming it after the image of the higher life from which art springs. Better Man , for me, makes this anthropological claim: we are who we are when we are drawn up by something greater than ourselves. As the first Robbie Williams’ song featured in the film sings, “I’ve got so much life running through my veins going to waste.” What happens when that human longing turns to the Mystic Spring which longs itself to be made known in myriad ways upon us, its instruments? ❧
Reprinted from Matthew Joel Vanderkwaak on Substack (Check it out!)
Matthew Vanderkwaak, Robert Vanderkwaak, and Amy Bird
Dance of the Maenads (transformation of a man into an olive tree), Andries Cornelius Lens, 1765.
Representations of Disability Lecture Series
MICHELLE MAHONEY, KING’S ACCESSIBILITY OFFICER
As we come to the close of the 2025 Disability Lecture Series at the University of King’s College, I want to take a moment to reflect on what we have accomplished together. As the Accessibility Officer for the University, it has been an honor to be part of this important initiative.
First and foremost, I extend my deepest gratitude to Dorota Glowacka and Susan Dodd for their dedication to this series. Their commitment to fostering these critical conversations has been instrumental in creating a space where disability is not only discussed but centered, valued, and understood.
The goal of this series has been to challenge assumptions, amplify marginalized voices, and engage in meaningful dialogue about disability and accessibility. Through our public lectures, interactive tutorials, and our upcoming Art Showcase, we have explored disability as a lens through which we can critically examine societal structures. We have learned from scholars, activists, and artists who have shared their insights and experiences, expanding our understanding of what it means to live, work, and create as persons with disabilities.
This discussion is particularly important in Nova Scotia, which has the highest disability rate in Canada at 37.9%, according to the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability. This statistic is more than a number—it is a reminder of the work still to be done. The province’s 2017 Accessibility Act was a significant milestone, setting the stage for
progress, but real change requires ongoing commitment and action. Similarly, Canada’s federal Accessibility Act of 2019 commits to a country without barriers by 2040, providing a vision that we must collectively strive to achieve.
At King’s, we are proud to contribute to this work through our Accessibility Plan, which calls on us to examine and improve our practices, policies, and spaces. Disability studies plays a crucial role in this effort, challenging ableist assumptions and highlighting the intersectionality of oppression. By integrating disability into our academic discussions—whether in history, science, literature, or art—we equip students with the tools to recognize barriers, imagine new possibilities, and advocate for a more just
and inclusive world.
As we conclude this series, I want to thank our speakers, artists, and activists who have shared their knowledge and experiences. I also want to thank each of you who have participated—whether by attending a lecture, engaging in a discussion, or reflecting on these issues in your own way. Your presence and engagement are what make these conversations meaningful and impactful.
The end of this series is not the end of the work. Let us carry forward the lessons we have learned, continue asking hard questions, and remain committed to accessibility, equity, and justice. Together, we are not just imagining a more inclusive world—we are building it. ❧
Clockwise from bottom left: Jocelyn Hundert FYP 23-24, Miranda Dagley 20-21, Sadie Jarrott, Charlotte Humboldt 23-24, Michelle Mahoney (King’s Accessibility Officer)
Michelle Mahoney, Dorota Glowacka, and Kenny Fries
(Continued from page 3)
Gilgamesh: Sumerian Hero & Sumerian Evil
Gilgamesh as Sumerian Hero
As a Sumerian hero, Gilgamesh stands at the summit of the temple state: he has built the walls of Uruk, a city that has organized the human community to serve the gods. Such a city was the means by which humankind freed itself from adapting to nature to enjoy the blessings of civilized life.
Two thirds they made him god and one third man … In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love ... Climb upon the wall of Uruk; walk along it, I say; regard the foundation terrace and examine the masonry: is it not burnt brick and good?
Two-thirds a god, Gilgamesh has been created to be its greatest ruler. Divine justice in this ancient way of life is clear: humankind must serve the gods to be rewarded with the blessings of the gods.
Gilgamesh as Sumerian Evil
Perhaps the oldest and most widespread religious principle of all humankind is that the root of all evil is for humankind to become self-serving. Yet, that is precisely what Gilgamesh discovers to be what it means for a human to be godlike: to have this godlike desire to serve one’s self. This is the Sumerian evil of Gilgamesh: what makes him most able to serve the gods enables him to serve himself as though he were a god.
The men of Uruk muttered in their houses, ‘Gilgamesh’s arrogance has no bounds by day or night. No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all, even the children; yet the king should be a shepherd to his people.’ The gods heard their lament … Anu cried to Aruru, the goddess of creation, ‘You made him, O Aruru, now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self, stormy heart for stormy heart. Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet.’
Gilgamesh is an evil to both gods and mortals: both want to be rid of him as a contradiction of the existing order. Enkidu is created to
cancel the contradiction of Gilgamesh and restore the old order. But instead they become friends.
Dionysian experience of Gilgamesh: the human bond of friendship The human bond of friendship
Gilgamesh bent his knee with his foot planted on the ground and with a turn Enkidu was thrown …Enkidu said to Gilgamesh, ‘There is not another like you in the world … you are raised above all men, and Enlil has given you the kingship, for your strength surpasses the strength of men.’ So Enkidu and Gilgamesh embraced and their friendship was sealed.
It is through his friendship with Enkidu that Gilgamesh experiences a Dionysian transformation, of seeing a whole new way for the human to live in the world based on the bond of human friendship, and to organize the human community to serve that end.
Human friendship as hubris against the gods
But within the Sumerian order of the temple state by which the human community is organized to the one end of serving the gods, there is no place the bond of human friendship breaks the bond of servitude and the result is the evil of human hubris, of the human rising above itself to challenge the divine.
Ishtar rose up and mounted the great wall of Uruk; she sprang on to the tower and uttered a curse: ‘Woe to Gilgamesh, for he has scorned me in killing the Bull of Heaven.’ When Enkidu heard these words he tore out the Bull’s right thigh and tossed it in her face saying, ‘If I could lay my hands on you, it is this I should do to you, and lash the entrails to your side.’
Gods destroy human friendship:
The divine response to a human hubris that would set itself over and against the gods is the same in the ancient near eastern order of the temple state as it will be in the Western order of the city-state, which is to root out the source of hubris as an impossible evil.
As Enkidu slept alone in his sickness, in bitterness of spirit he poured out his heart to his friend. ‘Listen, my friend, this is the dream I dreamed last night. I entered the house of dust and I saw the
Bacchus (Simeon Solomon, 1867), private collection
Jean Metzinger, 1906, La danse, Bacchante, oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm.
kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever; rulers and princes, all those who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old … Gilgamesh lamented; seven days and seven nights he wept for Enkidu, until the worm fastened on him.
Dionysian Experience of Gilgamesh: Despair of Human Happiness
Having lost Enkidu to death as severing the bond of friendship as the source of human happiness, Gilgamesh seeks in vain a life without death, first the divine immortality the gods granted to Utnapishtim or the immortality of seasonal renewal in nature symbolized by the plant and serpent.
Bitterly Gilgamesh wept for his friend Enkidu … ‘How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead. Because I am afraid of death I will … find Utnapishtim … for he has entered the assembly of the gods.’
Utnapishtim said, ‘As for you, Gilgamesh, who will assemble the gods for your sake, so that you may find that life for which you are searching? But if you wish, come and put it to the test; only prevail against sleep for six days and seven nights.’ But while Gilgamesh sat there resting on his haunches, a mist of sleep like soft wool teased from the fleece drifted over him, and Utnapishtim said to his wife, ‘Look at him now, the strong man who would have everlasting life, even now the mists of sleep are drifting over him.’
Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi the ferryman, `Come here, and see this marvellous plant. By its virtue a man may win back all his former strength. I will take it to Uruk of the strong walls; there I will give it to the old men to eat. Its name shall be “The Old Men Are Young Again”; and at last I shall eat it myself and have back all my lost youth.’
[But a] serpent sensed the sweetness of the flower. It rose out of the water and snatched it away ... Then Gilgamesh sat down and wept.
What the Dionysian experience of his friendship with Enkidu reveals in the end to Gilgamesh is the impossibility of ordering human life to serve the end of human happiness within the Sumerian order of the temple state in the ancient near east. Yet, ironically as it were, the bond of friendship as the human good found and lost by Gilgamesh becomes the very basis of a new order by which the ‘West’ sets itself apart from the ‘East’, the order of oikos and polis
Ancient Dionysian Experience of Odysseus, Socrates, Aeneas
Homer’s Odysseus
Odysseus has the Dionysian experience of speaking with his mother Antikleia in the underworld, who directs him homeward. The homecoming of Odysseus proves to be a Dionysian experience in its own right as a series of reunions that renew of the bonds of friendship: first, with Athena—the friendship of god and mortal; with Eumaeus, the friendship of master and slave, which Aristotle explained as the necessary of self-government in oikos and polis ; with Argos, the friendship of human & animal; with Penelope, the friendship of husband and wife as the basis of the oikos as part of the polis . Odysseus comes home not simply to what belongs to him, but to all that to which h belongs. Here is the human happiness based on the bond of friendship that eluded Gilgamesh. In the homecoming of Odysseus, we have the Dionysian experience of unity of divine, human and natural in the life of oikos and polis
Plato’s Socrates in R epublic
In Plato’s Republic , Socrates imagines the Dionysian experience of emerging from the darkness of a subterranean cave into the sunlit vision of an ideal polis, a celestial city of justice, illuminated by the light of the Good. The Republic ends with a cosmic vision of the soul as immortal and no longer bound to an afterlife in Hades but as participating equally in the Olympian afterlife of eternal Ideas.
Aeneas as founder of future Rome in the A eneid
In the underworld, Aeneas has a Dionysian vision of future Rome as a city without limit in time and space—the universal city of eternal Rome. It is a vision of the Roman empire as an earthly realization of the celestial city of justice in Plato’s Republic . The second half of the Aeneid begins the human project of building heaven on earth.
The Medieval Dionysian Experience of Dante
Before we move on to the Medieval Dionysian Experience of Dante, it might be useful to recollect from Augustine’s Confessions his experience—as a pagan Roman citizen— of the Aeneid as an empty
The Maenad and the Panther by Ernst Julius Hähnel, 1886. Albertinum, Dresden
Ancient Greek terracotta statuette of a dancing maenad, 3rd century BC, from Taranto. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
fantasy, and his friend’s experience of the brutal reality of the Roman Empire as hell on earth revealed in the insatiable slaughter in the Colosseum, where Roman citizens applauded the brutish execution of a female prisoner by way of a perverse reenactment of the myth of Queen Pasiphae having intercourse with the bull and begetting the monstrous Minotaur. This is Dante’s judgment on Virgil’s Rome in the Divine Comedy —it is why Virgil returns to Limbo after guiding Dante through hell and up mount purgatory to the empty Earthly Paradise at the top. Eternal Rome for Dante was a fantasy.
In a Medieval Christian view, Gilgamesh’s hope of attaining happiness through the good of human friendship is not sufficient— human nature does not suffice to serve that end.
Aristotle proposed that human friendship had need of a higher friendship with the gods. Was Virgil’s vision of Rome as the eternal city founded on the pax deorum —friendship with the gods—meant to prove Aristotle wrong? Augustine’s City of God , a study of Rome and Christianity, argued that the eternal city of Rome was in truth the temporal city of man, a city not of hope and happiness but of delusion and despair. Augustine agrees with Aristotle that human happiness has need of attaining the immortal life of abiding with the gods on Olympus. As Augustine would put it, our happiness lies not among ourselves on earth, but with God in heaven. Augustine found the way to heaven in accepting the Christian belief that the divine united with the human in Christ as ‘the word made flesh.’ The fundamental principle of the Medieval world that arose on the basis of that belief was summed up in Dante’s era at the height of the Middle Ages—a height precipitating its collapse—in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas: Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.
Dante’s Medieval Dionysian Experience of Transhumanization
The eyes of Beatrice were all intent on the eternal circles; from the sun, I turned aside: I set my eyes on her. In watching her, within me I was changed as Glaucus changed, tasting the herb that made him a companion of the other sea gods.
Passing beyond the human [trasumanar] cannot be worded: let Glaucus serve as simile— until grace grant you the experience.
DC, Paradiso, Canto I
Trasumanar —a neologism, a new word coined by Dante to characterize the experience of human nature being perfected by divine grace. Dante’s experience of transhumanization is a Medieval Dionysian experience in three ways: (1) it involves transcendence—going beyond what is human; (2) it involves personal transformation which he compares to Glaucus, from human to divine, a kind of divinization; and (3) it manifests the Medieval principle that ‘grace perfects
human nature’.
The Medieval Christian principle that ‘divine grace does not destroy human nature but perfects it’ had informed the whole of Dante’s ascent of Mount Purgatory as a purgation of vice and acquisition of virtue. He could only climb the cornices by light of the sun and in the invisible presence of faith, hope and charity that appeared as stars in the night sky. Now having reached the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Mount Purgatory, where he prepares to ascend through the heavenly spheres of Celestial Paradise, the principle of divine grace perfecting human nature takes the dramatic form of what Dante characterizes as transhumanization, the divine transformation of human nature so as to make it capable of transcending earthly existence to abide eternally in heaven.
As he ascends through the lowest spheres of the Moon, Venus and Mercury in earth’s shadow, then beyond that shadow through the higher spheres of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, Dante learns how the human defect, which makes Plato’s ideal city and Virgil’s eternal city impossible to achieve on earth, may be overcome by grace. The logic of his ascent through Paradiso is that of the perfection of faith, hope, and charity, which alone enable humans to live on earth as citizens of heaven. Dante’s placement of Solomon in both the Heaven of Jupiter (Justice) and Saturn (Contemplation), you will remember, is all about the restoration of the temporal (Jupiter’s correction of the Holy Roman Empire) based on the restoration of the spiritual (Saturn’s correction of the Church), such that both will serve the single goal of human salvation—preparing the earthly community to join the celestial community in heaven.
Dante’s ascent beyond Saturn goes beyond his concern to ground the earthly community in the heavenly aspiration of human nature, so that the remaining heavens of the Fixed Stars, Primum Mobile and Empyrean are concerned with the fulfillment of our human aspiration in the heaven itself. At the very end of the entire journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, we arrive at Dante’s ultimate Medieval Dionysian vision of human nature perfected by divine grace.
Dante’s Ultimate Medieval Dionysian Vision
In the deep and bright essence of that exalted Light, three circles appeared to me; they had three different colors, but all of them were of the same dimension; one circle seemed reflected by the second, as rainbow is by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed equally by those two circles …That circle—which, begotten so, appeared in You as light reflected —when my eyes had watched it with attention for some time, within itself and colored like itself, to me seemed painted with our effigy, so that my sight was set on it completely. As the geometer intently seeks to square the circle, but he cannot reach, through thought on thought, the principle he needs, so I searched
Menade (or maenad) in silk dress, a Roman fresco from the Casa del Naviglio in Pompeii, 1st century AD, Naples National Museum.
Two satyrs and a maenad. Side A from an ancient Greek red figure calyx-krater from Apulia, 380–370 BC. Louvre, Paris.
that strange sight: I wished to see the way in which our human effigy suited the circle and found place in it — and my own wings were far too weak for that. But then my mind was struck by light that flashed and, with this light, received what it had asked.
DC Paradiso Canto 33
Dante’s vision of the humanity of Christ as inherent in the image of the Holy Trinity as the only begotten Son of God justifies the Medieval principle that grace does not destroy human nature but perfects it.
Dante’s Divine Comedy appears at the height of the Medieval age and also at its end: his vision is of the reformation of the Medieval world—the restoration of Church and Holy Roman Empire. But his ultimate Medieval Dionysian vision of the identity of the human and divine proves to be a vision that anticipates the transformation of the Medieval world into the Modern world of Pico’s Renaissance, Luther’s Reformation, and Descartes’ Age of Reason.
Pico: Renaissance Freedom of the Christian
Dante’s ‘Dionysian vision’ that identifies the human and divine as one becomes the starting point for Pico’s Adam who is by nature perfect and free to determine himself:
Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam … The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will … shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature … so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power … to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
Pico della Mirandella, Oration on the Dignity of Man
Cugoano: Modern Evil of Enslavement
Pico’s freedom to become angel or demon permits him the demonic freedom to engage in evil, from which arises the modern evil of enslavement. In the ancient world where only the gods are born free, enslavement is not an evil but a good, illustrated by the bond of friendship between Odysseus and Eumaeus. But once humanity regards itself in Christ as one with God, human enslavement contradicts this newfound human freedom and is therefore categorically evil, which then drives the enslaver to dehumanize the enslaved. Thus the title and theme of Cugoano’s 18th century Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery :
But such is the insensibility of men, when their own craft of gain is advanced by the slavery and oppression of others, that after all the laudable exertions of the truly virtuous and humane, towards extending the beneficence of liberty and freedom to the much degraded and unfortunate Africans, which is the common right and privilege of all men, in everything that is just, lawful and consistent, we find the principles of justice and equity, not only opposed, and every duty in religion and humanity left unregarded; but that unlawful traffic of dealing with our fellow-creatures, as with the beasts of the earth, still carried on with as great assiduity as ever; and that the insidious piracy of procuring and holding slaves is countenanced and supported by the government of sundry Christian nations. This seems to be the fashionable way of getting riches, but very dishonourable; in doing this, the slave-holders are meaner and baser than the African slaves, for while the subject and reduce them to a degree with brutes, they seduced themselves to a degree with devils.
Luther: Reformation Freedom of the Christian
As with Dante and Pico, Luther’s Protestant vision of the freedom of a Christian is based on the identification and immediate union of the human and divine in Christ.
Man has a twofold nature, a spiritual and a bodily one. According to the spiritual nature, which men refer to as the soul, he is called a spiritual, inner, or new man. According to the bodily nature, which men refer to as flesh, he is called a carnal, outward, or old man … Since, therefore, this faith can rule only in the inner man … And since faith alone justifies, it is clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with this inner man … The following statements are therefore true: “Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works; evil works do not make a wicked man, but a wicked man does evil works.
Luther, F R eedom oF A chR istiAn
For Luther, the Medieval principle that grace perfects nature is absorbed into a Protestant notion of faith as an identification with Christ in the soul free of the natural body—the natural or outer man has no bearing on the inner freedom of a Christian, and so there is no need to scale the heights of Purgatory or ascend through the heavens of the celestial paradise—one is immediately at rest in the Empyrean, where Dante beholds the effigy of Christ in the Trinity.
One consequence of Luther’s justification by faith alone is the freedom of European Christians to engage in the exploration and conquest of what they regarded as the new world, which took the form of imperialism and colonialism, the subjection of non-European peoples and the destruction of their indigenous cultures. Another form in which modern freedom begat modern evil.
Descartes: Modern Reason as the Fruit of Medieval Faith
Dante’s ascent through celestial paradise involves the perfection of the human knowing of God, the human willing of God and ultimately the human loving of God which occurs in his beatific vision of Christ in the second person of he Trinity. The principle of his ascent is explained by Aquinas as the work of divine grace perfecting
Dionysus and two maenads as depicted by the Amasis Painter circa 550–530 BC.
human reason so that the human may unite with God in heaven:
[Since] man is directed to God, as o an end that surpasses grasp of his reason ... certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation. Even those truths about God which human reason could have discovered … would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors. ST I.1
For Descartes, the founder as it were of modern science as the project of knowing the world, the identity of human and divine knowing occurs within the human mind, whose inner nature is already, as it were, made perfected by the grace of God. In his mind’s possession of the perfect idea of God, Descartes finds the principle of human infallibility, of knowing as God knows, not as pertaining to knowing God, but to knowing the world:
For whenever in passing judgement I so keep my will under control that it confines itself to items clearly and distinctly represented to it by the intellect, it certainly cannot come about that I should make a mistake; since every clear and distinct perception is something, and therefore cannot come from nothing, but necessarily derives from God—God, the supremely perfect being, whose nature is incompatible with deception. It is therefore undoubtedly true.
The Modern Dionysian Experience of Nietzsche
Heidegger saw in Nietzsche the ironic outcome of modern metaphysics based upon Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am.’
Modern metaphysics first comes to the full and final determination of its essence in [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of the Overman, the doctrine of man’s absolute preeminence among beings. In that doctrine, Descartes celebrates his supreme triumph. (28)
For Heidegger,
Nietzsche is the transition from the preparatory phase of the modern age— historically, the time between 1600 and 1900—to the beginning of its consummation. We do not know the time span of this consummation. Presumably, it will either be very brief and catastrophic or else very long .... (6)
Modern Dionysian Experience of Nietzsche’s Übermensch
(Overman)
There was not time at the outset to speak of Nietzsche’s view of Dionysus as a god of nature bound to Apollo as the god of reason. But we can begin with a quotation that speaks of Nietzsche’s ubermensch as inspiring the Dionysian mania of transcendence and transformation. Only for Nietzsche, what is to be transcended is the transcendent itself—the metaphysical—Descartes’ Idea of God—and what is to be transformed is the human by the Overman—Nietzsche himself as the man who overcomes of the man of metaphysics—the Socratic Dionysus of ideas.
Nietzsche’s Overman turns us away from the heavenly, the metaphysical, the transcendent realm of ideas, and brings us down to earth, to nature not as for Pico, the divinized nature of the Renaissance, nor the res extensa of Descartes. For Nietzsche, nature is realm of the will to power, the liberation from the metaphysical realm of Ideas.
Turning Earthward: Hegel, Marx, Freud
Like Heidegger, Hegel found in Descartes the beginning of the end of the West, only not in the consummation of the metaphysics, but in its perfection. For Hegel, the human had achieved its aim of securing happiness in this world in the reason of the modern state by the man overcame its alienation from nature. The sovereignty of the modern state that emerged from Hobbes and Rousseau and found its highest expression in Hegel made possible the freedom of citizens to pursue private ends in a civil soci -
ety bound by laws that protected their right to private property and capital.
Taking the next step in Nietzsche’s turn away from God in heaven to the fate of humanity on earth, Marx saw Hegel’s state differently. For Marx, the modern state institutionalized the alienation not only of man from nature, but man from man. Marxist communism would overthrow the state so as to return humanity to the earth.
Freud took another earthward step away from the tradition of viewing human nature as essentially rational and metaphysical, and directed us to look beneath our reasoning ego into the unconscious drive of our libido, and drew up a whole new portrait of our self as an conscious ego caught between the social morality of our superego and the earthly reality of our instinctual Id.
The Beginning of the End of the Western Tradition
From his 20th century perspective, Heidegger found in Nietzsche the beginning of the end of the West, which brings us to where we are today.
The whole of Western thinking from the Greeks through Nietzsche is metaphysical thinking. Each age of Western history is grounded in its respective metaphysics. Nietzsche anticipates the consummation of metaphysics … Nietzsche is the last metaphysician of the West. The age whose consummation unfolds in his thought, the modern age, is a final age. This means an age in which at some point and in some way the historical decision arises as to whether this final age is the conclusion of Western history or the counterpart to another beginning.
The Millennial Dionysian Experience of FYP
Each year in FYP we come to our own age at the end and every year we ask ourselves the same question of it: are we the end of the West or a new beginning?
Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger repudiate the history of the West as enslaved by a metaphysics of ideas going back to ancient Greece, especially to Socrates. That repudiation characterizes a great deal of the ‘contemporary world’ of which our own age of global millennialism is part.
It seems to me that the Dionysian experience of FYP—of moving through this history as a series of transformative changes that result from Dionysian visions—suggests that our time is also an age of Dionysian experience, in which two sides are present that might be represented by what most regard as the most influential poet and novelist of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, both nurtured by Ezra Pound’s
Dancing maenad. Detail from an ancient Greek Paestum red figure skyphos, made by Python, c. 330320 BC. British Museum, London
famous dictum for modern (contemporary) art: Make it new!
Eliot’s review of Ulysses in a journal introduced the phrase, ‘mythical method’, the use of ancient myth to provide a tool by which the modern artist could render sense of the chaos of the modern world. It is a method that Eliot employed in his most famous poem, The Wasteland . Yet, The Wasteland and Ulysses are to my mind opposite responses to the modernity of Nietzsche.
Millennial Dionysian Experience of The WasTeland and Ulysses
The Wasteland is essentially a tragic vision that laments the contemporary world as a world of broken images—a vision Eliot later repudiated in favor of restoring the Christian metaphysics that Nietzsche had declared dead, culminating in his final poems, Four Quartets . The Wasteland presents the Western tradition as collapsing into selfruin. The final chorus signifies resignation and acceptance of the end:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
By contrast, Joyce’s Ulysses is essentially a comic vision that accepts Nietzsche’s vision of the Overman as ‘the meaning of the earth.’ As it is never read in FYP, we will just note that is essentially an anti-epic, a modern inversion of the Homeric epic Odyssey and its hero, Leopold Bloom, is an anti-hero whose anti-odyssey consists of walking around Dublin one day. There is nothing transcendent or transformational in Ulysses . It is very much back to earth, the world of experience, the passions, ending with what might well me the climax of an orgasmic monologue given by Bloom’s wife, Molly, in bed:
and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Millennial Dionysian Experience of Finnegans Wake
Joyce’s last work is perhaps the ultimate expression of Nietzsche’s earthward turn: it is nearly unreadable—nearly every word is a portmanteau pun— and begins where it ends and ends where it begins. It is a comic cosmic version of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’, a work in which the Western tradition of reason is overcome, as well as the narrative tradition of the West established by ancient epic.
BEGINNING
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe
Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war ... Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
ENDING (Anna Livia Plurabelle—a woman and a river)
O bitter ending! ... My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!... We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee,
mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps.
The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Thank you. ❧
Statue of Bacchus, Rome (2nd century AD). Louvre, Paris
Marbel relief with a dancing maenad, Roman, Augustan period, ca. 27 BC-AD 14. Copy of a Greek relief of ca. 425-400 BC attributed to Kallimachos. Metropolitan Museum, New York.
If you liked this, try these!
ABIGAIL MCGHIE (FYP 2024–25)
SECTION 1 — The Odyssey
Book: Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
A retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. This book takes place over a lifetime, and picks up on The Odyssey’s themes of divine interference, familial ties, and the depths of human nature.
Song: ‘The Highwayman’ by Glen Campbell
SECTION 2 — Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale
Book: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke Piranesi , like Hayy , is on a quest to discover the larger things in life—but where Hayy lives on an isolated island, Piranesi is in a maze of rooms and corridors. At the end of the day, both escape the perceived limits of their society.
Song: ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ by Bob Dylan
SECTION 3 — Hamlet
Book: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Despite technically being a fantasy novel, there is no magic to be found here—simply a sprawling gothic castle, desperate grasps for power, and a cast of flighty, brooding character. Titus Groan captures Hamlet’s dismal state of mind, how everything feels too complicated all the time.
Song: ‘Needle in the Hay’ by Elliott Smith
SECTION 4 — Tartuffe
Book: Les Belles Soeurs by Michel Tremblay Tartuffe and Les Belles-soeurs share more similarities beyond the fact that they’re both plays written in French. Both deal in family rifts, religious hypocrisy, and betrayal—all balanced with fast-paced comedy.
Song: ‘Mahashmashana’ by Father John Misty
SECTION 5 — The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Book: The Trial by Franz Kafka
Putting an absurdist spin on Ivan Ilyich’s themes of moral dilemma, superficial lifestyle, and control, The Trial is the story of a sham court case that reveals a web of complex bureaucracy just on the flip-side of society.
Song: ‘I Feel Bad’ by I Hate Myself Because
SECTION 6 — Passing
Book: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Yellowface calls to mind the very same dilemma between loyalty and selfishness as Passing —after stealing her friend’s manuscript in the wake of her death, a white author assumes an identity that is not hers in order to propel herself to authorial fame. Song: ‘Diamonds and Rust’ by Joan Baez ❧
ANSWERS TO THE FYP CROSSWORD (PAGE 24)
Across
5. kylefraser
7. pentangle
8. pears
10. fourtuna
12. creusa
13. frankchurchill
16. weaving
17. centre
18. medici
19. hartfield
20. dido
21. nimrod
22. goodfriday
Down
1. mary
2. firk
3. proletariat
4. limbo
6. seria
9. monica
11. tragicomedy
12. callherdaddy
13. fraternité
14. yorick
15. swine
To Caravaggio, my beloved…
MARIA EUCHNER
Last summer, I went on a trip of a lifetime: I had designed a journey in search of art history’s baddest bad boy: the inimitable (and utterly irresistible) Baroque artist Caravaggio (with whom I may or may not be slightly obsessed). My quest took me from Sicily to Malta, Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, and London – with a few stops added for the enjoyment of other cultural delights in Venice, Bologna, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. I travelled for six and a half weeks, only to feel that I didn’t have nearly enough time to see all the things I wanted to see. But the things I did see affected and changed me in profound ways. In Malta, I stood before the incredibly impactful Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608) for about 90 minutes, mostly in tears. Caravaggio painted it as an altarpiece for the Oratory of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, where it hangs to this day. Another highlight was the Flagellation of Christ (1607), which was exhibited by itself in the gallery of the deconsecrated church of Santa Maria Donnaregina Nuova in Naples. It is incredibly effective to encounter a work of art without any of the usual distractions, and an added bonus consists in the fact that one can get very close to the artwork, and really scrutinize it. Since I tend
to spend substantial amounts of time with a work of art I really want to see, I often get it all to myself for a few minutes, and those moments I cherish above all, as they create a heightened sense of intimacy – as if Caravaggio revealed himself, bared his wounded, searching soul only to me. Seeing a painting ‘in the flesh’ is the only way to really enter into an engagement with it; no reproduction will ever do it the slightest justice. You have to see the paint and the brushstrokes (maybe you’ll even find some hairs stuck in the paint) in order to get a proper sense of a particular artist and their approach to a topic and the canvas. Most opportunities for that will be offered in a gallery or a museum, but Baroque art was certainly never made for any of those spaces, so when you find yourself in Rome, and get a chance to slip into the chapel of a particular church to see a Caravaggio painting that was commis -
sioned for it, you should take it – an artwork always communicates with the space it’s in, and probably does so most effectively in the space it was made for. This special pilgrimage was filled with so many wonderful experiences and unexpected encounters that I feel compelled to share them more widely, so I’ve started to reflect on them in writing, and hope to be able to eventually publish a book that may have an appeal beyond the academic community. I envision it as a memoir-cum-tavelogue-cum art historical exploration, though in the end it is quite simply a deeply felt love letter to Caravaggio. ❧
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1608, Oil on canvas, 370 x 520 cm, St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Flagellation of Christ, 1607, Oil on canvas, 286 x 213 cm, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
