Dear Readers,
“At
times surreal, at times melancholic, often enchanting, crazily
dynamic, you don’t know where you will be going next as you let
yourself be led through the enclaves. The voice of Zebulon and
others visit to weave captivating tales, conjurations of dancing
women, of joyous gypsies, of the low, the cold, the uncertain,
amongst musical wanderings through territories sublimely satisfying.”
Nicki
Bullock
-from her review of the album
I
would like to tell you about my solo album : Music of an
Invisible Enclave.
After nearly
three years recording and mixing this eighteen track album, I just
need a little help to get the project over the finish line. If you
are interested, a $10 pledge to the kickstarter campaign will buy you
the album in pre-sale, which will be released in February 2019,
available in digital download format at
zebulonstoryteller.bandcamp.com
Your pledge will help me cover the cost of having the album
professionally mastered.
I have previous
albums already available through Bandcamp
and my Youtube channel has a mixture of music, dance and poetry
videos.
Also, the blog
Music of an
Invisible Enclave is the story of the nine months it took to do
the initial recordings, documenting my my life as a musician playing
in several bands, working with dancers and poets and teaching middle
eastern drumming, all in a little city by the sea.
The blog,
Indivisible
From Magic
is sort of a weird sequel,
but it's mostly about magic. Writing this blog helped me finish
writing my new novel, The Hangman Tree, which is still a few years
from release. (The third draft is done, it's in editing as I write
this). I'll tell you more about the novel later.
So if my music
interests you, I would be grateful for your support. If you could
share the kickstarter promotional video amongst your friends and
family, that would help a great deal too.
Thank you,
Morgan (Zebulon)
Taubert
...Now, on with
my letter to Thucydides...
*
Book Two, Letter
Nine
To Thucydides, on men, women, and the tyranny of democracy
Part 1 of 6
Dear Thucydides,
I've been reading
your book, The Peloponnesian War every
night for months, (the 1954, Rex Warner translation). I
thought at first that it was a ten year story, but that is only the
beginning. You describe twenty one years of war, including the six
tumultuous years of so called 'peace' in the middle. It is an epic
tome of the conflicts of many nations, struggling for dominance, or
independence, in the long aftermath of the failed (and still famous)
Persian invasion of Greece by King Xerxes. This will likely be a
long letter, you certainly deserve a carefully considered response,
but I'm not going to just flatter you with praise for your book
which, in your own words, “...is not a piece of writing designed
to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last
forever.” I've got some hard things to say as well.
I'm going to
start with a couple ideas that I don't think you'll like, but here
goes.
Democracy can be
just as tyrannical as any other form of government.
and
Men are not
the stronger sex.
To begin:
Dying in battle
seems easy. It doesn't take much to be courageous for a moment, to
fight for, and die for your country, or your beliefs.
Being a woman in
time of war is hard. Staying alive is hard. Keeping the children
fed is hard, ignoring one's own needs in favour of the next
generation....that takes true strength. Submitting to the violence
of one's enemies, and living on for the sake of one's children, in
forced hostage marriages or slavery, is hard. Ancient warfare was
every bit as horrid as its modern equivalent, and in typical fashion,
the civilian populations suffer just as much than the soldiers.
Yet in twenty one
years, in 541 pages, you mention women only three times, Thucydides.
To be fair, you hardly mention civilians at all, yours is a political
and military story that only lightly touches on the experience of
those not serving in armies, but still, women are everywhere you go
in the world, but they're not in your book.
This got me
thinking about the notion that the absence of evidence, is not the
evidence of absence. So, in the
almost complete absence of any reference to women in your book, I can
see a great sea of information hidden behind the question: where are
the women?
If
you read between the lines, it's all there. The women are at home
suffering through the famine and plague and pillaging armies who “lay
waste to the land”, as you so
often repeat.
What
does that mean? Lay waste?
I
can imagine it, and if you are a woman, I'm sure you don't want to
imagine it, but that is what this letter is going to be about, among
other things.
Men
are not the stronger sex.
I
say this because men go on and on and on about how strong and brave
and courageous they are and I just keep thinking...the
gentleman doth protest too much.
Books and scrolls and treatises and volume after volume of writing
about the courageous acts of heroic men in battle, but the more I
read the more I sense a smoke-screen, a beautiful, romanticised smoke
screen for a code of behaviour that is in actual fact, the opposite
of its professed virtue. Now I know there's the issue of high levels
of illiteracy among women throughout history, resulting in very few
of their stories being told, but many other authors go to great
lengths to include women in their histories. Herodotus, who wrote
before you, goes out of his way to find stories of women, and
Xenophon, who wrote after you, does the same, as does Plutarch, and
he loves your book.
But
you don't write about women and I ask myself why? I don't have a
straight answer, but my thoughts do seem to take me down a certain
path.
I
suggest that:
Men
are weak who submit to the violence of their natures.
A
true gentleman man is known by his restraint.
Yet
...
Men
are frequently obligated, in the name of courage, valour, freedom and
dignity, to submit themselves upon the altar of Phobos, and join
forces with other men to fight in wars all over the globe. Men are
frequently required by law to commit violence upon their fellow man,
when called upon by their sovereign or government to do so. Some
wars are fought for reasons that to me, seem good, or if not good,
then at least just. Other wars seem nothing more than the piteous
outcomes of political greed, or corporate meat grinding battles for
resources. The restraint and gentleness that defines a man in
civilian life, becomes a burden and obstacle in times of war.
(Although Marcus Aurelius seems to offer an alternative....I'll write
to him soon)
Your
story Thucydides, is not about gentlemen. It isn't even about heroes
and villains. I'm actually very impressed by your seemingly fair and
balanced telling of the conflict between democratic Athens, and
Sparta (which was a sort of fundamentalist, religious, oligarchical
monarchy, I suppose). Though you are Athenian, I don't feel like you
pull any punches when you describe their callous , criminal behaviour
towards their subject states, and despite having been exiled part way
through the war, and living among the Spartans afterwards, I do not
feel that you favour them overmuch either, showing their insecurity
and corruption in equal measure with their nobility, cleverness and
honourable conduct.
But
where, Thucydides, are the women?
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