The Dyad is the Smallest Society
Marriage, Antigone, and figure skating duets
Remember to let me know if you’re interested in a summer book club. Writing this week’s essay is definitely tilting me toward picking A Wizard of Earthsea. Also, Anne Lowry, who wrote the excellent “Time Tax” essay at the Atlantic, is working on expanding the essay to a book and says, “Tell me about the insurance snafu ruining your life, the years you spent waiting for benefits, your immigration process, your FAFSA cluster, your healthcare nightmare.”
I like thinking through what stories we tell and what models we have for how we depend on each other (especially as I look forward to reading novels to my daughters). So I was struck by this discussion of the Greek dual in Sophocles’s Antigone.
For Commonplace, the new journal of The Catherine Project, Felix Bieneman talks about his experience trying to get this Greek feeling into English:
Sophocles uses the dual to describe the pair of brothers as well. In line 13, it's used for both in the same breath: “duoin adelphoin esterethemen. duo, miai thanontoin hemerai diplei cheri.” or. "Not since the two of us were robbed of brothers two / who died a double death upon a single day." Antigone and Ismene are a pair, Eteocles and Polynices are a pair, and here they're set up in opposition to each other: a pair of pairs. Sophocles emphasizes this by using the words duo (meaning "two") and diplei ("double") alongside the dual form of the words for “two,” “brother,” and “dying” (duoin, adelphoin, thanontoin). I carry it into English by saying "the two of us" instead of “we,” and by emphasizing the “brothers two” and their “double death.”
I enjoyed the whole article, and I liked thinking about where I would use the Greek dual (with my limited understanding of it)—which relationships have that intensity of shared dependence and connection?
It was particularly fun to read the essay in the same week that I saw the news that pair skating and ice dancing will allow same-sex pairs to compete. Part of the push for the shift is to be able to tell same-sex love stories on ice, but another part is simply to tell a wider range of stories through skating, which could include any relationship between two men or two women, not just a romantic one.
Although women have been lifting one another in synchronized skating for 20 years, learning to lift each other in ice dance presented Papadakis and Hubbell with a new challenge: finding creative ways to leverage their body weight and overcome the fear of injuring a friend. “It’s an athletic endeavor,” Hubbell said. “And there’s artistry behind it, but artistry is not inherently sexual. She and I are both quite sensual people. It can look like we’re trying to convey some sort of intimate relationship. But then we put on another piece of music, and it can look like two people who are best friends, or two people who are fighting.”
Which leaves me imagining what an Antigone/Ismene ice dance would look like (and what music you’d set it to) or what you’d do for Ged/Shadow… on ice!
I also like to imagine that same-sex ice skating, which will include both romantic and other relationships might give more room for male-female pairs to tell more stories in their performances than smouldering! sexual! tension!
When I used to watch So You Think You Can Dance, one of my favorite performances was “Gravity” with Kayla and Kupono, which used the male-female asymmetry of physical strength to frame a dance about addiction. I’m pretty curious to see what stories lend themselves to symmetry.
But to go back the the paradigmatic asymmetrical dyad, I liked this from Mary Harrington in Plough on what marriage is.
We need to re-imagine marriage as the enabling condition for radical solidarity between the sexes, and as the smallest possible unit of resistance to overwhelming economic, cultural, and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market. Households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether that’s agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based, or a mix of all these. This is an essential precondition for the sustainable survival of human societies. Our biggest obstacle is an obsolete mindset that deprecates all duties beyond personal fulfilment, and views intimate relationships in instrumental terms, as means for self-development or ego gratification, rather than enabling conditions for solidarity.
I like her emphasis on solidarity over partnership and her emphasis on the way the natural family begins by reaching across a natural divide.
Is way to find solidarity across that asymmetry to find ways to blend more and more, to grow to resemble each other?
Or is it to lean into some elements of your unlikeness, the way choristers hold harmonies?
What are the best stories you’ve seen centered on symmetrical foils?
…I really am talking myself into the Earthsea bookclub
For what it’s worth, Classical Arabic has a nearly full set of dual pronouns and conjugations: masculine and feminine in both the second and third persons (the further you go along the spectrum of vernacular Arabic varieties, the fewer of those grammatical forms remain). One of the most commonly cited works of the pre-Islamic Arabic literary canon, the mu‘allaqa of Imru’l Qays, has a second-person dual imperative verb as its very first word (qifā/قفا). I sometimes fiddle with an English translation when I have trouble falling asleep. Unfortunately, Classical Arabic is very concise and compressed, which means an English line leaves little room for what a literal translation might render, “Stop, you two! Let us weep at remembering a beloved and his abode…”
"Is [the] way to find solidarity across that asymmetry to find ways to blend more and more, to grow to resemble each other?
"Or is it to lean into some elements of your unlikeness, the way choristers hold harmonies?"
Both! Especially among choristers, I'd think. A potentially-beautiful difference in pitch may not be beautiful if choral blend is off in other ways. Choral blend requires (rather obviously) becoming more like your fellow singers when necessary, and (less obviously) more different when necessary, too. (A naturally-huge voice might unobtrusively bow out entirely on the softest passages, leaving those to smaller voices. Breathing at different times in order to create an impression of no gap in phrases most choristers can't do well in one breath is also important. And so on.) Blending makes individual differences unobtrusive. It doesn't annihilate them.
Female-female duets are normal in synchronized swimming. A pair so matched it could be mistaken for identical twins seems especially prized in competition, but even then, gestures mirroring one another are opposites (an axis is flipped). Even symmetry needs difference, if only of axis, angle, or displacement, to manifest, revealing what's alike despite the difference. Interestingly, the following essay claims that polyphonic singing has an egalitarian symmetry that mere harmonizing typically lacks:
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/music/the-politics-of-polyphonic-singing
Analogy finds similarity across difference, and analogy's beauty comes from both the similarity and the difference. Writing verse about how my beloved's eyes are like eyes, nose like a nose, and so on, would thwart the purpose of analogy (to comic effect, I hope, if anyone tries it!).
"The Father forever sees and infinitely loves the whole depth of his being in the Son, illumined as responsive love in the fullness of the Spirit, and in the always determinate infinity of his triune being God begets all the riches of being – all that all things might ever be – in the image and light of his essence; and thus God himself is already his own analogy, his own infinite otherness and perfect likeness." – David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (a great book, both in excellence and size – here's one review: http://thesometimespreacher.com/2016/01/the-beauty-of-the-infinite-by-david-bentley-hart/ )