Protective Arts

Neptune’s Fountain

Las Vegas is a temple of the ersatz celebrating the vacuousness of gambled fortunes. For all the glitz and neon grandeur (quickly being replaced by LEDs), Las Vegas is usually an honest thief. Everyone knows that isn’t the Eiffel Tower, nor the Montgolfier balloon in front of Paris; New York, New York’s scale is wrong and isn’t as grand as the city itself; and the Luxor isn’t a monument for Pharaoh.

For Spring Break 2023 we stayed on the 58th floor of the Cosmopolitan with a commanding view of the strip. This visit we rented an Audi RS Q8 and took it to Red Rock Canyon. It was a cloudy and drizzling daytrip – reminding us all of home – and of the Painted Hills.

The car was the highlight of the trip for Adin. The RS Q8 shares the same engine as the Urus and is very quick off the line with a 3.6 second 0-60 while seating five people.

It was a fun ride and it has a g-force display on the dash so you can prove how well it corners.

For Kyrian we did the chef’s nine-course meal at Superfrico – with fresh mozzarella made table-side.

Most of the trip we – as is typical for my family – walked the strip just taking in the sights and looking at the luxury shops at the Venetian and Caesar’s Palace.

This trip, I noticed a fountain nearly hidden by an escalator in the Forum Shops labeled Neptune’s Fountain.

While I fully appreciate the curated shams of Vegas, a blatant error I cannot accept. This isn’t Neptune – rather, it depicts the death of Laocoön and His Sons.[1]

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Laocoön is the Trojan priest who saw through the Greek ruse of the horse and warned, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs
Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.

The Trojans ignored him. Despite the stratagem working, Athena sent serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons for his interference. Athena, ever-protecting her Odysseus.

The statue freezes the moment when:

Unswerving then
the monsters to Laocoon made way.
First round the tender limbs of his two sons
each dragon coiled, and on the shrinking flesh
fixed fast and fed. Then seized they on the sire,
who flew to aid, a javelin in his hand,
embracing close in bondage serpentine
twice round the waist; and twice in scaly grasp
around his neck, and o’er him grimly peered
with lifted head and crest; he, all the while,
his holy fillet fouled with venomous blood,
tore at his fetters with a desperate hand,
and lifted up such agonizing voice,
as when a bull, death-wounded, seeks to flee
the sacrificial altar, and thrusts back
from his doomed head the ill-aimed, glancing blade.
Aeneid, Bk 2

There are, of course, earlier versions than Vigil’s. A lost play by Sophocles makes Laocoön a priest of Apollo who is punished for violating a vow of celibacy (the Bibliotheca by Apollodorus follows this skein). Sophocles’ version is crueler than Virgil’s. In that version only his sons are slain, leaving Laocoön alone to suffer. (Quintus of Smyrna follows Virgil in making Athena his tormentor.)

Prophecy is dangerous for both the supplicant and prophet alike. The people of Troy take Laocoön’s death as punishment for striking the horse with a spear, proving that the horse was in fact a sacred idol:

Of his vast guilt
Laocoon,” they say, “receives reward;
for he with most abominable spear
did strike and violate that blessed wood.
Yon statue to the temple! Ask the grace
of glorious Pallas!” So the people cried
in general acclaim.

Poor Laocoön – damned if you do, damned if you don’t. He is the male Cassandra. Both are punished grievously by the gods for being right even while being ignored by humans.

Laocoön’s suffering was a precursor to what every Trojan would suffer as a result of their not heeding his warning. And Laocoön’s suffering was impossibly great.

Charles Darwin notes the impossibly furrowed brows that stretch unbroken in the marble from side to side. Darwin’s (1872) study of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals sought to document the physiological responses to emotions. In specific, Chapter 7 addressed “Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair” with the chapter summary:

General effect of grief on the system–Obliquity of the eyebrows under suffering–On the cause of the obliquity of the eyebrows–On the depression of the corners of the mouth.
Charles Darwin. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: D. Appleton & Company. (1872): 176

Darwin’s review of responses allowed him to comment on Laocoön:

The ancient Greek sculptors were familiar with the expression, as shown in the statues of the Laocoon and Arretino; but, as Duchenne remarks, they carried the transverse furrows across the whole breadth of the forehead, and thus committed a great anatomical mistake
Darwin (1872): 183

He provides for artistic license as a plausible reason for the impossible exaggeration:

It is, however, more probable that these wonderfully accurate observers intentionally sacrificed truth for the sake of beauty, than that they made a mistake; for rectangular furrows on the forehead would not have had a grand appearance on the marble.
Darwin (1872): 183

Darwin’s approach was scientific. For him, the statue was an example of art depicting emotion, just incorrectly.

Almost one-hundred years earlier, Ephraim Gotthold Lessing (1766) wrote his treatise on Laocoön, in critical response to Johann Joachim Winckelmann. I am not terribly interested in their debate on aesthetics[2], but Lessing makes pointed observations on the cultural differences in expressing pain. Lessing asserts:

A cry is the natural expression of physical pain. Homer’s wounded warriors not infrequently fall to the ground with a cry. Venus shrieks aloud at a mere scratch [Iliad V. 343], not because she must be made to represent the tender goddess of sensuality, but because suffering nature must have her due. Even iron Mars screams so horribly on feeling the lance of Diomedes that it sounds like the shouting of ten thousand raging warriors and fills both armies with terror [Iliad V. 859].
Lessing, 1766: 3-4

Even the Greek gods are sensitive to pain and express anguish audibly. This is in stark contrast to the Germanic sensibilities:

I know that we more refined Europeans of a wiser, later age know better how to govern our mouths and our eyes. Courtesy and propriety force us to restrain our cries and tears. The aggressive bravery of the rough, early ages has become in our time a passive courage of endurance.
Lessing, 1766: 4

And whence this aggressive bravery turned passive courage?

Yet even our ancestors were greater in the latter than the former. But our ancestors were barbarians. To master all pain, to face death’s stroke with unflinching eye, to die laughing under the adder’s bite, to weep neither at the loss of one’s dearest friend nor at one’s own sins: these are the traits of old Nordic heroism. Palnatoko decreed that his Jomsburghers were not to fear anything nor even so much as mention the word “fear.”
Lessing, 1766: 4

I smiled reading that paragraph. Only because I just binge-watched Vikings (2013-2020) did I understand Lessing’s reference.

Vikings starts with the exploits of Ragnar Lothbrok (Lodbrok) who sired sons who carry the series (and are historical) forward. It is Ragnar who “mastered all pain” when tortured and was executed by being cast in a pit to die “under the adder’s bite” by King Ælla of Northumbria. Palnatoko (Palnatoke) is the legendary hero of the Jómsvíkinga saga (Jomsburghers) which tells the struggle for power and control over Denmark and Norway – plot drivers for the series.

These Vikings embrace death and do not fear it because a warrior’s death assures entry to Valhalla. There is a wonderful blurring in the series between the pagan belief in Odin All-Father and the Father of All, the Christian god – they are presented as providing equal solace to human suffering. Belief in either can banish fear and provide succor to suffering with equal effect.

Not so the Greek! He felt and feared, and he expressed his pain and grief. He was not ashamed of any human weakness, but it must not prevent him from attaining honor nor from fulfilling his duty. The Greek acted from principles whereas the barbarian acted out of his natural ferocity and callousness. In the Greek, heroism was like the spark hidden in the flint, which sleeps quietly as long as no external force awakens it, and robs it of its clarity or its coldness. In the barbarian, heroism was a bright, consuming, and ever-raging flame which devoured, or at least blackened, every other fine quality in him.
Lessing, 1766: 5

Ragnar and his sons are driven by the need for recognition by heroic deeds – hence their constant striving and drive to move beyond. Achilles may start the Illiad seeking eternal fame, he actively decided his fate, but that was the decision of a brash teenager. By the end of the epic, we see him reconcile with Priam precisely because of shared grief: both having lost; Achilles, Patroclus – Priam, Hector. Lessing explains:

The poet has a deeper meaning. He would show us that only the civilized Greek can weep and yet be brave …
Lessing, 1766: 5

The Greek presentation of suffering is humanizing. Regardless of its impossibility, the depicted agony Laocoön endures shows us suffering as an undeniable common experience. For the Nord and Christian alike, suffering could be a key to a new kingdom.[3] The Greek knew the futility of suffering – there was no higher realm after death – agony was real, it had no intrinsic or existential value. Relief from suffering was granted only by the grace of your fellow man. Humanity defined by hospitality – xenia.

__________________________

[1] The history of the statue is much in question. The earliest reference is by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History where he lauded it as “a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of [bronze] statuary.” However, it isn’t clear whether the sculpture he saw was a Greek original creation or a Roman copy of a long-lost masterwork. In 1506, the statue was re-discovered buried in a vineyard. Pope Julius II dispatched a team of experts to oversee their excavation, including Michelangelo (see below).

[2] Lessing’s essay expands on the differences between the poetic and plastic arts (painting and sculpture). Using Laocoön and His Sons as the canonical example, he argues that it demonstrates the very different challenges faced by a visual artist from those that confront a writer. Lessing insists a writer can describe torment in as great detail as he wishes, a sculptor or painter can depict only a single frozen instance and thus must manipulate emotion to elicit our pity. Sculpted accurately Laocoön’s pain would be ugly – evoking the viewer’s disgust. “The demands of beauty,” Lessing insists, “could not be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring violence… the distress should be transformed, through beauty, into the tender feeling of pity.” Lessing’s arguments need to be revisited given cinema: the plastic and written arts have blended in ways his aesthetic theory did not contemplate. As indicated by the banner image which is a single frame of a mildly erotic video that plays on the columns of the main lobby of the Cosmopolitan.

[2] Michelangelo completed David before he ever saw Laocoön and some art historians claim it influenced him tremendously. They cite the posturing of the Dying Slave (1513), for example, but the facial expression remains beatific as the Pietà (1499). I see no deeper understanding of the human experience of suffering – rather Michelangelo continues with a Christian motif depicting suffering as a gateway without showing real agony.

Never Cry Wolf

My boys twisted my arm into getting Elden Ring so we could all play together. It was an easy sell (I wanted an excuse) and it is another way we three can bond. Too many hours later, I cannot keep up with them. Perhaps it is perceptual speed. Perhaps their keyboard skills are better. Whatever the reason, I need their help with boss-fights. They have both completed the main quest while I am still fumbling through.

The graphics are extraordinary. The soundscape is too good. I cannot hear the whine of the wolves when I am forced to kill them without feeling that something has been violated. Even in a virtual world, I am loath to do them violence.

I have an affinity for wolves. Perhaps it was Never Cry Wolf (1983). Perhaps it is the way they move: a flowing command of space, as if the terrain were built for them and everything else is visiting.

Wolves and humans have had, and continue to have, a contested relationship. As wolves reassert old hunting grounds, they are again a focal point of debate between ranchers and environmentalists. The economic loss is visible. The systemic benefit is harder to see.

There is also a deeper psychology to overcome. The wolf has a reputation. The Big Bad Wolf. Little Red Riding Hood. As recently as 2011, wolves were cast as the adversary in mainstream cinema.

In The Grey, a suicidal Liam Neeson finds the will to survive when the tables turn: the hunter becomes the hunted, pursued by a pack across an Alaskan waste. It is effective because wolves fit the role: intelligent, coordinated, relentless.

Fables offers a different figure: Bigby, the detective-sheriff of Fabletown; the predator given a jurisdiction. He is very good at the job.

I do not know why I have an affinity for wolves. What follows is an attempt to find where that accounting began.

___________________

We had no name that could be carried in the mouth. We did not need one. We knew ourselves in the press of bodies in winter, in the pull of the hunt, in the long hunger that did not end. We were what moved when nothing else could.

And you. Unfinished, upright, holding ground where nothing holds.

***

The earliest genetic evidence places dogs alongside human hunter-gatherers at least 14,000–16,000 years ago, well before agriculture. These populations occupied overlapping ecological niches, hunting the same prey across the same terrain.

They were not encountering an unfamiliar animal. They were encountering another hunting system. Group-coordinated pursuit. Shared kill. Territory marked and defended. Young raised within structure. The resemblance was not exact. It was sufficient. In such conditions, competition is not the only stable outcome.

Parallel systems can merge.

The first domesticate was not a sheep. It was a rival.

The timing coincides with instability. The Younger Dryas (~12,900–11,700 BCE) disrupts established patterns; cooling, drying, fragmenting ecosystems. Some groups range further, breaking into smaller units. Others contract around reliable patches of water, wild grains, recurring herds.

Mobility increases at the margins. Fixation increases at the nodes. The edge becomes consequential.

Fire marks the decisive break. In Greek terms, Prometheus gives the gift. What follows is not comfort but division. Fire extends activity into night, deters predation, and fixes position.

A boundary appears where none existed before.

***

Some of us came near it.

Not the dominant animals. Not those who held the center. The marginal ones; those for whom the edge offered something the interior no longer did.

We had not chosen you. We had chosen the place where the world had changed.

There was no agreement. Only repetition.

***

Two dominant models explain early domestication: commensal proximity and human adoption. Evidence suggests a blended process; tolerance, repetition, and eventual integration over generations.

To remain is not only tolerance. It is advantage.

Two hunting systems aligned produce more than either alone: speed joins endurance; scent joins sight; perimeter joins tool.

Such alignments require no agreement – only mutual recognition. In the present, wolves and ravens hunt in loose coordination, one tracking, the other signaling, both benefiting without shared intent. Proximity that proves productive persists.

Several thousand years later, another pattern emerges.

At sites such as Göbekli Tepe (~9600 BCE), large stone enclosures are constructed by hunter-gatherers before agriculture. These are not dwellings. They are places of return.

People gather before they settle. They build before they farm.

By this point, dogs are already present, moving with humans, hunting alongside them, sharing their space. The integration is assumed.

Gathering creates a second boundary between the individual and the group. The structure precedes the explanation.

One consequence is exogamy. Small bands face a problem not visible at the level of experience: genetic concentration. The solution appears as practice, mates taken from outside, reinforced through custom or exchange. Humans regulate reproduction before they understand inheritance. Modern attempts to recover these practices often outrun the evidence. Speculation is that monumental sites were places of celebration and dissolution.

In Greek terms, this belongs to Dionysus. If Artemis marks what remains outside, Dionysus dissolves what remains separate within.

The fresco at Plaincourault Chapel has been interpreted by some as depicting a hallucinogenic mushroom. The claim has been repeatedly rejected by art historians.

Its persistence is instructive. Ambiguous images invite projection. But the evidence increases. The use of wine and beer, and older compounds continue to be pushed further back.

The Greeks record altered states without systematizing them. Nepenthe removes grief. The Lotus-Eaters dissolve purpose. Dionysus dissolves the boundary of the self. These are observations, not explanations.

***

Those who remained outside continued to test the edge.

We were inside it.

Not because you were stronger.

Because we had stayed until staying became structure.

***

By the time dogs appear clearly in the archaeological record, they are already integrated: extending human perception, moving within human systems.

Wolves remain outside and test the boundary.
Dogs remain within and become the boundary.

***

When the old kind come near, and they always do, we felt them before we saw them.

We do not go.

We warn.

***

I watch coyotes in my neighborhood walk bold and brazen in the middle of the paved roads in daylight. Unafraid as I drive by or walk the family dog.

They playfully watch and try to entice my dog to follow. Not to join. To become prey.

The division persists. Wolves return to the margins. Humans respond. The line is enforced, violated, redrawn. The boundary is not a solution. Cultural memory preserves the split.

The Big Bad Wolf encodes what remains outside as threat. The dog encodes what has been brought within. One enters the system. One defines its edge.

The transformation does not stop at behavior. It continues inward. Dogs and humans now share disease profiles, cancer, metabolic disorders, cognitive decline, arising from shared environments. This is convergence. To enter the human system is to inherit its limits.

***

We lost the range.

We gained the fire.

The fire comes with everything fire comes with.

***

There is no evidence of wolves choosing in the human sense. Only selection for those who remained. The system stabilized not through elimination of force, but through its deployment. The early relationship among the proto-dog and humans must have been fragile. Both species must have sensed the dangerous tension.

The Greeks knew the problem. Heracles brings force inside the house and the house breaks. Neoptolemus inherits violence without formation and spends it where it cannot be contained. They understood the danger.

Heroes are too dangerous to be fully contained by the polis. Wolves must have been viewed thus.

***

We stand at the boundary we were shaped to hold.

We are what remains when a wolf decides, across ten thousand years of nights, that the fire is worth what the fire costs.

It costs everything outside the fire. The range is elsewhere. The silence is elsewhere.

You call this loyalty.

We call it the record of a transaction.

The terms were not negotiated. They accumulated.

You inherited a guardian.
We inherited your world.

Robert Ruark

We come to know characters in books far better than we can people in our own lives because characters are immutable, crystalline in their structured captivity. I stole that thought from Milan Kundera – there is likely something similar in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

My mother sent me a book my father had wanted my boys to read – The Old Man and the Boy, by Robert Ruark. I read a few chapters which are clearly anthologized serial stories (as they were published originally). They are charming in a folksy wise man teaching the youth about life way. Ruark captures the innocence and optimism of an America soberly unaware of itself after WW2 – an America where hunting and fishing are taken for granted, when the incessant pressure of city-time wasn’t oppressive, when common-sense was in fact common and sensible because there was an implicitly shared understanding.

Because he never sent it while he was alive, he and I never got to discuss the book. He never mentioned to me that he had read it.

In thinking upon “Why this book?” makes me reflect upon my father. Did he see himself as the Old Man hoping to convey warm wisdom upon my sons? Upon me? Did he find idyllic memories of his youth in these tales – reminders of experiences I don’t believe he ever had? It would be easy to dismiss it all as too saccharine and too sentimental. My boys would have had no interest in nor even care to understand these stories – the context is too foreign to them. Despite a rural upbringing, from the stories my father told me of his youth, he never hunted nor fished extensively. He did take up fly fishing after he retired, so perhaps he can see himself there. But I am quite confident he didn’t do anything of the sort with his father. His father by all accounts was a loving and well-loved man. But he was a small-town banker, not a gentlemen farmer or woodsman.

I think that what my father responded to was the feeling of the book – its spirit. He was an artist, so I expect he wouldn’t be opposed to the terms. Ruark does manage to create an atmosphere of innocence that I believe my father wished for everyone he loved – a hope for good – and simple – outcomes.

By sending the book post-mortem, I see it as a totemic blessing. It serves as a reminder of the power of the idyll: a reminder to read Theocritus and not just Homer.