A Series Of Footnotes

Metaphysics

Fatalism: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose (3.4), Monday (6.14)  Interactionism: Shadows (1.5), Fire (1.11), Excelsis Dei (2.11) Determinism, compatibalism, and/or human freedom: Aubrey (2.12) , Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose (3.4), Syzygy (3.13), Wetwired (3.23), Talitha Cumi (3.24), Synchrony (4.19) Disembodied existence: Shadows (1.5), Beyond the Sea (1.12), End Game (2.17), Elegy (4.22) Personal agency/autonomy: Ice (1.8), Pusher (3.17), Hell Money (3.19), Kitsunegari (5.8), Empedocles (8.17) Personal identity: Lazarus (1.15), Born Again (1.21), End Game (2.17), The List (3.05), Apocrypha (3.16), Herrenvolk (4.1), The Field Where I Died (4.5), Dreamland (6.4), Dreamland II (6.5) Psychological continuity: End Game (2.17), Herrenvolk (4.1), The Field Where I Died (4.5) Reincarnation: Lazarus (1.14), Born Again (1.21), The List (3.5), The Field Where I Died (4.5) Time travel (see David Lewis): Synchrony (4.19) Parallel universes: 4-D (9.4)

Epistemology

Belief [This is a major theme in the entire series, but it is especially prevalent in these episodes] (see James, Clifford): Beyond the Sea (1.12), E.B.E. (1.16), Colony (2.16), Quagmire (3.22), S.R. 819 (6.9) Cartesian skepticism: How the Ghosts Stole Christmas (6.6), Field Trip (6.21), Via Negativa (8.7) General epistemology: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose (3.4), Jose Chung’s From Outer Space (3.20), Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man (4.7), Demons (4.23), Bad Blood (5.12) Pragmatism: The Erlenmeyer Flask (1.23), Little Green Men (2.1), all things (7.17) Fideism: all things (7.17)   

Ethics

Animal ethics: Red Museum (2.10), Fearful Symmetry (2.18) Biomedical ethics: Eve (1.10), Colony (2.16) Divine command theory ethics: Revelations (3.11) Environmental ethics: Darkness Falls (1.19), Quagmire (3.22) Ethical subjectivism: Home (4.3) Ethics of scientific research: Demons (4.23) Kantian ethics: Home (4.3), Small Potatoes (4.20) “Lifeboat” ethics: Død Kalm (2.19) Moral relativism: Excelsis Dei (2.11), Fresh Bones (2.15), Hell Money (3.19), Teso Dos Bichos (3.18), Kaddish (4.12) Moral responsibility: Irresistible (2.13) Virtue ethics: Apocrypha (3.16), Avatar (3.21), Zero-Sum (4.21) Moral education: Home (4.3)

Philosophy of mind

Artificial intelligence: Ghost in the Machine (1.6), Kill Switch (5.11)

Philosophy of religion

Faith and reason: Revelations (3.11), All Souls (5.17) Religious ambiguity: Essence (8.20), Improbable (9.13)

Philosophy of science

Abductive inference (see Peirce): Pilot (1.1) Axiological & normative issues in scientific research: Ice (1.7), Young at Heart (1.15), Soft Light (2.23)  Folk theories and scientific explanations: Teliko (4.4) The “Unexplanable”: Without (8.2), Invocation (8.5), Dæmonicus (9.3) Paradigm shifts (see Kuhn): The Erlenmeyer Flask (1.23)

Political philosophy

Government’s proper role in society: Blood (2.3), Musings of a Cigarette Man (4.7), The Pine Bluff Variant (5.18) Freedom of Religion: Roadrunners (8.4)

Existentialism

The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by…

Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldn’t be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they’re translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus’s nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (“of many a turn”) and Cook (“of many turns”) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them — poly(“many”), tropos (“turn”) — answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does “a man of many turns” suggest the doubleness of the original word — a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the “Odyssey,” one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?

“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”

Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered … wrecked … where … worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about …” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.

Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.

“It feels,” I told Wilson, “with your choice of ‘complicated,’ that you planted a flag.”

“It is a flag,” she said.

“It says, ‘Guess what?’ — ”

“ ‘ — this is different.’ ”

For people who still don’t see anything wrong with cultural appropriation, who still call cornrows “boxer braids”, “Kim K braids” or whatever - our cornrows symbolize liberation and freedom, it’s not your trendy hairstyle, it actually does have a history.

Since slaves were never taught to write and drawing directions was dangerous, because they could lead to them being discovered, captured, sold again or even killed by their master.

To reduce the risk of being discovered, women started weaving the maps in their hair, carving out paths with their cornrows. Some of the patterns even had hidden messages!

Yes, braiding existed in Africa way before, but it got a whole new meaning when Europeans enslaved millions of people. So next time you decide to go for a “Kim K look”, do a little research before you end up disrespecting someone’s culture and just, in all honesty, looking silly.