The Line Begins to Blur

"There's an obstinacy about the hero that obliges him to keep on and on, following just one path and no other."

 - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p. 70.

To the hero, ignorance is an obligation.  It's hard to believe, but Calasso presents the idea in a way that seems undeniable.  "Apollo was the first slayer of monsters," says Calasso on page 68, "then came Cadmus, Perseus, Bellerophon, Heracles, Jason, Theseus."  Already he establishes that all heroes serve the same ending - the simple slaying of monsters - but he also establishes that all heroes' endings serve the same purpose, saying on page 69 that "with the monster slain, an impurity lingers on to dog the hero.  There will also be the withered remains of the foe whose power the hero turns to his advantage.  Heracles clothes himself in the skin of the Nemean lion; Perseus brandishes the petrifying face of the Gorgon as he goes into battle.  Leave only emptiness and the chatter of human voices.  The isthmus becomes practicable, people trade, and write poems recalling monsters."

The emptiness Calasso speaks of is the very impurity that would linger on to torment the hero.  The emptiness is the vacuum left by following the same path, to the same end, to the same extermination; the same removal.  The emptiness is what the hero leaves for us, it is his legacy.  With the monster slain, there is no more drama, no more intensity, no more change, and the world is left in silent, stagnant peace.  It is this stagnancy - which is ultimately the physical manifestation of the hero's own ignorant, unchanging ways - that will survive in the hero, torturing his spirit, as if a piece of the monster had been absorbed into he himself.

"It is part of the hero's civilizing work to suppress himself," Calasso asserts on page 70, "because the hero is monstrous.  Immediately after the monsters, die the heroes."  The hero, and thus the land, has become complacent; without change and thus without meaning.  It has become only "emptiness and the chatter of human voices," as Calasso said.  Stagnancy breeds pestilence, as they say, and we see the hero become the very monstrosity he once sought to slay.  It is only in the wake of the hero's destruction that change, and thus purpose, can resume.  "This is done in agreement with the hero," states Calasso on page 70, "betrayal completes the hero's work... brings it to its conclusion and winds up the story."

Along with the heroes' slaying of monsters, betrayal is a form of negation.  However, betrayal is different in that it doesn't punch a hole in existence, leaving the world in a passionless, unexciting void.  Instead, the negation of betrayal rests purely in change and excitement.  As Calasso puts it on page 70, "...betrayal does not alter the elements of space but rearranges them.  The influence of certain pieces on the chessboard are inverted.  White attacks white.  Black attacks black.  The effect is confusing, above all disturbing.  For the first time roles have been reversed."

"And it is always a woman who reverses them."

A Return to Roots

And here we have a picture of me lovingly embracing a tree.  Yes.  Lovingly.  Why?  According to the legendary myth of Apollo and Daphne, Daphne pleaded to her father Peneus to transform her so that she may escape the ravenous and unrequited love of Apollo, and more importantly because Professor Sexson required it as an ill-humored attempt at a humiliating assignment.  Still, mythology dictates that these metamorphoses are commonplace, and that each tree may have been a human being once, and may be so yet.    So I inquire - why not hug a tree?  Sometime you might find a tree that hugs back. 

In the Blood

"Dionysus is the river we hear flowing in the distance, and incessant booming we hear from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant."

 - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p. 45

   Utterly and painful insignificance; a darkness that humankind as a whole carries with us, crying silently in the back of our minds.  We can sugarcoat the bitter facts, we can paint on a smile with all the make-up in the world, and we can masque the scent with all of the perfume, but we cannot deny it's potency; amongst the greater world, the greater universe, the greater existence stands the one solid, lonely truth that we can verify: we are innately meaningless.  Unimportant.  A single grain in the sand of Time, swept away by the wind more swiftly than we arrived.
   Yet, within the gloomy company of the void, Calasso offers us a torch; a single shimmering beacon of hope in the dark sea of our days.  On page forty he depicts the myth of the creation of Tragedy (full-grown men dressed up like satyrs, dancing around the corpse of a recently slain goat, felled by their own hands) as "a few shabby elements that are nevertheless capable of releasing an enormous power."  Myths are imperceptibly simple, yielding elementary yet profound truths.  Such may yet hold true for humankind; although we might occupy a blank canvas, or a shapeless ball of clay, the canvas is ours to paint, the clay ours to mold.  This existence is ours to define, and we too may hold the potential to release an enormous power.

It's right there, waiting to be rediscovered by our fingertips.

In Illo Tempore

"As she walked down toward the flowery meadows near the sea, what Europa was carrying, embossed in precious metals, was her destiny...  She carried it along, without thinking." 

- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p.6

   Calasso's words are indicative of not only Europa's nature, but the nature of humanity as a whole.  Like innocent, absent-minded, perhaps naive Europa, we too carry along with us, unknowingly, our myths in the makings; our destinies.  Whether our destiny manifests itself in a literal, physical embodiment, or in a more ephemeral vestment, is irrelevant; our fates lie within our essence, resting, waiting to unfold either way.  

   Therein lies the very meaning of the myth; to draw upon parallels.  Myths serve to teach a certain moral, to deepen one's understanding of "self".  The heroes and heroines, the deities and demigods, and even the Gods themselves make mistakes.  They can be outwitted, deceived and even wounded.  They are tragically flawed - much like their mortal counterparts; us.  Through the characters' imperfections, the reader is allowed a certain level of empathy, a connection.  The reader can experience what the characters experienced, vicariously learning the nature of humankind from the nature of godhood, and hopefully, as to not repeat them, learn from their mistakes.    

But we all know that is far too much to hope for.