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| The Remorse of Orestes, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862 |
When we try to pluck
out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the whole world.
John Muir
If a typical tourist comes to Delphi today, he or she may
hear of Apollo’s victory over the Python and perhaps the tale pertaining to his
divine birth. But in doing so, the traveller will hear a story that never
existed in isolation. Like any other tale, the tale of Apollo was embedded in a
complicated, highly organised cosmos of stories from which it derived meaning.
Today we encounter in parts what was once whole. In this way we are all bookish
tourists and typical in our piecemeal approach to myth. We contemplate the nose
without the face, the face without the body. We forget that every story is
embedded in the body of Greek mythology just as this sentence is embedded in
the structure of the English language.
This makes myths into highly-complex realities. They
constitute a body of meaning in which the whole is dynamically present in every
part. This body is expressed in time, and at the same time independent of it.
The plot is not just impelled by the past. Mythical time is a totality in which
before and after, future and past, are linked in intricate, non-linear ways:
The fate meted out to Orestes is not just caused by his filial duty to kill his
mother because she had murdered his father.
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His destiny is linked to the
destiny pattern of his family line of which incest, betrayal, filicide and
cannibalism are but the temporal expression. His fate is implicit in that of
his ancestor Tantalus (who dared to test the omniscience of the gods by serving
them the flesh of his own son) in the same way that the car pre-exists in a
carriage and a carriage in the first conception of a wheel. Orestes is part of his family destiny, as this
destiny is part of the Greek myth. (Tantalus’s
own transgressions fit rather tightly into the topic of generational conflict
that made Zeus overthrow his father Kronos, and Kronos castrate his progenitor
Uranus.)
To the artistic eye the fate of a major character such as
Orestes arises like an absolute necessity in the body of Greek myth. Orestes
belongs to that body as a finger belongs to the hand. His destiny is there from
the beginning even if it manifests only at the end. In myths the future draws
the past towards its realisation.
In this trans-temporal sphere concepts like cause and effect
did not apply as they do now. They are appropriate to physics. In the
metaphysics of myth a single effect is never entirely explicable by a single
cause. Cause and effect are also interchangeable. An event is pushed by the
history at its back and drawn by the future in its front. Past and the future
conspire to reveal in time what is essentially beyond time. The story is trans-temporal:
it is there before it is told, complete before it unfolds
This qualifies the mythological mindset as one that partakes
in wholeness. This this is what makes the encounter with myths so salutary to
us who tend to understand everything as the typical tourist understands the
story of Apollo: in isolation. If this tourist relates the story to the body of
Greek myth he or she will do so after the fact of separation. The wholeness
achieved is counterfeit. Most knowledge today is of this kind: a body glued
together after it has been cut apart. This has its uses, but also its
downfalls. It is brilliant when it comes to the construction of machines,
devastating when applied to nature, which is intrinsically whole.
This intrinsic wholeness has remained unobserved in nature
and elsewhere because it has remained unobserved in the mind: thinking in time,
we remain unaware of the thinking before time that partakes in wholeness.
In this thinking every thought is linked to others in in the
same way as Orestes’ destiny is linked to that of his family, and that of his
family to the totality of Greek myth. Every concept is embedded in a body of
meaning like a fingernail on a finger: the existence of a spoon necessitates
that of a fork, a fork that of a knife. The concept of cutlery implies that of
tools and tools that of technology and so on. The links between a spoon and CD
player may not be immediately obvious, but they are there in the same way as
the links between the fingernails and the optic nerve: far apart for immediate
perception and yet related through the overarching reality in which they exist.
Language mirrors these overarching realities. The
preposition ‘in’ immediately implies that there is an ‘out’ - and everything
in-between as well as adjacent to it: invoking every possible relationship be
it spatial or otherwise: ‘in’ thus derives its meaning through the context in
which it exists, and how it, as an isolated entity, is intimately related to
this context.
This may sound terribly abstract. Yet it is on the back of
such seemingly terrible abstractions that we understand even the simplest
things. We are composers inside a complex music we don’t even know exists. We
handle this music as we handle the grammar of our mother tongue: with utmost
perfection, without knowing the laws.
We are too occupied with the one-at-a-time products of the
mind to give heed to their production, too focused on the particular to see the
whole. We forget that we can only understand the part because we have already,
albeit unconsciously, understood the whole.
Heraclitus, the most profound of early Greek philosophers,
called this sphere of wholeness the Logos,
of which he said:
Although the Logos is common to all, many live as if their thinking was
their own. They separate from the Logos with which they are in touch at every
moment, and therefore the Logos on which they depend at all times remains
foreign to them….
Today we must not remain foreign to a realm on which every thought and hence every one of our actions depends. Oracular culture was still aware of this realm and contacted
it through rituals. It is the same realm from which artists draw their
inspiration, scientists their insights and inventors their innovations. Most
importantly it is the realm we must draw from more consciously if we wish to
think thoughts that contribute constructively to the world, that is thoughts
that do not forget the wholeness on which they, as well as everything else,
depends.
Admittedly direct contact to this realm requires philosophic
rigour and meditative dedication. But there are other, easier, more indirect
approaches: one of them is through imagination and metaphor.
Metaphors, by virtue of their innate connectivity, emphasise
wholeness. They connect where the intellect separates. They join hitherto
isolated things and establish a surprising, yet in hindsight obvious,
relationship: They provide a moment of poetic evidence. And in that moment we
have a glimpse of the wholeness that the intellect hides. A window opens into a
trans-temporal world. We feel satisfied because context has been restored, and
wholeness renewed.
The moment we think in images we approach wholeness. We
engage with realities in which before and after, cause and effect, are relative
rather than absolute. Time is not the irreversible arrow shot by the archer of
accidental creation. It is a translator of tacit knowledge, the medium through
which potential becomes manifest.
Seen from this perspective the future appears less
arbitrary. It exists as immanent potential. It has intent present in a fluid
state that allows for freedom. Metaphors invite this intent to dawn on the
horizon of the mind. They are mobile enough to resonate the fluid state of
potentials in transit. Open where the intellect is closed, they offer an
antidote to isolation. They are remedial, particularly when used in community.
This makes the development of our metaphoric mind more than
an entertaining pastime. It offers an alternative mode of cognition that can
complement the one we already have. Above all it provides a canvas for the
future to paint itself unobstructed from the limitation of the intellect.
This makes the work with metaphor a first, modest and yet
very real beginning for capacities that may initiate a new paradigm.
The Remorse of Orestes, from Wikipedia
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