Literature and the Gods

II. Mental Waters

The gods manifest themselves intermittently along with the flow and ebb of what Aby Warburg referred to as the “mnemonic wave.” This expression, which appears at the opening of a posthumously published essay on Burckhardt and Nietzsche, alludes to those successive surges of the memory that a civilization experiences in relation to its past, in this case that part of the West’s past which is inhabited by the Greek gods. This wave has been a constant throughout European history, sometimes rolling in, sometimes trickling out, and the two writers Warburg chooses to talk about can be seen as representing polar opposites in their reactions to that wave at a moment when it was decidedly on the flood. Burckhardt and Nietzsche were similar, Warburg claims, in being necromancers in relation to the past. Yet their attitudes toward the “mnemonic wave” were quite different. Burckhardt was determined to the end to keep a strict distance between himself and that wave, if only because he was aware of the danger — indeed, the terror that must come with it. Nietzsche on the other hand abandons himself to the wave, becomes himself the wave, right up to the day when he would sign some brief letters posted from Turin with the name Dionysus. One of those letters was addressed to Burckhardt and concluded with these words: “Now you, sir, you are our great, our greatest, master: for I, together with Ariadne, must only be the golden equilibrium of all things, at every stage there are those who are above us …” Signed: Dionysus. But we can safely say that ever since Ficino, Poliziano, and Botticelli frequented the Orti Oricellari of early-fifteenth-century Florence, the story of our dealings with the gods has been one long succession of peaks and troughs. Where the lowest point was probably a moment in eighteenth-century France when, with breezy and derisive self-assurance, the childish Greek fables, the barbaric Shakespeare, and the sordid biblical tales were all summarily dismissed as no more than the work of a shrewd priesthood determined to suffocate any potentially enlightened minds in their cradles. Indeed, it was sometimes the case that all three targets would be mocked by the selfsame pen: Voltaire’s, for example. In the course of this long, tortuous, and dangerously deceptive story, the pagan gods might assume any sort of shape, disguise, or function. Often they were reduced to a merely papery existence, as moral allegories, personifications, prosopopoeias, and other contrivances of rhetoric’s arsenal. Sometimes they were secret ciphers, as in the writings of the alchemists. Sometimes they were the merest pretext for lyricism, no more than an evocative sound. But whatever the form, we almost always have the feeling that they are not being given free rein, as if, without anything’s being said, people were afraid of them, as if the master of the house — the hand that writes — regarded them as prestigious but ungovernable guests, and hence to be kept under discreet observation. Long euphemized and tightly bridled in literary texts, the gods ran wild in painting. Thanks to its wordless nature, which allows it to be immoral without coming out and saying as much, the painted image was able to restore the gods to their glamorous and terrifying apparitions as simulacra. Hence a long and uninterrupted banquet of the gods runs parallel with Western history from Botticelli and Giovanni Bellini, through Guido Reni and Bernini, Poussin and Rembrandt (The Rape of Persephone would itself suffice), Saraceni and Furini and Dossi, right through to Tiepolo. For almost four centuries these were our gods: silently shining out from picture galleries, parks, private studies. So that if we were to take away the representations of the pagan gods from the paintings of the fifteenth century through to the end of the eighteenth, we would create a vortex that would draw a great deal else down with it, and the development of art in those centuries would seem disconnected and schizoid. It is as if, in short, the passage from one style to another, one period to another, were something that was secretly handed down through the gods and their emissaries, whether Nymphs or Satyrs or winged messengers.

But above all Nymphs. It was this band of female and immensely long-lived, though not immortal, creatures who were to be the most faithful when it came to assisting metamorphoses in style. Announced for the first time in fifteenth-century Florence by the breeze that ruffled their robes (and it was a “brise imaginaire,” as Warburg points out), they have never ceased to make eyes at us from fountains and fireplaces, ceilings, columns, balconies, decorative niches, and balustrades. And they weren’t just an excuse for eroticism, the pretext for having a breast or a naked belly grab a place in our field of vision, though they were sometimes that too. The Nymphs are heralds of a form of knowledge, perhaps the most ancient, certainly the most dangerous: possession. Apollo was the first to find this out when he beset and then chased away the Nymph Telphusa, solitary guardian of an “unblemished place” (), as the Homeric hymn puts it, in the vicinity of Delphi. He had come there looking for a place to found an oracle for those who lived in the Peloponnese, the islands, and “those who dwell in Europe”—and this is the first text to refer to Europe as a geographic entity, though here it still means only central and northern Greece. First Apollo encounters the Nymph Telphusa, then the female dragon Python. Both protected a “spring of sweet waters,” as the hymn says, using the same expression twice. And with both Nymph and dragon Apollo uses the same words when he announces his intentions. For both were manifestations of a power that had split itself in two, appearing now as an enchanting young girl, now as a huge coiled serpent. One day the two figures would be reunited in Melusina, but for the moment what linkend them was the thing they were protecting: water that issued from the ground — water at once wise and powerful. Before anything else, Apollo was the first invader and usurper of this knowledge that did not belong to him: a liquid, fluid knowledge on which the god would now impose his own meter. From that day on, one of the names he let his worshipers call him was Apollo Telphusios.

Nýmphē means both “girl ready for marriage” and “spring of water.” Each meaning protects and encloses the other. To approach a Nymph is to be seized, possessed by something, to immerse oneself in an element at once soft and unstable, that may be thrilling or may equally well prove fatal. In the Phaedrus, Socrates was proud to describe himself nymphóleptos, one “captured by the Nymphs.” But Hylas, Heracles’ lover, was swallowed up by a pool of water inhabited by the Nymphs and never reappeared. The Nymph, whose arm drew him towards her to kiss him, “thrust him down in the middle of the whirlpool.” Nothing is more terrible, nothing more precious than the knowledge that comes from the Nymphs. But what are these waters of theirs? Only in late pagan times do we get a clue, when, in his De antro nympharum, Porphyry cites a hymn to Apollo which speaks of the , the “mental waters” that the Nymphs brought gift to Apollo. Once conquered, the Nymphs offered themselves. The Nymph is the quivering, sparkling, vibrating, mental matter of which the simulacrum, the image, the eídōlon is made. It is the very stuff of literature. Every time the Nymph shows herself, this divine material that molds itself into epiphanies and enthrones itself in the mind, this power that precedes and upholds the word, begins once again to throb. The moment that power makes itself manifest, form will follow, adjusting and composing itself with the power’s flow.

The most recent, majestic, and dazzling celebration of the Nymph is to be found in Lolita, the story of a nymphóleptos, Professor Humbert Humbert, an “enchanted hunter” who enters the realm of the Nymphs in pursuit of a pair of white bobby socks and another pair of heart-shaped spectacles. Nabokov, a master when it came to filling his books with secrets so plainly visible and even obvious that nobody could see them, states his tormented hero’s motives in a splendid tribute to the Nymphs only ten pages into the novel when, with his lexicographer’s scrupulosity, he explains how “between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or thrice older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets.’” Although the word “nymphet” was to enjoy an astonishing future, mainly in the ecumenical community of pornography, not many readers realized that in those few lines Nabokov was actually offering the key to the novel’s enigma. Lolita is a Nymph who wanders among the motels of the Midwest, an “immortal daemon disguised as a female child” in a world where the nymphóleptoi will, like Humbert Humbert, have to choose between being thought of as criminals or psychopaths. From the “mental waters” of the Nymphs to the gods themselves, the passage is an easy one. If only because, when the gods made their forays down to earth, it was more often than not the Nymphs rather than the humans who attracted them. The Nymph is the medium in which gods and adventurous men may meet. But how can one recognize the gods? On this point writers have always been blessedly bold. They have always acted as if alluding to an enlightened observation of Ezra Pound’s: “No apter metaphor having been found for certain emotional colours, I assert that the Gods exist.” The writer is one who sees those “emotional colours.”

As for the esoteric truth of Lolita, this Nabokov crammed into a tiny sentence buried like a splinter of diamond in the overall mass of the novel: “The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.” What he did not say is that it was this “precise science” that, even more than his beloved entomology, he had been practicing his life long: literature.

The Nymphs clear the way — but other divine figures may burst into literature. So it is that in rare moments of pure incandescence the gods themselves can still take on a presence that leaves us speechless, overwhelmed, as the encounter with an unknown traveler may overwhelm and bewilder. This is what happened to Hölderlin. Born in 1770, at the close of what was for the gods the most arid and impervious of ages, he seemed from earliest childhood to be waiting for the “mnemonic wave,” which eventually crashed onto him like a breaker on rocks. But one mustn’t imagine that Hölderlin was alone in possessing this sensibility, though the form of his hymns would indeed be unique. When Hölderlin was still a tutor in the house of Diotima — otherwise Susette Gontard, wife of a Frankfurt banker — and before he had been dazzled by Apollo, he would receive a visit, in October 1797, from the twenty-three-year-old Siegfried Schmid. For two hours they talked about poetry in the attic room where Hölderlin lived. Having returned to Basle, Schmid wrote the poet a letter still pulsing with arcane enthusiasm. And he added a few lines of verse, including this couplet:

Alies ist Leben, beseelt uns der Gott, unsichtbar, empfundnes.

Leise Berührungen sind’s; aber von heiliger Kraft.

All is life, if God animates us, invisible, felt. They are light touches, but of sacred power.

It is hard to imagine how the essential tone, not just of one person but of the whole poetic psyche of the moment, could have been better or more soberly described. And at once we have an example of that “clarity of representation” (Klarheit der Darstellung) that, as Hölderlin himself would put it, “is as native and natural to us as the fire in the sky was to the Greeks.” Before the names themselves appear, then, before Greece rises dizzyingly up with its divinities and their noisy retinue, we have these “light touches” which alert us to the presence of an unnamed god. This was the experience from which all the rest followed, and that each would then elaborate after his fashion. Two years before Schmid’s letter Herder had already been wondering whether that new creature everyone was talking about — the nation — didn’t need a mythology of its own, and he looked forward to a resurrection of the Eddic myths. Schiller replied that he preferred to think of “poetic genius” as expressed by the Greeks and their myths, and hence “related to a bygone age, exotic and ideal, since reality could only spoil it.” A few months later and Friedrich Schlegel would be asking himself whether it mightn’t be possible to think up “a new mythology”—a fatal idea this, which would do the rounds of Europe until it got as far as Leopardi in remote Recanati. Leopardi was certainly favorably inclined to the “antique fables”; they were the mysterious remnants of a world where reason hadn’t yet been able to unleash the full effects of its lethal power, a power that “renders all the objects to which it turns its attention small and vile and empty, destroys the great and the beautiful and even, as it were, existence itself, and thus is the true mother and cause of nothingness, so that the more it grows, the smaller things get.” But Leopardi was too clear-sighted, his ear too finely tuned, not to appreciate that the “antique mythology,” if dragged bodily into the modern world like so many plaster busts, “can no longer produce the effects it once had.” Indeed, “in applying anew the same or similar fictions, whether to ancient matters, or to modern subjects or meaner times, there is always something arid or false in them, because even when, from the point of view of beauty, imagination, marvel, etc., all is perfect, still the persuasion of the past is missing.” In short, we moderns lack conviction; we don’t experience an inextricable tangling of the “antique fables” with the gestures and beliefs shared by our community, “since though we have inherited their literature, we did not inherit Greek and Roman religion along with it.” Without this bedrock, it follows that “Italian or modern writers who use the antique fables in the manner of the ancients, go beyond a just imitation and exaggerate.” The result is an “affectation, a crude sham,” a clumsy posturing, “pretending to be ancient Italians and concealing as far as possible the fact that they are modern Italians.” This is Leopardi at his most unforgiving, passing what seems to be final sentence not only on all romantic appropriations of the “antique fables” but on the whole verbal armory of those future Parnassians and symbolists whose appeal to the gods was above all a shield against the vulgarity of the shopkeeper. Yet despite this biting dismissal of all would-be “new mythologies,” Leopardi was nevertheless to give us a sympathetic and farsighted justification for the use of the “antique fables.” They are useful — no, they are precious — when it comes to escaping the asphyxia of our own time, with respect to which the poet can only be a ceaseless saboteur, since “everything can be at home in this century but poetry.” And here one might say that Leopardi is setting up a generous plea that might be used in defense of Flaubert, to absolve him from the one sin he can be accused of: not, of course, the immorality of Madame Bovary, but the noble shipwreck that is Salammbô. By all means let us hear Leopardi’s peroration:

Let’s forgive the modern poet, then, if he follows antique ways, if he adopts the language, style, and manner of the ancients, and likewise if he uses the antique fables, etc., if he pretends to have ancient opinions, if he prefers antique customs, usages, and events, if he imposes on his poetry the character of a bygone age, if he seeks, in short, to be, so far as his spirit and nature are concerned, or to seem ancient. Let’s forgive the poet and the poetry that don’t sound modern, that are not contemporary to this century, for to be contemporary to this century, is, or necessarily involves, not being a poet, not being poetry.

Leopardi was speaking of the writers who named the ancient gods. But there is one writer of whom we may suspect that he saw the gods enargeîs, in all their vividness: Hölderlin. In comparison with his contemporaries, what happened with Hölderlin — as Schmid’s couplet so delicately announces — was something far more radical. One needed to go beyond and behind the gods, to arrive at the pure divine, or rather the “immediate,” as Hölderlin was to write one day in a dazzling comment on Pindar. It is the immediate that escapes not only men but the gods too: “The immediate, strictly speaking, is as impossible for the gods as it is for men.” Hölderlin is referring here to the lines where Pindar speaks of the nómos basileús, the “law that reigns over all, mortals and immortals alike.” Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive. This is the immediate: but pure intensity, as a continuous experience, is “impossible,” overwhelming. To preserve its sovereignty, the immediate must come across to us through the law. If life itself is the supreme unlivable, the law, which allows both mortals and immortals to “distinguish between different worlds” is what transmits life’s nature to us. At least if — staying with Hölderlin — what we mean by “nature” is that which “is above the gods of the West and the East,” and which, as he says, is “generated out of sacred chaos.” At this point Heidegger would later ask: “How can cháos and nómos be brought together?” It is here perhaps that we come to the bold provocative core of Hölderlin’s poetry: never before nor after him would chaos and law be brought so close together, obliged to acknowledge, as in Vedic India — where Daksa, the supreme minister of the law, is son of Aditi, the Unlimited One, and Aditi is daughter of Daksa — a relationship of reciprocal generation. Chaos generates the law, but only the law will allow us to gain access to chaos. The unapproachable immediate is chaos — and “chaos is the sacred itself,” adds Heidegger, and at once he goes on to develop a modulation that would have seemed obvious to the theorists of the nirukta, yet sounds incongruous to Western linguists, from the verb ent-setzen, “to shift,” to the neuter das Entsetzliche, “the awesome,” which is used to define the sacred: “The sacred is the awesome [das Entsetzliche] itself.” Then comes a sentence which is rather mysterious: “But its awesomeness remains hidden in the mildness of this light embrace.” Words which clearly — and it was a clarity Heidegger was certainly after — set out to echo Rilke:

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen.

Since the beautiful is only The beginning of the awesome, as we are barely able to endure it.

But at the same time too we are reminded once more of the words of the young Schmid: “They are light touches, but of sacred power.” Between Schmid and Rilke, between 1797 and 1923, a spark was struck and a fire lit that would prove inextinguishable. This was the period in which the epiphany of a multiplicity of gods went hand in hand with the overturning of established forms, a prolonged contact with the “sacred chaos,” the emancipation of literature from all the authorities it had previously obeyed.

But, even when it comes to this new vision of chaos, it would be misleading to suppose that it was Hölderlin’s exclusive and peculiar property. On the contrary, we can even identify the year in which chaos triumphs. It is 1800. Hölderlin was writing “Wie wenn am Feiertage …,” lines that wouldn’t reach his readers until 1910, when Hellingrath published the poem. Here we find the opening precept: “das Heilige sei mein Wort”—“may the sacred be my word”; here, three lines on, the poet speaks of nature as “reawakened with the clash of arms”; here, immediately afterward, the “sacred chaos” is named. Now in April of 1800, in the fifth issue of the Athenaeum, you would have found Friedrich Schlegel’s “Conversation on Poetry.” And since, in Schlegel, we are not, as with Hölderlin, listening to an indomitably individual voice, but to the expression of a group of kindred spirits — a Bund that went from Novalis to Schelling — we are now obliged to acknowledge that certain words have taken on a resonance hitherto unheard of. Suddenly the word “chaos” gathers exhilarating connotations. Instead of being opposed to form, its enemy, it seems to suggest a higher form, of fragrant vividness, where finally nature and artifice mix together to be separated no more, in the “beautiful muddle of the imagination.” And looking for a symbol that might suggest the “original chaos of human nature,” Schlegel admitted that he knew of none better than the “shining tangle of the ancient gods.” This, then, is the connection by means of which, from now on, the reappearance of the ancient gods can be seen as accomplice and instigator of that breaking-down and recasting of forms that characterizes the most daring literature. As if formal experimentation and divine epiphany had made a pact — and the one could now step forward in place of the other and say: larvatus prodeo, I proceed disguised.

What is unique about Hölderlin, then, is not his perception of a new presence of the ancient gods — all of the Athenaeum group shared that perception and declared it as a new article of faith — but his focusing on the difference that the gods had acquired in now manifesting themselves to the moderns. This, at bottom, is the point at which history impresses itself on all that is, the point at which we are forced to acknowledge that time, in its mere rolling by, has changed something in the world’s very essence.

When Hölderlin names the gods, when he writes that the god is “near/And hard to grasp,” we sense he is speaking of a force that precedes, exceeds, and looms far above every poetic vision. His perception of this force was, we might even say, too precise. But no one more than Hölderlin knew how very different that god was from the god that had appeared to the Greeks. And this is the subject of his most arduous speculations, from the letters to Böhlendorff to the fragments on Antigone. For the Greeks, the god appears as Apollo appeared to the Argonauts in the words of Apollonius Rhodius:

Now, when the immortal light has still to rise, yet all is no longer quite dark but a light glow has spread across the night, and this is when those who awake say that the day is dawning, at that time they hove into port in the deserted island of Thynias, and exhausted from their efforts climbed down on the shore. And unto them the son of Leto, who was coming from Lycia and on his way to visit the innumerable people of the Hyperboreans, appeared; golden curls each side of his head flowed down in clusters as he went; in his left hand he held a silver bow, on his shoulders hung a quiver; and beneath his feet the whole island trembled, and the waves rose on the beach. Those who saw him felt an uncontrollable dismay [th´mbos ]. And no one dared look the god directly in his beautiful eyes. They stood stock still, head bowed; but he, far away, passed over the sea through the air.

Towering as Poussin’s Orion, yet suspended over an empty sea, just as the dawn spreads its first light, absorbed and unconcerned: such is the god. He barely touches the heroes, whom he could easily trample underfoot. Instead it is the earth and the sea that quake. What can these men do? They listen to the words of Orpheus: “Take courage, and let us call this island sacred to the Apollo of the Dawn, for he appeared to us all, while walking in the dawn.” Then he invites his companions to offer a sacrifice to the gods. What could be more straightforward? Everybody has the same vision, all feel the same dismay, all help build the same altar. But what happens if there are no Argonauts, all sharing the same experience? What if no one knows how to build an altar? What if no one dares make an offering? This was Hölderlin’s secret thought. And concealed within it was another, more secret still: not only has our way of welcoming the god changed, but the form in which the god himself appears is different: “we cannot have something the same” as the Greeks had, Hölderlin confides to Böhlendorff. If only because — he adds a few lines later and with sudden harshness—“we leave the realm of the living tight-lipped, mute, shut up in some box or other.” It is not for us “consumed in the flames to expiate the flame that we could not subdue.” And this is “the tragic for us”: this meanness in our deaths.

Hölderlin knows the gods can’t reappear in a circle of statues over which the heavy curtain of history will suddenly rise. That was the neoclassical vision, which Hölderlin was the first to distance himself from. No, like figures on a carousel gods and men follow the back-and-forth of a secret movement that takes them now closer together, now further apart. Everything lies in grasping the law that governs that movement. Hölderlin calls it “turning back to nativeness” (vaterländische Umkehr). His most strenuous and obscure speculations, which still remain to be fathomed two hundred years on, are dedicated to that movement. Of these, I wish to mention one trait in particular: Hölderlin doesn’t speak of a situation where gods and men start to meet each other once again. Quite the contrary: in a scenario that he compares to that of the Thebes of Oedipus, “in the plague and in the confusion of the senses, and the general quickening of the spirit of divination,” in an age, what’s more, that Hölderlin then surprisingly describes as müssig, which is to say at once “vain” and “idle,” god and man, “in order that the world’s flow might not be interrupted and the memory of the divinities not be extinguished, communicate through the form, oblivious to everything, of infidelity, since divine infidelity is what is most easily retained.” Far from renewing an old relationship, gods and men immediately set about deceiving each other. “In such a moment man forgets himself and the god and turns around [kehrt … um], but in a sacred way, like a traitor.” So this new epiphany of the gods proves to be extremely ambiguous, a sort of salvation to be won only through deceit. The place we live in is thus the no-man’s-land where a double betrayal, a double infidelity, is going on: the gods’ betrayal of men and men’s betrayal of the gods. And it is in this place that the poetic word must now take form. There’s no question, then, of developing new mythologies, as if a mythology were a kind of fancy dress that made life more exciting. The very idea that mythology is something one invents suggests an unpardonable arrogance, as if myth were at our beck and call. Rather, it is we, the will of each and every one of us, that are at the beck and call of myth.

“We dream of originality and autonomy, we believe we are saying only what is new, and all this is no more than a reaction, a sort of mild vendetta against the state of servitude in which we find ourselves with regard to the ancient world.” Straightforward as they are drastic, the words are to be found in one of Hölderlin’s prose fragments. And a few lines further on he explains how in our relationship with the past a powerful spell is at work, a spell that still has us in its thrall, so that the whole of the past appears to us as “an almost limitless prehistory which we become conscious of either through education or experience and which acts upon us and oppresses us.” It is not only enthusiasm and the “fire in the sky” we need to recover now. Hölderlin had already tried that — and said only this of the experience: “we almost lost the power of speech in a foreign land,” words over which looms the shadow of Apollo who overwhelmed him in France. No, now it’s a question of recovering “Western sobriety,” that “clarity of representation” that the Greeks, born of oriental ardor, discovered as a, for them, exotic splendor in the verse of Homer — but which for us Hesperians, the modern Westerners, dry and blinkered as we are, is our native land, a place we must set out to rediscover, betraying the gods. But “in a sacred way for sure.”

What is this “Junonic Western sobriety” that is our natural heritage — and as such the most difficult of characteristics to identify, since “what is natural to us must be learned no less than what is foreign”? Hölderlin doesn’t say. He offers neither illustrations nor examples. Yet we sense that, though rarely found unalloyed, it is a constant if undeclared feature of literature in the West — something that we find in every age and in every register. When it asserts itself, it has the authority of a pulse beat. And then we are astonished by its sheer obviousness. It is what happens when we turn to Henry Vaughan and read:

I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright.

Many have seen eternity, but only Vaughan, and he only in this poem, saw it “the other night,” as if it were an old acquaintance, or some traveler freshly arrived from abroad. Crucial here is the complete absence of preliminaries, the lightning suddenness with which the vision is introduced — and at the same time the sobriety in recording the event, as if one were to say: “There was a brawl the other night at the corner of X and Y.” And even more than “Eternity” the crucial word is “night,” for it determines the three rhymes. Might one speculate that what Hölderlin meant by the expression “Western sobriety” was something that calls to us from beyond enthusiasm, beyond that impulse that draws us to mingle with the gods, but which can disappoint, since it cannot “preserve God through purity and by making distinctions”? But even this is still only a definition by negatives. Otherwise we can merely observe that immediately after the elliptical formulations of the “turning back to nativeness,” Hölderlin’s style becomes ever more rugged, abrupt, broken. Until finally it eases out into the pensive, boundless uniformity of the last lyrics, where Scardanelli takes on the ceremonial role of him who stamps on the seal.

Towards the end Hölderlin abandons theory. If he has to pass judgment, he writes that something is prächtig, “splendid”: “life” itself, or even “the sky.” He now asks no more than to observe and name nature in its most common manifestations, though sometimes too in its most rare. Like the comets: “Would I like to be a comet? I think so. For they have the speed of the birds; they flower into fire, and in their purity they are like children. To wish for anything greater is not within man’s reach.”