This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

O — Odyssey

Language is the creation of time. And time, in the language of myth, is the eternal present. It is language that expresses the aspiration of being one, complete, as in the beginning: before the first sacrifice, before the first murder, before the first rape, before the first testimony of death. Everything in the cultures of the dawn is remembrance, a representation of the privileged instant before separation. Time and again, myths have attempted to illustrate this yearning for a return to that first age, that “Golden Age.” The purpose of the eternal present — the myth — is to relink us (through religion) to the natural world at the moment it becomes the human world.

From Vico to Lévi-Strauss, myth and language are identified as one: the paradox that an animal sound (the “moo” of a cow) gives rise to both the word that it is (mitos, word) as well as the word that it isn’t (mutus, mute). Myths are like a glass wall between the two dimensions of language. To say or not to say. To return or not to return. And while the nostalgia of language may consist of offering us a reversible structure that brings us back to the primary unit of man, the inevitability of language is that it depends upon a successive and irreversible medium: the word. The dilemma of language is right there in its very origins: how can we employ a fragmented and sequential medium to create the impression of immediate, complete presence? This is the dilemma of the first shaman, María Sabina, who is every shaman, and the last one, James Joyce, who is every writer.

History is the privileged locus of chronological time. From there emerges its fraternal parallel with the successive destiny of discourse. Each step forward taken by history and its servant, which is the word (because history is only that which survives, that which speaks or writes of history), takes us one step further away from our origins. The so-called “primitive cultures” (which are not in fact primitive, just different) reject this accelerating impulse of history. The life and passion of Christ occur, as far as Western culture is concerned, between two very specific historical moments: the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. Transposed onto the culture of the Cora Indians of Nayarit, Mexico, Holy Week does not celebrate the sacrifice of a historical God, Jesus, but rather the sacrifice of the original God who at the dawn of time spilled His blood so that the corn could grow. The price of the communitarian unity of mythical worlds is called isolation. The price of the individual translation of myth is called freedom, and freedom means fallibility.

As in all cultures, the culture of Greece originally manifested itself through myth: the memory of dawn, the space of the home, the living flame of genealogy. But Greece is the first civilization to travel. And by displacing itself (that is, leaving the place), it must confront all that is foreign. Through displacement, through roaming, through transplant, Greek culture displaces myth (moving it from its original place) and gives it two opportunities to grow and transform human life. One is the epic poem. The other is tragedy.

In the Odyssey, the heroes are those who travel, and the gods are those who follow them. Ethics, then, are born from a normative identity between society and its literary manifestation or song. The dead are abandoned in the tombs of the Hellenic home. They are the object of anguished memory; they are the guardians of a culture that is running the risk of traveling to far-away citadels, foreign kingdoms, and islands of tempting sirens.

The gods accompany the heroes; thus the epic poem is born. But the hero is fallible; thus tragedy is born. Amid these three singular discoveries — myth, epic, and tragedy — freedom emerges as an inevitable value. Because while the hero may be able to abandon the original world of the myth, he is nevertheless unable to separate himself from the cosmos that envelops him — he is part of the natural world but he sees himself as a being that belongs to nature, given that his mission is to maintain a social and political order that di ferentiates man from nature. When the hero is able to shoulder this burden, he is an epic hero: Achilles. When he cannot endure it, or when he betrays it, he is a tragic hero: Oedipus.

Why does the tragic hero transgress? Because he is free. Why is he free? Because he is part of nature but he separates himself from nature. How does the hero know this? Through his knowledge of himself. And how does he come to know himself? Through action. Aristotle warned us that tragedy is the imitation of action. And human action not only affirms values; it disturbs and, on occasion, destroys them. The debt must be paid.

Oedipus liberates Thebes from the Sphinx. He condemns himself. Orestes kills his mother. He reestablishes the order of the city. Prometheus liberates men by granting them the divine fire of intelligence. By doing so, he condemns himself and proposes the very highest order of the tragic dilemma: would Prometheus have been freer had he not exercised his freedom, since by exercising it, he loses it? The Andalusian philosopher María Zambrano, in love with her moral sister Antigone, gives us the key to tragic illumination. Without Antigone, without her tragedy, the evolution of the city would not have continued.

And this is true because tragedy, in the end, proposes a conflict of values, not virtues. Accustomed to living in a melodramatic world that pits the good guy against the bad guy, we have lost the wisdom and generosity of the tragic world, where both parties in conflict are in the right: Antigone, by defending the value of the family; Creon, by defending the value of the city. The mission of tragic drama is to grant the community — which includes both individual and society, family and city — the right to resolve the conflict. The values do not destroy each other. But they must wait for the representation that allows them to reunite, so that one may resolve the other and restore both individual and collective life. Medea, mother and lover; Antigone, daughter and citizen; Prometheus, god and man. Through tragic catharsis, they reconstruct the life of the community. Tragic theater, through catharsis, allows catastrophe to be transmuted into knowledge.

The loss of tragedy, eliminated by one optimism that is supernatural (the Christian promise of eternal happiness) and another that is far too natural (the progressive promise of happiness on earth), gave us crime in its place. Not to believe in the Devil is to give him every opportunity to catch us by surprise, said André Gide. Beatifically trusting the notion that our destiny was an inevitable ascent toward perfect happiness through irreversible progress, we arrived, blind, in the land of crime: the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag. Never can we be as we were before. The myth has slipped from our grasp. “We are too wounded,” to use the words of Adorno. There is no possible epic when wars are waged from the sky, protecting soldiers from harm and killing only civilians. There is no tragedy when the Manichaean melodrama fully inundates our entire lives, our discourses, our television, movie, and computer screens, and our feelings. We know in advance who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

Nevertheless, I find a poignant echo and a sliver of hope in between two statements: one by Franz Kafka, the greatest tragic writer of our modern times, the other by Simone Weil, the greatest Judeo-Christian witness of the concrete validity of the classic epic. “There will be much hope, but not for us,” Kafka writes. And Weil, rereading the Iliad, concludes that the contemporary lesson to be learned from the classic poem is that “those who dreamt that might, thanks to progress, belonged henceforth to the past, have been able to see its living witness in this poem.”