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FRAGMENTATION OF BEING and the Path Beyond the Void by Kent D. Palmer
copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
Given the structures of intersubjective projection of the world stemming from Indo-European roots and the manifestation of the city and war in meta-levels of Being outlined in the last chapter, it is necessary to see where the utopia fits into these structures. And that is exactly the place for the recounting of the initiation for Odysseus. The journey of Odysseus is precisely the delineation of the structure we have articulated in images which have reciprocal relations that expose this structure of the inner constitution of the polis. The journey clearly delineates the interspace between the oikos and the polis. Our interpretation of this interspace is important to the understanding of the inner structure of manifestation. This structure has been laying before us since the beginning. It was understood by the ancients. The Epic was the edifice of the world. In it all the features of the world were constructed and maintained. That world had two limits -- the oikos and the polis -- in human terms these were the limits of experience. The proof of these limits was that all the bizarre experiences of Odysseus occur between these limits. The fate of one polis and one oikos, one lost and the other saved, are shown hung in the balance. And one man, completely human, journeys through all the fantastic places of the worlds to play a crucial role in the fates of both.
The journey of Odysseus from Troy to Ithica and beyond must be seen not in its serial order of presentation, but instead in terms of complementary opposites. He sets out from Troy, and on the way home pays a visit to Ismarus which he sacks because they were allies of the Trojans. Because they did not leave as quickly as they came, there was a battle when the Cicones reinforcements arrived in which the warmongers suffered badly. We already know, although Odysseus does not mention it, that his fleet sided with Menelaus in the argument with Agamemnon, but then turned back again to attempt to rejoin Agamemnon. Thus, we see Odysseus oscillating between the two great leaders of the expedition to Troy, after sacking the city when they began to argue on when was the best time to leave. We note that in the first case Odysseus was on the side of Menelaus who preferred to leave quickly and sacrifice to the Gods later. However, when they sacked Ismarus, Odysseus made the error, or rather did not prevent his men from making the error, of not leaving quickly. Thus, in these actions, we see Odysseus oscillating between two positions, between Menelaus and Agamemnon and between quick and slow departure. In this oscillation between nihilistic opposites, Odysseus gets lost. He is lost in a nihilistic landscape whose nature is defined by the chaos of the sea and the ever present danger of forgetfulness of home. The very first people that Odysseus encounters with his fleet are the Lotus Eaters who make some of his men forget home with their drug. This forgetfulness is embodied in the subsequent episodes with Circe and Calypso. These two nymphs, each in a different way, attempt to make Odysseus forget home. They each amplify the experience he and his men had with the lotus eaters. In order to understand them, we must see them as embodiments of forgetfulness. They stand as guardians of the crucial encounters in Hades and on the Island of Helios which occur between these two limits of forgetfulness. In fact, the whole interpretation of the journey of Odysseus must revolve around these two episodes. They represent the negative fourfold and positive fourfold respectively. One is the realm of intense darkness, and the other the world of intense light. Hades is guarded by Circe and her transforming drug which, when tamed, leads to forgetfulness. The other is guarded by Scilla and Charybdis, the very embodiment of the horns of nihilistic wicked dilemmas. These adventures separate the two extremes in communities -- that of the Cyclops and Scheria. The Cyclopses do not fear Zeus and do not treat strangers according to his law. The Scheria go to the opposite extreme and treat strangers too well for their own good. So we see in the adventures of Odysseus, there are a whole set of nihilistic opposites playing themselves out. The opposites are not one for one. But there are sub-bifurcations even within the opposites. So we see put into play a series of symmetry breakings which produce a nested structure. If we follow the fault lines in these symmetry breakings rather than the story, we get a picture of the inner structure of lostness. One is not lost just anywhere. One is lost in the WORLD. Thus, the structure of lostness in order to be utterly lost must display the structure of the world. One is utterly lost when one wanders the whole world, when one goes to the ends of the earth and even beyond. In order to go beyond the limits of the world, those limits must be delineated. The Odyssey delineates the limits of the world, and thus has relevance for our appreciation of the Indo-European worldview.
The first symmetry breaking is forgetfulness. It is encountered by Odysseus and his fleet. This tells us that once one has entered into the interspace of nihilistic opposites, into the argument between Menelaus and Agamemnon and begun to oscillate between the two alternatives, then one begins to become forgetful. Forgetful of what? Forgetful of the proper relation between Oikos and Polis. Agamemnon wishes to sacrifice more before leaving because he fears the effects of the atrocities of the Acheans. Menelaus wants to flee quickly. But though Agamemnon tarries, he only prolongs slightly his own death at the hands of his wife and lover. Though Menelaus hurries homeward, it is only so he can be blown off course and in the end return after his brother. So the one who tarries is the one who gets home first in order to find it nolonger a home for him. The one who rushes forward finds he is thwarted, and he returns to live a long life with his dubious wife. Both of the brothers' wives are flawed. One because she kills him and betrays him at home, and the other because she runs off with another man, precipitating the war. In both cases, the oikos is flawed because of the flaw of marriage and ultimately because of the bad nature of women. But this nihilistic choice between two equally bad fates is what Odysseus becomes lost between. His own wife is as good as a woman can possibly be -- indecisive. She cannot decide whether to wait or remarry. She leads on the suitors, and yet puts them off. She weaves the shroud of Laertes by day, and unweaves it by night. The woman is oscillating while her husband becomes ever more lost. To Odysseus, lostness manifests first as forgetfulness in the land of the lotus eaters, and then it splits into being embodied by Circe and Calypso. Circe offers her hospitality after she fails to drug Odysseus and swears not to harm him. Calypso offers immortality. Forgetfulness is embodied by these two nymphs with similar but still different enticements.
Next, after encountering and unleashing forgetfulness as the first kind of lostness, we see the City appear as its very opposite. The Cyclops and Laestrygonians are the very embodiment of anti-civilization. They appear as the anti-city. They stand opposite Scheria the utopia -- the ultra city which appears at the end of Odysseus' journey. This is another bifurcation between the primitive and the ideal city. In his lostness, having been tempted to forget his home, Odysseus encounters the extremes of anti and hyper civilization. These define the limits within which the real city appear. Odysseus and his men have destroyed a real city, and as they are threatened by forgetfulness, we see the limits that define that real city. Those limits are beyond what humans can achieve in barbarity and in civilization. Both these very different inhabitants are "close to the gods." Like the wilderness and the temples of the gods, they define the limits beyond what human nature is capable of attaining in the ghastly and the urbane.
The Cyclops and the Laestrygonians, as a pair, guard the Aeolian isle by appearing either side of it in the narration. The Aeolain isle floats around in the seas, and is the realm of the wind. Its King has six daughters and six sons who are married. They give Odysseus a bag of all the winds but one, so that he can get home. He almost makes it home when the crew, while it he is sleeping, open the bag thinking it is some precious gift. So within sight of their homeland, they are all blown back to the Aeolian land, only to be rejected by the king. I posit that this ring of winds, represented by the sons and daughters of the Aeolian king, is the representation of the autopoietic ring in the story. That the bag of winds which leaves only one out is like the windegg which manifests different aspects of Aphrodite. The opening of the bag is the undoing of the crew of Odysseus which throws them into utter lostness. Only one wind is manifst outside the bag. This fatal action of the crew is only undone when Odysseus knots up the jar of his presents on Schiera using a knot taught him by Circe at the bidding of the king's wife in that utopian land at the end of his journey. We see, in this configuration, the nihilistic opposites of the Cyclopes and Laestrygonians over against the people of Scheria. But within the former extreme is the kingdom of the wind. Scheria is clearly a kingdom of the water, as the sea is no barrier to their ships. So we see that the tamed wind and the tamed sea provide the nihilistic opposites with their substance. The autopoietic ring of winds stands within the braces of the sub-human primitives. As the sub-human stands at the foundation of the utopian city, we can conjecture that the autopoietic ring is within this foundation. When the crew opened the bag of wind, they allowed the autopoietic ring to disperse. This is the opposite of the fate of Schiera which will be ringed by mountains, by Poseidon shutting off their access to the sea. The ring of mountains is equal to the vase sealed by a magical knot. It is the binding of the autopoietic ring which is the heart of every polis.
After the encounter with the nihilistic extremes beyond human experience of the limits of the city, we encounter Circe and the intensification of forgetfulness. It is at this point that Odysseus splits his party for the first time, and his opposite appears within the crew. His opposite, who is the leader of the other half of the crew, makes all the wrong decisions. He embodies the will to death and yearning for destruction. He leads the party who discovers Circe and who are turned into pigs. Odysseus goes to save them, and is helped by Hermes. Odysseus has the non-nihilistic solution to the situation in the help from the gods. He is told what to do and say by Hermes, and so turns an impossible situation into a good one. But the crew's being turned into pigs was merely a foretaste of their being lost in sensual pleasures and ease. When one of them finally is reminded of home, he spurs Odysseus to act. In this case rememberence comes from the crew. The encounter with Circe braces the journey to Hades. There the negative fourfold is experienced in its human form as the land of the dead. Odysseus goes beyond the Ocean's river to encounter the dead and hear his fate. There, in Hades, all is darkness, covered over by the earth, in the chaos of the forgetfulness of madness where the mind loses its reason, in the abyss that lies beyond life. Hades is the embodiment of the negative fourfold in its most direct human terms -- as death. The white and black animals that Circe provides are the true opposites that lie beneath the nihilistic opposites. They are pure opposites, like night and day, which are offered here at the extreme of negative nihilism. There, in Hades, Odysseus meets a variety of humans who had died, and he sees the variety of good and bad fates displayed. On leaving, Odysseus returns to Circes isle. He buries his comrade who unthinking fell off the loft, and plants an oar on his burrow. A tribute to a needless accidental death far from home. This oar is the same as the oar Odysseus himself must plant in a land that does not know the sea on his last journey inland. That journey is left untold, but we know it must be the opposite of this one that has taken him across all the seas and to their nether limit. The limitless sea is nihilistically opposite the limitless land, and Odysseus will travel both on either side of his return home to Ithica. Ithica is the center. The oikos is the pivot of his life which embodies the nihilistic opposites of the enframing.
Next Odysseus sets out with his crew toward the island of the sun. On the way he must pass the sirens. There he plugs the ears of his men while he has himself tied to the mast to listen. This scene is the center of the storm of nihilistic opposites standing between Hades the realm of too dark and the isle of the sun, which is the realm of too light. It is a scene that Adorno and Horkheimer use well in their book The Dialectic Of Enlightenment to symbolize the bourgeois man who is given up to sensual pleasure while bound to the work of the proletariat. It is the very representation of the relation of reason to the desires. Reason is the inhumanly pure which must control the unruly desires that are too impure. Here, Odysseus embodies the nihilistic dilemma completely. He is bound to his crew. But he alone hears the transcendental song. Mind and body. Male and female. Greek and barbarian. Polis and wilderness. Embodying nihilism completely, -- this is the pain that Odysseus is fated to suffer in his initiation.
On the other side of the sirens we see the framing of the gates of the Sun by Scylla and Charybdis. These represent very well the wicked problem where you must either risk the whole or sacrifice the part. Odysseus gets hurt by both sides of the horns of this dilemma. The first when he goes to the island of the Sun, and the latter when he returns after his ship is lost with all its crew as punishment for eating the cattle of the Sun who cannot die. On the island of the sun even cows have immortality. They are probably immortal because being possessions of the Sun the Sun never sets on them. It is the very opposite of the always dark Hades. The same leader who Odysseus placed over the other half of his crew convinces the men to choose destruction. They eat the cows that continue to moo even when they are cut up on the skewers. This is their doom. It occurs when Odysseus (reason) is asleep, just as when his men opened the bag of the winds. When they were in Hades, Odysseus controlled the eating of the shades, and now on the isle of the Sun, he fails to control the eating of his men. They are caught between starving and eating what is forbidden. They are in the same position that the Donner party experienced that ended in cannibalism. But some of that party survived without eating human flesh. So you see that there are some people who ate human flesh that died, and others that lived. There were some that did not eat human flesh that died, and others that lived. The dilemma is between life that is not worth living with the memory of cannibalism and death. But some people chose death rather than eat human flesh, and lived. Those are the charmed, who like Odysseus, are fated to return home in spite of the terrors of the wicked problem. The others are doomed whether they eat or do not eat. Odysseus recognized the non-nihilistic distinction of the immortality of the cows of the sun. He did not transgress that boundary as did his crew. In spite of the wicked problem, he endured and survived, where his crew perished by their own transgression of invisible limits of which they were warned of but did not heed. Through his recognition of limits, he is freed of his crew in the midst of the wicked problem related to the positive fourfold and the associated enframing. The enframing is represented by Scylla and Charybdis, while the positive fourfold is represented by the isle of Thrinacia where the cattle of the sun numbering the same as the days of the year are kept. In the positive fourfold there are non-nihilistic distinctions covered up by the nihilistic enframing. If one recognizes these non-nihilistic distinctions, then one is saved. If not, then one is doomed. When Odysseus is freed of his crew (body), he may enter the isle of Calypso and be offered immortality which would mean complete forgetfulness -- forgetting home and being forgotten at home. But immortality is yet another nihilistic opposite, the opposite of the wildness of lostness and the many savage lands in the world. So Odysseus rejects that alternative and begins to be remembered by the gods.
They send him on his way to the utopian city of Scheria. Poseidon attempts to destroy him at sea, and he is saved by the scarf of a sea nymph.
TABLE 19
Discursive distinctions of the Journey
Identifier
Opposite
Inverse
Visit
Type of distinction
A
Land
Sea
0-14, 17 vs 16
naturalistic
B
Forgetfulness
Remembering
2, 6, 8, 13
naturalistic
C
Lostness
Found
4, 6, 13
naturalistic
D
Primitive
SuperPolis
0, 3, 5, 14
nihilisitc
E
Too Dark (Hades)
Too Light (Sun)
7, 11
nihilistic
F
Scylla (risk part)
Charybdis (risk whole)
10, 12
nihilistic
Mortality
Immortality
11, 13
naturalistic
Captain
Crew
6, 9, 11
nihilisitc
Mobile
Fixed
4
Poseidon
Zeus (Athena & Hermes)
naturalistic
G
Polis
Oikos
naturalistic
Aeolian (Wind)
Scheria (Water)
4, 14
naturalistic
We can see the structure of the initiation of Odysseus into the pain of nihilism if we carefully put together the opposites of the discursive landscape. This is first based on the distinction between land and sea. The old man in the sea is an important episode. Here Menelaus captures the old man in the sea by following the advice of a sea nymph. He transforms himself, attempting to elude capture. In his transformation and the necessity to hold onto him as he transformed, he is like Thetis who, in a similar way, attempts to elude capture by Peleus. We remember that Thetis is the mother of Achilles in the Illiad. Thetis is a sea nymph with unaccountable power deriving from her special relation with Zeus. She saved him from binding during a revolt of the gods and set over him the Hundred-handed one as a guard. She also has a special relation to Dionysus and Hephestus, the two rejected gods. She provided a refuge for them. Thetis is powerful and helpless at the same time. She was forced to marry a mortal because of the prophecy that her son would be greater than his father. So both Zeus and Poseidon decided to let her marry a mortal so her son would not threaten their rule.
In the book The Power Of Thetis by Laura M. Saltkin1 these themes are explored in their relation to the motives behind the action of the ILIAD. It appears that there is an interesting relation between the grief of Thetis over Achillies and Demeter over Persephone. In their grief, they both dawn the blackest of all capes which signifies the transformation of grief into anger. The shared attribute of the black cape of angry grief causes us to wonder at the relations of the myth of Persephone with that of Achilles. Is there a relation between these two myths which relate the initiation of young men into warriors and the initiation of young women into the powers of their own inherent darkness? This is the other initiation which occurs outside the city to the youth which is contrast to the initiation of the older warrior into the mysteries of nihilism that we see occurring to Odysseus. Odysseus alludes to his own initiation in youth at the end of the epic when he recounts the boar hunt where he was wounded and received his name. The wounding is an important aspect of initiation2. That boar hunt was led by the wolfman. In the earlier initiation of his youth he got a name while in the later initiation he discovers the meaning of his name. In this later initiation, the old man of the sea plays an important role by giving Menelaus the first word of the fate of Odysseus. But that old man from the sea acts exactly like Thetis by transforming under the hands of Menelaus and his crew into "bearded lion, and then into a snake, and after that a panther, and a giant boar. He changed into running water too, and a great tree in leaf" [p. 76 between 438-513]. This holding onto the transforming old man of the sea is the essence of what we will call dynamic clinging. Later we will explore the myth of Thetis to see how this dynamic clinging is expressed in that myth. In the Odyssey, it is clear that one must be able to perform dynamic clinging in order to wrest the secrets from the elements of the pluriverse. The sea is ambivalent. The nymph with the scarf later helps Odysseus at a crucial point just after Poseidon has tried to destroy him. We must remember that the sea is anathama to Plato who wants his citizens in the Laws to have nothing to do with it. The sea, in effect, is the very image of chaos. The sea has all the elements of the negative fourfold -- its depth as are "wine dark," it covers over things, when blown by the wind it becomes chaotic, it fills an abyss of unknown depths. For the seaman the sea represents the ever present danger of unknown death. So the sea is the manifestation of oblivion and death in the world. Women form the sea like the nymph with the scarf and women in the midst of the se like Circe and Calypso personify this dark power of the sea. Even the sea's will to destroy Odysseus is not constant, though it will destroy him in the end, in his old age, after his second journey wandering over the all the lands. The fact that both creatures that transform in response to being bound come from the sea is significant. The chaos of the sea is the basis for all the transformations seen in the pluriverse.
All the places that Odysseus visits are ports of call on the land. Yet not all of them have fixed places. There are the Wandering Rocks and the Aoelian Isles which have no fixed place. However, generally the land stands against the sea. The sea is the visible source of the random elements of fate. There is a dialectic between land and sea because from it come the raiders and the sackers of cities. Those from the land use the sea to attack others and for the purpose of trade. Either way, the sea may be used as a way to gain wealth as well as a source of danger. The distinction between the sea and the land is a natural one. But the sea is invested with a special power which is related to the power of horses that the Indo-Europeans transfered to it. It has the character of wildness that untamed horses exhibit. Poseidon has a special relation to horses. He is also called earth shaker, for stampeding horses seem to make the earth shake like earthquakes. The ship riding on the torrents of the sea is in a similar position to the rider who tames the bucking bronco. A turbulent dynamical system will move between different regimes as it descends toward chaos. Dionysus lord of chaos arises from the sea at a yearly festival. Therefore, when the ancients saw arising from the sea the old man of the sea and Thetis, their vision was acute. They depicted the essence of the chaotic system as one that shifts between regimes, displaying different forms between structural transformations. Thus, the old man in the sea is a lion, and then a snake, and then a panther, and then a boar, and then running water, and then a great tree in leaf. These transformations of the old man in the sea are the deepest level at which the different elements of the pluriverse change into each other. It is the power that the gods harness in order to change their appearances on different occasions. In the course of the Odyssey we see Athena change forms many times. The power to transform from one form to another appears as a lacune in which the form momentarily collapses into chaos, and then out of that chaos emerges a different form. Since chaos was the first existent thing, it is in the nature of all things to be able to make these transformations. Thus, as Ovid records, there are many different metamorpheses of which the myths speak which go beyond the transformations of the gods. We see this as an aspect of mythology which is fantastic. But our formal-structural systems are precisely aimed at understanding these types of transformation. The ancients represented their understanding of this aspect of the world, as being able to transform, by what is to us the fantastical transformation of the jinn and men and other objects. But the ability of one form to transform to another has been confirmed by modern physics. Fundamental particles transform from one to another by specific operations understood by structural models. The expression of the transformative power of nature is an important insight which the ancients understood very deeply. Transformation between forms is mediated by chaos. The land is the representative of the congealed form, and the sea that Odysseus traversed from one land to another is the movement through chaos between formations. The transformations of the old man of the sea are analgous to the transformations of the different lands that Odysseus visits. Likewise, Odyssues must hold on, in spite of the pain as the world is transformed around him by each landing from the sea. The old man in the sea is the opposite of the lands to which Odysseus travels. The single nexus of transformation that Menelaus and his crew can grip is contrasted with the transforming world that grips Odysseus. By this we see that transfromation has two horizons: the old man from the depths of the sea at the root of the world, and the world itself. The old man in the sea had four animal aspects, and two aspects that were not animals. The animals are all land animals. The two non-animals are a great tree and running water. Here we see again the primal scene already explored in an unexpected place. The old man in the sea showing that he represents a source of the world, from within the negative fourfold appears as the elements of the motif tree and well. Thus, his transformation points back to endless time. He also appears as four animals reminding us that forms have a minimal system of aspects like the four views of the minimal system: tetrahedron, torus, mobius strip, and knot. These four faces of the minimal system are the ways the root minimal system, which is never seen, is manifest. From the chaos of the sea we have the binary and then fourfold division of the system tending toward chaos. This bisection goes on until, with the advent of a third thing, the whole falls into chaos. Thetis, when she is captured by Peleus, turns into fire, water, lion, serpent and Cuttle fish that squirts black sepia. Notice here there are both animal and non-animal forms. But significant is the form of the Cuttle fish which contains black ink. There is little doubt that this relates to the black shawl that Thetis will put on herself as her grief turns to anger. The black shawl covers and is the color of night. It ripples chaotically in the wind and represents the abyss of anger in grief. Similarly the scarf of the sea nymph probably represents the negative fourfold. It is a scarf from the sea that Odysseus wraps around him when he is escaping Poseidon. It cannot leave the sea and gives the hero the power he needs to attain landfall. The scarf is the help from the sea which counteracts the power of the Sea God who is the personification of the dreadful aspects of the power of the sea to engulf, overwhelm, and finally cover over. Thus the scarf in some way the helping side of the negative fourfold. We do not know its color but both the shawl and the scarf represent the veil and effectively conceal the world in opposition to the manifestation of the world by the positive fourfold. So here we see in Thetis not the primal scene of the well and tree being alluded to, but instead the blackness that we cannot help relating to the negative fourfold. On the other hand the old MAN in the sea points to the primal scene which is the fundamental distinction from which the world emanates. Interestingly, lion and snake appear in both and remind us of the lion-headed snake encircled god of the Mithrists and Gnostics. Some of the meaning of this particular combination may be elucidated by refering to The Lion Becomes Man by Howard M. Jackson3. Here the main point is that the transformation of the old man of the sea and Thetis into different forms is the opposite of the transformation of the world as different lands manifest out of the sea. The source of this transformational energy comes from the depths of the ocean. For the woman, it refers back beyond the opposites of fire/water and lion/snake to the jet black ink of the negative fourfold. For the man, it refers back to the primal scene which makes the fundamental distincition in endless time that is the root of the positive fourfold. What the black shawl, scarf or ink and the primal scene cover over is the same origin seen from the viewpoint of the origins of the male or female aspects of existence.
On land there are two kinds of dwellings for humans. There is the Oikos, whose center is woman, and there is the Polis, which is the construct of men working together. Men working together can defend or destroy the polis. Men are separated when they return to their respective households. The oikos in the Odyssey is obscured by lostness and forgetfulness. That lostness and forgetfulness manifests throughout the journey of Odysseus, but most strongly in the tales of the Lotus Eaters, Circe, and Calypso. These three together manifest lostness and forgetfulness and form the core of the discursive formation underlying the oikos. On the other hand, the city Troy is defined in relation to a different part of the discursive formation which contrasts primitiveness to the ultra-city. The limits of the polis are explored and defined by this contrast. Implicitly, there is a contrast between the polis as the males work, and the oikos, that is the females' realm. The females' realm embraces forgetfulness and lostness, as it is women goddesses who embody these characteristics. Thus, Penelopy is the subject of the finding, but her opposites are goddesses, so the lost and found, as well as forgetting and remembering, are bound to the female realm. On the other hand, within the cities both primitive and sophisticated, there are men who must be dealt with. The whole range of culture, from the most savage to the most sophisticated, is exhibited by men. So the discursive formation within the story divides oikos/polis along the male/female boundary and embodies therein two very different measures of existence -- lost/found//forget/remember on the one hand and primitive//sophisticated on the other. This is not a nature/culture distinction within the discursive formation. Instead, it is a distinction between the realm within which the polis appears, and the realm in which the oikos appears. The oikos appears out of the distinctions between remembering and forgetting or lostness and foundness. The polis appears in the midst of the spectrum of the posibilities for the level of civilization.
These two discursive sub-formations provide the background upon which the nihilistic opposition between too dark and too light appear. The nihilistic opposition appears as the tales of Hades/Cimmera, the land of perpetual darkness, and the Island of the Sun. Hades is bounded by two visits to the island of Circe and so grows directly out of the female sub-formation as the embodiment of the negative fourfold. The episodes of the isle of the sun, on the other hand, are bracketed by Scylla and Cheribdis which embody nihilistic distinctions that have become wicked, solutionless problems. From Hades, Odysseus gets a view of the dead, while on the isle of the Sun the crew of Odysseus transgresses all bounds by killing the immortal cattle of the sun which most critics agree represent the days and nights of the year. In Hades, the accepted sacrifice of the white and black rams is made, while on the Isle of the Sun the forbidden sacrifice of the immortal cattle is made. This sacrilidge is punished by Zeus who destroys the crew when they set sail. Here we notice that the route by Scylla and Cheribdis is contrast to the route not taken by the wandering rocks that Jason visited. We also notice that in relation to the two sub-formations, the episodes related to the positive fourfold has no single place. It is embraced by each sub-formation as shown by the dotted triangle. The episodes related to the positive fourfold are encompassed by each of the sub-formations, but appears to be floating rather than anchored with respect to them. This is highlighted by their relation to the wandering rocks which seems to have some correspondence to the Aeolian isle which floats itself wandering the ocean. The Aeolian isle is bracked by the primitive and savage cultures on the spectrum of types of cities. Similarly, the episode of the Sirens is bracketed by the nihilistic opposites of Hades and Sun. In the episode of the Siren, as already discussed Odysseus embodies nihilism, completely giving us the perfect image of the Guardians in relation to the rest of Plato's higher utopia. It is the picture of the mind seperated from the body. This occured after the fundamental split in the body when Odysseus appointed another leader who ultimately betrays the crew by luring them to disaster. In the Republic, this split is symbolized by Cephalus and Thracimachus who originally lure Socrates into conversation on his way back from Pireaus, the harbor of Athens. The higher utopia is more closely connected with the sea than the lower utopia that is kept from being poluted by the sea. The Kakatopia is the result of the mind/body split. That split is clearly seen throughout the Odyssey in the relation of Odysseus and his crew. The Episode of the sirens is the center of the discursive formation which is parallel with the element of remembering within the background sub-formations. It stands out on the background of the hinged nihilistic opposites of Hades/Isle of Sun.
Looking at the full formation we see that there are two basic layers. There are the two sub-formations related to oikos and polis under the auspices of the land but immersed within the land. On top of this background there is the nihilistic opposites of Hades/Sun and the embodiment of the nihilistic situation with the episode of the Sirens. The foregrond opposition and its synthesis are hinged to the background which encompasses the isle of the sun from both directions. This hinging of the nihilistic distinction between too dark (Zophos, west) and too light (Eos, east) but rooting it in the female-oikos side of the split background is significant.
Zophos is not as fully realized as eos. It is more a shadowy kind of substance than a person. It is the exact contrary of eos: the region into which the sun and its light descends and eventually disappears. Eos is a rising, zophos is a descent; eos is bright, zophos is murky; eos is movement, zophos stillness; eos sheds light, zophos encloses and hides it. Zophos is the sum of the attributes of the sun as it descends from its noontime meridian to its western disappearance.4
Here we catch a glimpse why Hades is hinged to Circe while the Isle of the Sun floats free. The eos moves across the heavens, while the descent of the sun to zophos is located in one place in the West. Though the sun arises from the East, eos is associated with the whole movement of the sun that it preceeds. This is, of course, a model of manifestation. The nihilistic extreme of the sun, which cannot be looked at directly without causing blindness, manifests with eos and daily moves across the sky to descend finally into the murky realm of zophos, the ultimate of which is Hades. The manifestation of things is linked to this daily progression of the sun. This means that their Being is a process of eos turning into zophos and vice versa. Thus, things move between the poles of eos and zophos. All things like the sun appear with the light and then disappear into darkness. This model of manifestation is linked directly to the positive and negative fourfold as an embodiment of that cosmic opposition. However, eos and zophos are naturalistic opposites that have been turned into nihilistic oppositions within the Odyssey. The manifestation process has been reified. It has also been summarized and contrast by the image of the sirens. There Odysseus embodies the schizophrenia of nihilsim (mind/body split). He is lured by the song of the sirens which is yet another view of forgetfulness and lostness in some extreme form. Men are always lured by the female side of things. They must bind themselves to their duties and be prepared to die at their posts. They must become hard and resist the forgetfulness following Apollo's dictum to "know themselves" as men separate from the feminine oblivion. They must realize themselves as the builders and destroyers of cities. The whole sub-formation of the oikos appears summarized in that alarming song whichmust be avoided at all costs. The ship itself with the male crew appears contrast to the whole range of cities represented by the sub-formation emanating from Troy. This ship that brings destruction from out of the sea, and is vulnerable to destruction from the land and ocean, is a kind of prototype for all cities. It is like the army phalanx. It is an organization in which each man carries his oar instead of a spear and has his bench instead of a shield, but where all have to pull together in order to move across the sea which is analgous to the Mele in battle. The hull of the ship is a wall that keeps out the wilderness of the sea. The image of the ship reminds us of the Aeolian isle with its king and twelve sons and daughters who bind the winds into a bag. A ship is like a wandering island of civilization that also expresses in its destructiveness the anti-production of warfare. The ship sails across the sea like the sun sails across heaven. It has its eos at the bow and zophos at the starboard. It constantly manifests new things to the sailors and leaves things already seen behind to fade into oblivion. The sun is surrounded by the two sub-formations like the seas are surrounded by the lands.
This model of manifestation, that by implication exposes an interpretation of Being, has at its center representatives of the positive fourfold (the sun and land) and the negative fourfold (Hades beyond the land of the cimmerians and the sea). This appears on the background of a more fundamental split between the range of civilization whose center piece is Troy. It also appears on the background of lostness and forgetfulness. Hades, we know, is at the center of this sub-formation related to the oikos which manifests forgetfulness and lostness. The sun, on the other hand wanders, making manifest the things of the world like cities and villages of savages and utopias.
1(U. of California Press 1991)
2See Michael Meade Men and the Water of Life (San Francisco: Harper 1993)
3(Scholars Press Atlanta GA 1985)
4ARCHERY IN THE DARK OF THE MOON by Norman Austin p 92-93
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