The riddle of lice posed to Homer by the children of fishermen, and taken up after two and a half centuries by Heraclitus, allows us to reflect on the significance of the Enigma in ancient Hellas.
di Daniele Capuano
image: Wyeth, "Ulysses and the Sirensβ, January 1929, XNUMX
Β«Every exile is an Ulysses, on his way to Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The road to Ithaca, towards the center. I have known all this for a long time. What I suddenly discover is that the opportunity to become a new Ulysses is offered to any exiled person (precisely because he was condemned by the "gods", that is to say by the powers that decide historical, terrestrial destinies). But to realize this the exile must be able to penetrate the hidden meaning of his wandering, and to understand it as a long series of initiatory tests (wanted by the "gods") and as many obstacles on the road that brings him home ( towards the center). This means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, in the depressions, in the dryness of every day. See and read them even if they are not there; if you see them, you can build a structure and read a message in the amorphous flow of things and in the monotonous flow of historical facts. "
Mircea Eliade, "Journal", January 1, 1960
The enigma-griphos it is not a riddle, as the oracle is not a prediction. This error of perspective towards the Apollonian oracle envelops the postulant in a tragic shadow, not unlike that of those who 'express wishes' in the stories of magic: whoever judges will be judged, the contracted reading of the ego falls on the ego as destiny.
The riddle is solved, dissolved: we arrive at a fixed point, at an object, the object concludes and appeases the search. But an answer can never close the horizon opened by an authentic question: because the authentic question is the return to itself of the original exclamation. The exclamation point, axis of the cosmos, curves in question, these, folds up, takes shape mystery pastoral care.
The enigma does not aim at making one object emerge among the many, but at dissolving all objects: for this reason it cannot be solved-dissolved. The enigma brings out the knower beyond any known. It is the question "Who am I?" of the Vedantic ascetic, who refutes every wrong identification, peels off every rind of the self [1]; is the question "What is it?" of the erotic Athenian torpedo, Socrates, which does not produce other knowledge (as in the Aristotelian, and perhaps already Platonic interpretation), but leads back to the damp soil of ignorance, to that thaumazein- stupefaction that reveals us how stupid thaumata, puppets, the puppets of the gods-children [2].
The riddle does not hide a secret, but hands a mystery - an initiation.
Homer, after having sung the glorious and sad lives and deaths of heroes, the last edge of the age of myth, the isthmus between the cycle of human-divine metamorphosis and that of only human history - he walked solitary on a shore, a strip between the land of known and the sea of ββthe unknown, when he noticed, he blind, that some children, sons of fishermen, were intent on a game that seemed to amuse them in an unusual way [3]. The wise old man asked them, in a distracted but not indifferent tone, what they were doing: the little fishermen did not respond with affability, but proposing an enigma, that is, hostile launching a challenge. Accustomed to the dangers of the sea, they left the largest of the bays on a small boat, among the waves, guided only by his inner vision. The riddle was:
Β« What we have seen and taken, we let go; what we have neither seen nor taken, we carry. Β»
Homer, the "hostage", remembered, with an imperceptible smile, the words of Lossia, Apollo the Oblique: when asked about his country, he had replied: "Your mother's country is Ios, but beware of the riddle of the boys."
The gods are really boys, he thought. They play on the chessboard of time, of cycles, in an irresponsible way: yet their every move is wisdom. He tried to fix the gaze of his heart on the fog spread by those few, childish words, and waited for a face, an image, a flash of recognition, an object with a shape and a name to emerge: that name, emitted by the breath, it would be the weapon of victory, the parade that would rebound the blow against brazen challengers. It didn't matter that they were little boys, sons of fishermen, without a shred of that prestige that - more and more often without real substance of light (and who more than he could see him?) - haloed the thrones of the lords in whose halls he had sung, celebrating the bronze deeds of their famous ancestors. An enigma is a duel to the death, and it is the oblique god who provokes us, however and always.
The object, the long-awaited weapon, did not emerge from the fog. Homer, who had remained standing, leaning on his staff, sat down on the wet sand and grabbed the ancient head in his hands. The urchins understood that it was a sign of surrender. They had fooled him: they were fooling each other, between salacious mottos. That was the "solution" of the riddle. There was a muffled chuckle, nothing more. Homer, the one who had found the rhythm, the pulse of Odysseus, the "multiverse" (polytropos), he who had educated the breath of the Greeks with his hexameter, transmuting the confusion of a thousand battles and a thousand dreams and nightmares of sailors into a dark and perfect laurel wreath, collapsed in himself, in his darkness: and all they said he died.
Two and a half centuries after his death - if you believe in the fantasies of poets like him, of course - another wise man, a disdainful aristocrat of Ephesus, initiated into the mysteries of Artemis, the disdainful, scandalously manifested several times his contempt for the teacher of the Hellenes. In one of his sayings he shared him with Archilochus: both the blind leader of heroic greatness, who trained Greece, molded its energy, with its flowing and rich hexameters, and the savory forger of iambs, the singer of the iron man, comic and tragic, which took shape in the contrast with the suspended statues, with the catasterisms of myth and epic - they should have been whipped and chased away from the games, the games of the Muses, like the incorrect athletes who start before the signal (fr. DK B 42). To Archilochus' iambic impatience corresponded, in Homer, to a more subtle impatience - closer to the roots of knowledge and ignorance, the roots of specific human evil.
It seemed, to the Ephesus, that Homer's error was similar to that of Oedipus, Piedigonfi, the king of the unfortunate: the Theban had solved the enigma of the Sphinx, but without hearing what he prophesied.; he had listened to the oracle of Lossia even before, but without perceiving the enigma he offered him [4]. By immediately throwing himself into action, on the basis of what he had understood, he had committed himself to the tragic, or - so he thought Heraclitus - to the burning dross of initiation: he would have gone through all the stages of liberation, but suffering them as external events, blows of destiny; he would become the One-All in spite of him, in the blinding light of the sun, not in the dripping darkness of a crypt, in the discreet and essential presence of a mystagogue. And after that he would go blind, like Homer. But Oedipus's blindness would open, over time, during the long pilgrimage with his daughter-sister Antigone, to the sacrificial light hitherto denied, and which could only be offered to the spectator of the , - that rite of Dionysus that in the years of Heraclitus began to take shape under the ambiguous sun of polis, cutting (at least in appearance) the umbilical cord of the mystery.
Homer too had tried to solve the riddle of the boys with the impatience of the athlete who sprints before the signal. Those guys, those paides, were the gods: and theirs griphos it was not a casket in which a word, an object was hidden - but a blade that the old poet could have turned as a weapon of his triumph only by using it against himself. Eraclitus wrote, in one of the passages of his poem dedicated to the lunar huntress, Artemis the Bear, the disdainful [5]:
Β« Men are deceived, with respect to the knowledge of manifest things, in a manner similar to Homer, who came to be the wisest of all Hellenes. In fact, boys who killed lice deceived him, saying: βThe things that we have seen and taken, we let them go; the things we have neither seen nor taken, we carry. "(Fr. DK B 56).
The enigma of the paides, of those paides who play the orderly and incomprehensible game ofaion, of cyclic time [6], yes it was about lice (phtheirai), but as an image of something else: "The things we have seen and taken", the multiple objects of our perception, experience, knowledge - we let them go, we lose them; they are relative to a subject, once experienced they flee, escape, disappear; "The things we have neither seen nor taken", the subject himself who has known - and let go of - the first (and it is a plural subject, if it is the real one, because it is all subjects, all connoisseurs), we carry it in us, on us.
We cannot know the knower: only "carry" him, and manifest him in the knowledge of what eludes indefinitely - in the gesture, from Gerere, to bring, of knowledge as manifestation, as eternal dawn.
The hard artemid sage of Ionia, in his cell which was neither the crypt of a mystery nor the square of the polis, wrote (for everyone and for no one) that thus, "in a way similar to Homer", all men do: Homer, who "came to be the wisest of the Hellenes ", was as ignorant as theeveryman, as to the essential; and theeveryman, man as man, ordinary man, the "mortal", knows as much as Homer. Homer was a blind man who led other blind people: the teacher of the uninitiated, of men trapped in their passions, in their ignorance.
If Homer had heard the perfidious and kind gabbo of the very young fishermen, the tragicomic of his death (the defeat in a sapiential challenge, based on lice, launched by ignorant children) would become the tragicomic of a death-in-life, of a gnosis which would have made it really, as tradition indicates (which Heraclitus disputed), blind because he is a seer, and vice versa: he would have laughed and shouted, because what we know, we are not, and what we are, we do not know. But why we can not know him, not why we could know it: there is no riddle to solve, there is a whole world to dissolve, to refute, leading it back to its source, recreating it from what we carry and neither see nor grasp.
The fishermen set up the scene with the sagacity customary to the initiating gods: lice, parasites, are phtheirai, from phtheiro, destroy-corrupt; the divine principles, the knowers, hidden in us, consume us, suck our blood: the unlimited getting lost-disappearing of known things finds a point of equilibrium, a source, a limit, in the unknowable connoisseur that we carry in / about us. Initiated is the one who welds this cycle, the one who unites life and death, the disappearance and the persistence, the known and the knowing. Homer was unable to do this, and died according to the letter, rather than according to the spirit.
The arrowhead, the Hyperborean shaman, Apollo, had told the aedo that Ios was his mother's homeland: but that he had to beware of the riddle of the boys. Returning to the homeland is always dying, literally, spiritually, or both: the form of that death was an enigma. As it is right, being a wise man, a sophos. However, a suspicion is legitimate, which perhaps smiled at Heraclitus: perhaps what appears to us his indignation, his bilious austerity, was often a smile from kouros archaic, not a grin from The old man modern pessimist.
Homer had delivered in the time of men the Kleos, the sonorous and fantastic memory, of the time of the heroes: he had shaped a culture on the smoking ruins of an infamous war, whose contenders seemed to be enveloped by the very broad gaze of death, which equalizes, reconciles, distills sadness and twilight light. Everything was fulfillment and omen, profound fraternity and aristocratic destiny: and he himself, the Hostage, perhaps knew that the ashes of Troy had already given up the embryo of the Phoenix, of the invincible vanquished, of the alchemical gold of two ages - Rome.
After this feat, Homer was to die - that is, be initiated into higher wisdom: the wisdom that destroys and reabsorbs the spectacle of time in the shining darkness of the Heart, in the blind clairvoyance that sees the one in the many and the many in the one; there sophia who knows how to laugh and shiver in front of lice finders.
Note:
[1]Β Nan Yar? (See Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are. The Teachings of Shri Ramana Maharshi, and. D. Godman, Penguin, 1985).
[2]Β See AK Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Paternity and the Puppet Complex, in "Psychiatry", VIII, 1945, rist. in AK Coomaraswamy, The Bugbear of Literacy, 1947.
[3]Β PS. Plutarchus, De vita et poesi Homeri IV
[4]Β DK B 93: "The Lord, whose oracle is in Delphi, does not say (leagues) nor hides (kryptei), but makes signs (sΔmainei) ". The Apollonian oracular word, therefore, is not a Logos (leagues), a lunar reflection like that of Artemis (of Heraclitus?), nor its absence, but a tertium as sima, a "sign" like the Orphic-Platonic body. The Apollonian word is a mutual liber, it is hieroglyphic, it is a body that shows itself. The sign is "carried" (verb pherein in the fragment on the riddle of lice), geritur.
[5]Β Diogenes Laertius (Vitae Philosophorum IX. 1.) says that Heraclitus retired (anachΕrΔsas) in Artemision and played knucklebones with the boys (again them!); he further informs that he deposited (anethΔke, βDedicated-consecratedβ) his 'book'. According to Theophrastus, the aphoristic writing is linked to the melancholic temperament of the author.
[6]Β The most famous of Heraclitean flashes: DK B, Β«The cycle [aion, eternity unfolded as the totality of time] is a child playing [pais paizΕn, that is, behaving like a child] in checkered [pesseuΕn: the oracular game par excellence]: the priestly regency [that of basilus it was a priestly type of magistracy: Heraclitus himself was, for reasons of ghenos] of a child Β».Β Β
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