Finding a Form (33 page)

If we return to the image of a growing globe for a moment, it is easy to see how we might understand one bit of surface as causing the character of the region most contiguous to it the way sweat stains a blouse or a shirt. Such attention would be like running a needle through our onion and following only the tunnel it tore. It opens the path for a narrative.

With such a focus, the unitary nature of the rings is lost; they become segmented, as if a circle of dancers were skipping away from one another. But when I watch widening rings of water, am I right to imagine each small piece of the wave causing only the ripple “in front of it,” or is the movement of energy through the medium itself a continuous and unbroken whole?

Our story begins, abstract as it must be (its characters without qualities, so brutal and distant), when we set up alongside this continuum of activity a metronome to mark the stages—indeed, to make them, since the notion of rings, spheres, layers, levels, degrees,
thin skins, and lucent orbits is an invention of this clock, which insists, to accompany its monotonous ticks, on an appropriately parallel row of monotonous tocks.

The metronome’s beats will encourage us to think of this three-dimensional circus we call creation as a single, regularly segmented line of time. It will furthermore fasten an arrow’s head to the right, or expanding, end, so that the line will seem to intend its direction, and may even mean to strike something when it arrives—perhaps, like Cupid, a critical point in the cosmic heart.

Narration relies on the notions of event, cause, sequence, aim, and outcome. None of these can be assumed to be an essential part of the nature of things. We find them only in accounts of a certain kind.

Men sprang, some say, from the dragon’s teeth. Others argue that men are the terrible teeth themselves; teeth which rend one another like meat and close like a grate upon whatever life gets lodged between them. However, the fuller story only ends with men of that kind: carnivores who may eat up all creation. It begins, instead, with the favored creatures of the Age of Gold, the children of Cronos. It begins at a period when this god is in an unusually benevolent mood, for during that dawn of dawns men eat only acorns, fruit, and honey; they drink only the milk of goats, and are wholly unaware of worry, death, disease, or any labor.

Their silver-sided offspring seemed solely mother-made, so close to their mother’s realm did they remain, living in the fields and on its bread the way, later, mice would occupy a farm. Men of the Silver Age were as ignorant as children, playful, careless, quarrelsome, like children easily distracted from their angers, also like children, incompetent at organization, and therefore incapable of war.

Then men of bronze, their torsos hard as the metal of their
spears, fell from the ash trees—broken off like branches, shaken free like leaves, such were the tempests of that time. They ate both bread and flesh, one slab upon another, and went to war as eagerly as to a parade, because they were as simple and pitiless as their ax blades and the cruel gaze of their eyes.

These creatures—gold, silver, bronze—each had the gods for parents: whether one alone begot them, forced them from a breast or brow, or whether they were a consequence of the noisy coupling of two Titans like the cars of a train, and given in secret to some natural resource—wave, plant, cave—to bring forth. In any case, they were pure descendants of the divine, however mean their spirits may have been, and bore the emblems of the sun, or moon, or earth, upon their banners; but the fourth race of men, also brazen, with chests as solid as shields, came from the wombs of mortal mothers, somewhat as Jesus did, and, like him, established themselves as heroes: the warriors, for instance, who besieged Thebes, who journeyed with Jason in search of the gleaming fleece, or those who waged the Trojan War and went to their reward in the Elysian Fields.

From godlike men of several sorts to those of heroic mold and then to men who were merely human: that was the descent. Last in line was the iron race, lacking even a lick of divinity, degenerate throughout, as Robert Graves describes them: “cruel, unjust, malicious, libidinous, unfilial, treacherous,” and, above all, in every want, insatiable as the squirrel or the weasel—hungry though sated, after orgasm still bloodily engorged.

While this narrative deals with a specific species and not some anonymous point of plosion, and its stages are more discrete, bulky almost, it nevertheless has the same shape: a temporally calibrated, entropic departure from a privileged starting place. What it adds is evaluation: the early ages are better than the later ones—and not simply because they are prior or more powerful. Furthermore, loss of value in the effect is directly due to a weakening, a lowering of value, in the cause. In narratives, good and evil pass through stories like halls through a house where the occupants either sigh with
relief and say the breeze feels good, or suffer a chill and complain of the draft.

The Greek version of the descent of man, which I chose to cite, did not attempt to personify its personnel; nor did it particularly care to designate a location, for presumably the entire world was every Age’s oyster. It did add a few lively touches concerning diet and character, but its principal interest was genealogical. It is a tribal theory. The lines it draws are lines of blood. The familiar Christian account I turn to now, although confused almost to the point of incomprehensibility, creates a theater and a company of players, then puts them down in a most dramatic and attractive setting: a walled and gated garden with a river to water it, fruiting trees, creatures of various kinds to occupy its earth and air, a militant angel, God, and of course, enjoying a breeze, the devil in the costume of a serpent, as well as Adam and Eve in their eventual leaves. There are scenes and conversations; there is buck-passing; there are temper tantrums, dramatic confrontations, and all sorts of other advances in the art of fictional excitement.

The most important events are these: after God created the heavens and the earth (the latter a desert from whose depths water occasionally rose like a flooding Nile to moisten and soften its surface), he made man from the sand and the dust which was everywhere, and blew into him a little left-over yet divine breath as though he were a lung, so that man began to stir himself and endeavor to live. Then God designed the aforementioned garden and sequestered man inside it, denying him only the fruit of the tree which bore knowledge of good and evil, and warning him that the fruit was deadly, either because some part of it—skin, pulp, juice, seed—was poisonous, or because an awareness of sin would do Adam in.

God fashioned birds and beasts next, rather incompetently,
though they were formed from the same dust, because he wanted them to resemble man as man did his creator; yet, although they were alive like man, and ate and slept like man, they were otherwise far from family; so finally, with man etherized like a patient on a table, God cut one rib from Adam’s side, and replicated it, and ran the replications through as many variations as a theme until he heard a full tune and had a title: she, Eve.

Eve does not become the mother of us until later, when, after listening to the serpent and having her pride piqued, she eats of the forbidden tree so as to become like one of the gods, and offers the fruit to Adam as well, which he devours, as docile as a dog. Neither dies on the spot or even falls ill.

The serpent was right about this. Rather, the fatal blow comes from God, who, in his anger at being disobeyed, promises to return them, after a painful passage through life, to the dust they came from, although Eve ought properly to fold up like a pocketknife into a rib again and disappear into the body of her spouse, though he be a corpse coming apart in the earth then like a dry biscuit. Lest either eat of the tree of life and live forever, Adam and Eve are forced out of paradise, its precincts closed, and I suppose, left in a state of permanent neglect, with neither he, Adam, nor she, Eve, nor it, Eden, in harmony or in happiness.

Our initial myth, that of a bubble-blown universe, was designed to exhibit the form which creation took, once it had begun and continues to occur. Its single-minded concentration upon structure leads us to call it “scientific.” The stress, in the Greek story, is rather upon “what.” It is vague about the mechanics and, of course, feels no need to rationalize. From time to time, Zeus simply calls for a new deal. However, the Hebrew tale does not simply describe the sorry state of human affairs; it seeks to justify that sorrow, so that our satisfaction with the story will be complete, since we shall now know not only how the world was formed and man was made (the way a potter makes a vessel out of clay), or what kind of paradise he was placed in, but why we must maintain our life by the sweat of our bodies, why women owe fealty to their
men, why there is guilt and shame concerning many of our most powerful urges, why we reproduce in pain and with groaning when mother lions drop their cubs like overlooked gloves and fruit seems the easy outcome of every flower.

Narratives not only explain the events they describe; they anoint the explanation—they justify. In Plato’s
Symposium
, when Aristophanes overcomes his hiccups sufficiently to make his speech, he does something none of the others, in their praise of the god of love, have done: he tells a story. This story not only speaks of us as once round, but suggests that we thought we were accordingly perfect, equal to the best, and describes how we wheeled ourselves up the slopes of Mount Olympus with the intention of displacing the gods. It is for this presumption (improper pride was Eve’s error also) that we were sliced in two like a breakfast bun and left to hop about looking for our better half, bereft of our accustomed capacities like a clap which has been accorded but one hand for its accomplishment. So was the serpent doomed to slither along the ground, stinging human heels, suffering his skull to be crushed in retaliation; since all it has become, as a consequence of its sly advice, is a fatal fang, hidden in its head like a thorn in a bush.

Alleging that this original round race possessed three genders—symmetrically male, symmetrically female, and asymmetrically hermaphrodite—makes our search for the half we once had seem both right and reasonable, since most sexual preferences, on this view, are equally legitimate; although Aristophanes cleverly makes it difficult to see how the restored whole which heterosexuals pursue is something better than the sideshow endowment of a freak.

Stories of our innocent origins are not innocent. Genesis stamps its okay on the subservient state of women; victims of natural disasters like floods and volcanic eruptions seem to deserve their fate; and the so-called curse of Canaan, recounted in the same book, can be read as supporting slavery. The normal shape of a narrative (like an hourglass, it is so corseted by Time) and its customary content (its agents, actions, and their accomplishments) are both designed to disclose a comforting pattern in events, discover a true
direction to existence, and give an honest meaning to life. It is essential that each pattern, purpose, and significance be inherent in the natural course of things, and not simply be the functional properties of some descriptive history like the concealed seams of a glitzy dress.

Shepherds work alone on lonely slopes, and if they tell a fanciful tale, their sheep won’t correct them. Gyges was such a shepherd, but it is Plato who offers us his history. Philosophers, as we know, work in even remoter regions with nothing but their own rectitude to rein them in. It seems there was a storm of such violence it opened the earth where the sheep of Gyges were grazing. Curiosity drew him into the gorge. Descending, he saw many strange things indeed, most particularly a bronze horse with doors in its side. As innocent as Alice, he opened one to find the corpse of a very large man wearing nothing but a gold ring on one of his fingers. Gyges removed the ring and returned to his sheep.

Some unspecified time later, at a meeting with other shepherds who were preparing their usual monthly report to the king on the condition of his flocks, Gyges discovered that by positioning the bezel of his stolen ring a certain way while he was wearing it, he became invisible. A simple turn restored him to the visible world; another twist and he was gone again like a coin in a magician’s fist. With an ease and swiftness only anecdotes of this kind can accommodate, Gyges gets himself transferred from the mountains to the court, where he swiftly seduces the king’s queen (not while invisible, one assumes, or was the invisibility the attraction?), and with her help murders her husband in order to become the ruler himself. We are not told what happens to him after that, although we know (otherwise than through Plato) that he will be the grandfather of Croesus, and that the ring makes him and his offspring very rich.

In
The Republic
, following Thrasymachus’s intemperate outburst,
Plato has Glaucon relate this story. If he had allowed Socrates to present it, doubtless other details would have been chosen, another point sharpened. Certainly my own summary (as with all of these specimen accounts) is just that: a description of a story rather than the tale itself, fully retold or performed. Mine is only a reminiscence, a little reminder of something we have all read. Oddly, none of these differences (among the tale, its various tellings, our memories, or its summary description) really matters. What matters here is its rhetorical employment by a very energetically held idea which is searching for a way to create for itself a sympathetic state of mind, as the story of Aladdin’s wonderful lamp does in order to dramatize human greed. What would you, or anyone, do if you had robbed the grave instead of Gyges and found yourself with the ability to vanish from sight at will? Into whose bedroom would you be tempted to steal unobserved? what blows might be struck if every back were turned? what a lot of gossip could be collected for sale to the tabloids, what gross jokes played, friends amazed?

Narrative is indifferent to details and dislikes its swift flow impeded. It hastens from stolen ring to usurped kingdom with nary a care for complications. When Gyges first notices his own disappearance, it’s because other shepherds begin to speak of him as if he were no longer at their meeting. Do his clothes vanish too? whatever he touches? if not, aren’t his companions surprised by his sheepskin’s sudden loss of occupant? Will the floor still squeak when he walks over it, and will the coins he has filched seem to float through the air though borne by his hidden palm? How did the adulterous queen feel, feeling Gyges and his lipless kisses? Is Gyges invisible to Gyges, and what is it like becoming disembodied as a ghost? Spooky, I’ll bet, and disorienting to be never in the picture but always where the camera would be. Put
basta!
to scruples and complications. The narrative is already ten miles past the station. You cannot even hear the distant whisper of its whistle. In any case, its cars were always empty of such answers.