Psyche continued.
Psyche Papers 2.
1991
Reading the Real Truth
PHAEDRUS: Tell me, Socrates, isn't it somewhere about here that they say Boreas seized Orithyia from the river?
SOCRATES: Yes, that is the story.
PHAEDRUS: Was this the actual spot? Certainly the water looks charmingly pure and clear; it's just the place for girls to be playing beside the stream.
SOCRATES: No, it was about a quarter of a mile lower down, where you cross to the sanctuary of Agra; there is, I believe, an altar dedicated to Boreas close by.
PHAEDRUS: I have never really noticed it, but pray tell me, Socrates, do you believe that story to be true?
SOCRATES: I should be quite in fashion if I disbelieved it, as the men of science do. I might proceed to give a scientific account of how the maiden, while at play with Pharmacia, was blown by a gust of Boreas down from the rocks hard by, and having thus met her death was said to have been seized by Boreas, though it may have happened on the Areopagus, according to another version of the occurrence. For my part, Phaedrus, I regard such theories as no doubt attractive, but as the invention of clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied, for the simple reason that they must then go on and tell us the real truth about the appearance of centaurs and the Chimera, not to mention a whole host of other such creatures, Gorgons and Pegasuses and countless other remarkable monsters of legend flocking in on them. If our skeptic, with his somewhat crude science, means to reduce every one of them to the standard of probability, he'll need a deal of time for it. I myself have no time for the business, and I'll tell you why, my friend. I can't as yet 'know myself,' as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to enquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I don't bother about such things, but accept the current beliefs about them, and direct my inquiries, as I have just said, rather to myself, to discover whether I really am a more complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a simpler, gentler being whom heaven has blessed with a quiet, un-Typhonic nature.
OMEWHERE FAR AWAY and long ago, we may have gone wrong. Our most ancient ancestors were, they had to be, and in the truest sense of the word, educated. They made art. They must have known how to consider and search out meaning, and how to make sense, how to gather from reaction the fruits of reflection, and how at least to pursue the distinction between the better and the worse. In other words, and also in what should be the truest sense of this word, they did know how to "read." We seem not to know.
Their reading, of course, would not have been what is so easy now to so many of us, the receiving of what is on the page, but rather the reading that has now become so hard for us, the reading of one who looks up from the page in wondering and reflection. Like us, they had no end of "reading material," but, unlike us, they had not convinced themselves that the receiving was also the knowing. Their library, just like ours, was a literature, that which was written; but unlike ours, it was a literature in which no one could be sure of holding an advanced degree. When we survey our past, we see a continuous upward climb. Those old ones long gone had, by our standards, almost nothing. And, in that sense of the word now most common, we must account them entirely without education. We presume an absolutely essential relationship between education and literature. Education's history begins, for us, with the coming of writing. Before that, there was nothing but such sub-literary forms as myth, and legend, and fairy-tale, all of them naïve, confused, and inconsistent, however colorful and charming. When we do find worth in such primitive forms, we deem it a worth that only we, but not the hearers of the tales, could have found, and that, only by virtue of our reading in psychology or sociology or some such discipline. Thus we conclude that the wisdom and insight which we enlightened ones may sometimes take from the ancient story was not in fact available to those who told and heard it. We will allow that Sophocles, of course, was literate and subtle, and thus could seek out the "deeper meanings" of the tale of the miserable king, but of those who told and contemplated the tale long, long before Sophocles, what can we suppose, except that their understanding, if any, must have been childish and primitive, and that their indubitable interest in the tale must have been due only to what was in them but utterly invisible to them, since they had not the advantage of the explications which the more literate of their descendents have by now provided. But for them, alas, too late. We must leave them behind in darkness, and without hope of the light, like the useful idiots who bring in and die for the revolution whose fruit will never ripen in their time. Thus we see our mind's history. First there was darkness and confusion, the ignorance out which grows what we call, as though it were the work of the mouth alone, the "oral tradition." Then comes the faintest glimmer of dawn, the coming of writing and the reading of writing. Now there can be Litearature, ever growing and improving, moving always from the worse to the better. And we, too, can always be moving upward with it, always measuring the powers of our understanding by the number of books we have read, and thinking ourselves "educated" in proportion with the numer of "facts" that we remember and cite. And Literature itself we now know to be only the great messenger sent before the face of the greater to come, Criticism. Books of course are good, but they are only the beginning of the understanding that comes from books about books. As some poor chap asks in Acts, "How can I learn, except there be a teacher?" And "How indeed?" replies the teacher, and the teacher of the teacher. And so it is that schooling is practiced mostly by teachers carefully positioning themselves directly between their students and the light. Plato's Phaedrus is a remarkably iconoclastic little piece. Besides the dismissal of literary criticism cited above, it contains also that story in which the Egyptian god Thoth devises for humanity the gift of literacy and proudly presents it to the king of Egypt. The king is not pleased. This invention, he says, is not a path to understanding but to remembering. It will bring us not into considering but into reciting. It will not bring knowledge and understanding, but only information, the illusion of knowledge and understanding, and, with that, to the endless discomfort of all humanity, a pack of pests who, having read much, imagine that they are wise. To the king's misgivings, Socrates adds others. He reminds Phaedrus that books, like statues and paintings, are beautiful but dumb. If you ask them questions, they do not answer. They are like speechless infants, who can neither defend nor explain themselves, who can say only what they have said, and can give no further account of it without their parent standing by. They are also, he says, and to our tastes most shockingly, as indiscriminate as their victims. They can be read by anyone who picks them up, young or old, wise or foolish, and with potentially disastrous consequences. They always speak as though they knew they were right, and never consider, as a wise person would, what is the right thing to say at this time to this listener. In effect, they always do exactly what Socrates says elsewhere what no thoughtful person seeking the good would ever do -- they speak at random. It is interesting but maddening to speculate as to how things might have turned out had the king been able to spare us forever the gift of literacy. We would surely now lack much that we think necessary, but we might also not ever have come to to think them necessary. We would lack a great collection that we now have, but we might also not need it. It is easy to speculate, of course, as to what we might have lost; the harder task, but also the more important one, is to discover what we might have kept. Joseph Campbell, somewhere in the middle of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, makes a provocative assertion, that a great light came into the world with Galileo, but that, at the same time, another great light went out of it. It may be that Campbell sets the date far too late. Socrates would have chosen an earlier one. But the date is not as important as the question: Is this worth worrying about at all? Does Campbell, out of some sentimental archaism of the sort that always thinks the old days were better, assert what is simply preposterous? Socrates would like to consider that question, I think. In a way, he has considered it in the passage cited above, when he says that in thinking about a story he would rather not think about the story but about himself. Leaving aside for now the probable modern reaction to this idea as selfish and anti-social, it will still be disapproved as a rejection of two of our most popular and powerful generators of what we call light -- science and literary criticism. Where myth is concerned, those two have become the closest of all collaborators. Myth is most often understood among us as the feeble attempt of the primitive mind to answer the sort of question that we have learned to answer through science. That is also to say that myth, while it may be entertaining, is a failure which we have replaced with a success. We tell schoolchildren, if we do still tell them anything about myth, that Persephone's half-year stay in the Underworld is meant to account for the perpetual return of the cold weather when nothing grows. It is the same kind of "explanation" that Socrates finds useless in the case -- and a very common case it is -- of the maiden spirited away by a lecherous wind. There is no story which can not be subjected to like treatment, so that it is possible, out of nothing more than sufficient cleverness, to account in equal fashion for the fact that it was a swineherd and not a cowherd who was the only witness to Persephone's abduction. And all the same is possible, of course, in the case of our heroine. Psyche, too, is spirited away (and here the word "spirited" is used in its best sense) by a wind. There are, in fact, many such stories from countless cultures, so many, indeed, that we have to conclude, if we want to be perfectly scientific, that the early death of some pretty girl because of wind was far more common in preliterate times than it is now. But the story of Persephone was never intended to "explain" the cycle of the seasons. It may even have been meant the other way around, suggesting that the meaning of our condition is the shadow of something greater. The sheer brute facts of life do not call for explanation until after the coming of science. If science wants to answer the question What is the world? which may be not entirely a falsification of science, then the making of myth can perhaps be understood as the attempt not exactly to answer but at least to contemplate a very different question: What does it mean that the world is what it is? When Socrates tells of his studies in physics, he pronounces them fascinating but of little use. They taught him, for instance, what the moon does, but gave him no clue at all about the question that interested him: Why is it right that the moon does what it does? And, about the story of the moon as told by physics, he would probably have found another question to ask, one similar to the question he asks about the story of the wind that it named Typhon: Can I learn to be like the moon, always in my place, always doing what I should do? Obviously, where there are such questions, it is not some imaginable better physics that would serve. Something else entirely is needed. The "answers" to such questions, furthermore, are not at all what science means by answers. They do not relate to the questions as solutions relate to problems. They are not, as Socrates makes clear to Phaedrus, questions about the world out there, but questions about the world in here, in the self. This is the tremendous difference between our sort of "education" and the education that I am ready to think possible not only in the most ancient of our forebears but also in the least schooled and lettered of any human being anywhere and at any time. It is an education in and about the self, and, a leading forth out of self-ignorance. In our time, when all of our devices and desires, all of our social, political, and technological endeavors, are aimed at the world out there, when all our fondest dreams of the good life drive us mightily to labor for the improvement of other people, the idea of an education devoted to the nurture of self-knowledge seems not only preposterous but even a little bit wicked. Consider this passage from The Book of Thomas, a gospel that was rejected by the Christian establishment. In it, Jesus speaks thus to Thomas: Since it is said that you are my twin and my true friend, examine yourself and understand who you are, how you live, and what will become of you. Since you are called my brother, you should not be ignorant about yourself. ... While you are walking with me, though you are ignorant of other things, already you have obtained knowledge, and you will be described as one who knows self. For whoever does not know self does not know anything, but whoever knows self already has acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe. So, my brother, you have seen what is hidden from other people, what they stumble over in their ignorance.1 This Jesus sounds like Socrates, although Socrates, moderate, of course, in all things, would never have been quite so assertive. He may well have believed, but surely would never have said, that who knows self knows "about the depth of the universe," and that who is ignorant of self knows nothing, nothing at all. But it was exactly about the depth of the universe, and not merely about the universe itself, that Socrates wanted to know when he studied physics. The Golden Ass, which frames our story of Psyche, and which may be not much more than a pretext for telling that story, is nevertheless also a story about self-knowledge. Lucius, when we first meet him, has no self-knowledge and no interest in self-knowledge. This is true of almost any young person, and, although it isn't, it ought to be the first truth on which any school is built. His interest is in the world out there, and, most especially, in whatever is bizarre and titillating in the world out there. He is hypnotized by sex and magic. The lure of sex is easy to understand, but his fascination with magic should be thought about. It is not myth, but magic, that is the true pre-scientific counterpart of science. Magic is about the physical world, the universe itself as opposed to the depth of the universe that Socrates wanted to understand. Lucius, just like any budding young scientist, wants to make things happen out there in the world. He will learn at the last to make things happen within himself. But he resists any learning that points inward. In his cousin's house he beholds the sculptured group of Diana and her hounds, in which even the face of Acteon is seen peeking out between the leaves. The hunter is already beginning to turn into a beast. He examines the group "with delighted curiosity." "Delighted curiosity" is exactly the phrase with which to describe the very best of scientific enterprises. It is, if I remember correctly, the most captivating and perhaps even the happiest of all the conditions of childhood. The world out there is full of wonders and marvels, each containing its own never-ending regressions of more wonders and marvels. Scientists play exciting games. Lucius' cousin Byrrhaena finds him admiring the statuary and says a strange thing: "Cousin, this is all for you." But Lucius can not "read" what she says, any more than he can read the sculpture with the reading that Socrates commends to Phaedrus. The sculpture is a story, and a very famous one. Lucius, of course, "knows" the story, as we would say, making no important distinction between knowledge and information, but he can not read it, he can not look up from the page and wonder. If he could, he would, to be sure, wonder what of Acteon he might have have hidden in himself, but he might go even further. He might wonder about his own houndness, that animal nature in him that might well turn and tear its master to pieces. And he might ask, too, whether there is in him something of Diana herself, or, as the Greeks told the tale, of Artemis, the strangely ambivalent protector of the beasts as well as their hunter. And he might consider her famous and unshakeable virginity, asking what is chastity, after all. Can it, perhaps, be understood in some terms larger than those of creaturely sexuality? Is there in him some purity, violated and outraged even now by his own Acteon? But no. He is bewitched already, and held in the spell of "delighted curiosity." Which is to say, he is not free. And that is to say that he is not educated, not yet led forth out of captivity. This is one of the most striking facts about all of us. We are born in captivity and poverty. We have nothing. We must obey every order of our bodies, and we must absorb entirely and only those influences and ideas into whose midst we are delivered. And yet, sometimes, some of us can have glimpses of the bars of the cage. And these glimpses always arise from stories, either the stories that we tell silently in the mind, and that we call our "life," or the stories that are told for us to hear. An entire education, of the sort that leads out of captivity as distinct from a training, which by itself leads only into another captivity, can come from the contemplation of stories. But it does take contemplation and attention to the nature of the self, for which Lucius is not ready. His metamorphosis into an ass is an elegant literary device, and an important part of the pleasure we take in the story, but inwardly he is already a perfect ass, a serviceable beast who has been loaded with burdens by others. When his transformation comes, he does not truly become a man again; he becomes a man at last, now educatus, set free. And it is, of course, as an ass that Lucius hears -- really overhears -- the story of Psyche and Eros. "I stood close by the girl prisoner listening to this beautiful story, and though it was told by a drunken and half-demented old woman, I regretted that I had no means of committing it to writing." Well, perhaps he is not entirely an ass. He can see that the story is beautiful. And, just like a man, he wants to write it down, that is, he wants to make of it literature. He is not content, as the girl prisoner probably is, with a ritual telling, a secret, as it were, passed on from a drunken and half-demented old woman to a weeping maiden. Well, how can he be? He, the ass, hasn't been given any of the sacramental chicken soup the old lady is brewing. That may be a large part of the trouble we have in finding what there is to be found in myth. We receive it as literature, and apply to it automatically all that we have soaked up from our reading or movie-going or television-watching about the canons of literature. We have certain expectations, even the most naïve of us, about such things as plot development and the relationship of character to action. We expect some logical progression of events, and some reasonable probability that there will be some order in what happens. Much of what we read as myth does provide these things, but that is because it has been turned into literature. The plays of Sophocles will surely hang together much better than the ancient stories that lie behind them. And, could we hear those ancient stories, we would certainly, I think, prefer Sophocles. We would say, of course, that he has done them better, but by that we would mean that he has made them into our kind of thing, into literature, and "rescued" them from their crude and primitive prototypes, which, we assume, and probably correctly, were far less coherent and logical. This should have been a problem for Lucius Apuleius. He has to put this story into the mouth of a "drunken and half-demented old woman," who can not be supposed literate in any sense of the word. But she sounds as though she is. Her telling of the story has nothing at all in common with, for instance, anthropologists' transcriptions of stories told by the shamans of the Lapps or the curanderos of South America. We have here, really, nothing but literature. We will have to read it, therefore, with the reading of Socrates, and not as we are inclined to read a novel of Dreiser or of Dickens, pretending, perhaps that it is a story we have heard, not read, and that we could, in our own way and in our own words, tell to others. We have to read and tell it in pure selfishness. It is not about the world out there; it is about the world in here. You must read and hear it as thought it is about you. Indeed, this is true of all stories, for there is nothing else for them to be about but what is general and continual in human persons. The raw material out there in the world is the set on which the drama of every human life is played, and the general and continual conditions of persons are the theme. It is only from us and because of us that we can make meaning, just as it is only out of you and you alone that your dreams can be "written" and played out on the set suggested by the world as mysteriously altered by you. We must go a bit farther than Socrates goes. He, in brief and casual conversation, mentions only Typhon, and concludes that he has been granted a less tempestuous character. But the maiden Orithyia is also "about" him. Had we been able to hear him talk about that, he might have given us some interesting hints as to how to understand Psyche and the wind that blew her away. Winds do blow in us, in all of us. Looking for yourself is a good way to read all stories, not just myths and fairy tales. It is also the way to "read" all art, which is the name for all those creations that tie together the outer and the inner worlds. The painting on the wall of the cave, just as much as a song of Schubert tells us all about what is human in us all. While such a reading provides nourishment to self-knowledge, however, it provides also strange difficulties. Consider that you are Psyche, a soul in the world. If her story is truthful, it will tell you much about yourself. But our gentle and beautiful heroine is also the murderer of her sisters. It is true that Eros says that he will "very soon be avenged upon them," but it is the forlorn Psyche who visits them in turn and sends them to their deaths by enticing them into leaping off the cliff when "another wind altogether was blowing." In our literatures, of course, such an event might come to pass, but certainly not in the case of a heroine who is ultimately to be redeemed and rewarded. We have certain ideas about "morality" -- which Socrates and Plato had as well -- which lead us to decide that some things are not suitable to be shown to children. While our practice is not in keeping with these ideas, we hold and propound them nevertheless, and often conclude, especially in the schools, that impressionable children should not hear a story in which Jack kills a giant, lest they go forth and kill. Myth is especially rich in the objectionable: violence, rape, murder, dismemberment, infanticide, treachery -- the list is probably complete, but the harm that it does to children (or to us?) is at least debatable.2 But it needs no debating if you read as Socrates reads. You are the sisters. If Psyche must kill them, what must you kill that is also you? This is why murder and death are so common in myths and all sorts of stories left over to us from an earlier time. Our ancestors apparently believed that there might be some things in us that we ought not to put up with. The slaying of monsters and dragons, which we tend to applaud, becomes somewhat more a threat -- although truly no less a triumph -- if we are mindful of the monsters into which all of us are capable of turning, and have in fact turned, more than once. And if we are especially fond of our monsters, as fond as we might be of sisters, are they any less monsters to be destroyed?3 The concrete worldly elements of myth and fairy-tale, which look to us like mountains or monsters or cruel mothers, are in fact a kind of poetry, metaphor treated as though it were fact. We imagine, because we are "advanced," that preliterate people told so many stories about the change of one kind of creature into some other because they must have believed that such things could happen. Of such an event, the transformation of a girl into a bird, for instance, how much experience could they have had? Did it happen often, or only occasionally? Obviously, it did not happen at all, and even our most primitive forbears could not possibly have believed that it did. They were not fools or madmen. They lived what they would surely call "well," and they made art. If the stories they have handed on to us are rich in metamorphoses, it must be that they could "read" human behavior in a way that is not customary among us. And some of us, perhaps, can still read as they read. Any little child among us knows that he is neither mistaken nor lying when he tells himself, at night, that his father turned into a monster. Such a statement is the real truth, not the "real truth" which must of necessity be continuously concocted by the clever and industrious explicators to whom Socrates refers, and to whom the real truth needs the support of some fact, even if we have to imagine that fact, but simply the real truth. Fathers do turn into monsters. And men, not a few of them, turn into asses. Every day. An inability to read the metaphoric poetry of the real truth causes great trouble in the world. Believers and nonbelievers will fight forever -- but not to the finish, alas -- because they can not read that poetry. For the theist, the poetry of metaphor must be fact; for the slightly more sophisticated atheist, the poetry may be lovely indeed, but it is still a lie. Northrop Frye, in The Great Code, describes, although not intending to, just what the reading of Socrates means. Of truth and lie, of correctness and incorrectness, he says nothing. He speaks rather of two modes of narrative: the one intends to tell you what you would have seen had you been there; the other tells you what you should have seen had you been there. The forms of myth are intended to help us to fulfill the obligation implied by that word -- should.
Richard Mitchell
Notes:
1. You can find the rest of this in The Secret Teachings of Jesus, Random House, 1984, translated by Marvin W. Meyer. The short-lived relationship between early Christianity and the dying mystery religions is chronicled and weighed by Rudolf Steiner in Christianity as Mystical Fact, a strange but intriguing book, first published in 1912 and now available in the second English edition of 1972 from the Rudolf Steiner Press, London. Steiner was somehting of a crank, no doubt, but one whose time may yet come. He was, among other things, the founder of the Waldorf School movement, which just now is enjoying a renaissance.
The importance of Steiner's book for us lies especially in this: He understands and documents the elitism of the mystery religions, and goes on to assert, partially through a remarkably compelling interpretation of the story of the raising of Lazarus, that the intended work of Jesus was to bring the awakening to a new life, the light and consolation of the mysteries, to all people, not just to the cultured and intelligent (and rich), like our hero Lucius, for instance.
- BACK - 2. Years and years ago we ran a piece about some schoolish revision of "Jack and the Beanstalk." It was concocted by a lady educationist who changed the ending and had Jack and the giant sitting at the conference table working out their differences by rapping and relating to each other. She expected that this would stop war and other forms of violence. Just now, no one around here can remember the name of the piece, but if you still have it this would be a good time to read it.
- BACK - 3. C.S. Lewis, in his wonderful version of this story, does not allow Psyche to murder her sisters. What he does instead is interesting and beautiful, but it still may be true that he has given in to "morality."
But that is not to disparage his book. It is called Till We Have Faces, and if you haven't read it you should go and do so. To compare it, point by point, with "Psyche and Eros" brings both delight and light.
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