Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Throughout Odysseus’s life, and above all during the long years of the voyage back from Troy, there was a constant whispered exchange between himself and Athena. Nothing happened to the hero without that whisper being part of it. Only once did it peter out altogether. Then Odysseus had to find his way back to another female voice, even more remote, a voice beyond which all voices fall silent. He was clutching the raft he’d built with his own hands on Calypso’s island. Huge waves battered the mast. Naked, clinging to a few planks of wood, he might have been the first or last man on the waters of the flood. He couldn’t hear Athena’s voice. Then, looking up amid the whirling foam, he saw a white sea gull on the top of the mast, and in its beak it held a purple ribbon.

That ribbon, incongruous in the storm, reminded him of something. It was absurd trying to remember what, when at any moment a wave might submerge his raft forever. But Odysseus was determined he would remember. One day, in Samothrace, when he had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri, some nameless person had come up to him and tied a purple sash around his waist, the kr demnon . And that sash now seemed to be fluttering in the sea gull’s beak. Odysseus realized that only a veil lay between him and death, and that veil was initiation. When everything is reduced to its most basic and is about to be swallowed up, there is still a ribbon fluttering in the dark.

Instead of protecting himself from the waves, Odysseus exposed himself by reaching out an arm to take the purple ribbon from the sea gull’s beak. Then he tied it around his waist. He repeated the ritual of Samothrace, but this time the nameless person’s hands were his own. For years that purple ribbon that saved Odysseus from shipwreck had been tied around the hair of Leucothea, the White Goddess. And before becoming the goddess who rises from the watery depths to rescue sailors, Leucothea had been a poor mad woman who drowned herself, throwing herself into the sea from a cliff, her infant child in her arms. At the time her name was Ino; she was one of the four daughters of Cadmus and wife of King Athamas. During her mother Harmony’s lifetime, and perhaps partly because Harmony “knew of many crimes committed in the past by barbarians and Greeks,” the most heterogeneous and remote elements had agreed to submit to the same yoke. Afterward, during the lifetime of her daughters, every unity was torn apart and dismembered, as if the gods had wanted to have everybody appreciate, and fast, that the harmonious yoke that binds disparate elements is the most precarious form of all.

Ino was the last of Cadmus’s daughters to go crazy and kill. She had seen her mother reduced to ashes, had seen Agave cut her son Pentheus to pieces, had seen Autonoë pick up the remains of the stag that had been her son Actaeon, torn apart by Artemis’s dogs. All these horrors had been reflected in Ino’s eyes before being repeated one last time with herself when she plunged the little Melicertes into a caldron of boiling water, while her other son, Learchus, was run through by his father, Athamas. Yet this princess who committed suicide was saved, and became herself a savior. Why? She had shown kindness to the orphaned Dionysus; she had disguised him as a little girl in her palace; she had given him her white breast just as she did to her own son Melicertes; she had hidden him in a dark room wrapped in a purple veil while Mystis the serving maid gave him his first taste of the sound of the cymbals and tambourines and offered him his mystical objects as toys. But it wasn’t only Dionysus who remembered Ino. Aphrodite remembered her too. “ Spuma fui ,” “I was foam myself,” the goddess said to Poseidon, encouraging him to accept Ino among the divinities of the sea. That foam was the ribbon in Leucothea’s hair; it was the veil around the hips of the initiates in Samothrace; it was the slow upward spreading of the light as the hidden is made plain in the dawn; it was the whiteness of appearance itself and the sovereign purple of blood; it was the only veil that is laid over the shipwreck.

The veil, or something that encloses, that wraps around, or belts on, a ribbon, a sash, a band, is the last object we meet in Greece. Beyond the veil, there is no other thing. The veil is the other. It tells us that the existing world, alone, cannot hold, that at the very least it needs to be continually covered and discovered, to appear and to disappear. That which is accomplished, be it initiation, or marriage, or sacrifice, requires a veil, precisely because that which is accomplished is perfect, and the perfect stands for everything, and everything includes the veil, that surplus which is the fragrance of things.

No one was ever lonelier than Calypso. From the mouth of her cave she watched the violet waves, knowing that none of the other gods was interested in her. Behind her she heard the whirlpool bubbling deep underground, throwing water up to the surface in four directions. Divine hostess, time denied her any guests. But why was the sea around her so empty, why didn’t the smoke of sacrifices rise to her from the lands of the earth? Calypso’s distance from the world wasn’t only to be measured across the huge expanse of the waters but first and foremost across time. Like her father, Atlas, “who knows all the depths of the sea” and watches over the great columns that separate earth and sky, Calypso lived at a point of cosmic intersection: Ogygia was a primordial island, not to be confused with any other, just as the water of the Styx, which dissolved any and every material and frightened even the Olympians, was not to be confused with any other water. But no one paid any attention to these places. They were orphans of a lost era, of the usurped realm of Kronos. These days the gods sat on a mountain and sparkled in the light.

Calypso means “She Who Conceals Things.” Concealment was her passion, cloaking something in a veil, like the veils she sometimes wore around her head. But she was given nothing to conceal, apart from the constant mingling of the heavenly and earthly waters beneath her cave, a dull roar she could perfectly well distinguish from that of the sea before her. As a little girl she had played on flowery meadows with Persephone and other Nymphs. Now the only beings she ever saw were the two maids who served her and the birds perched on the dark trees around her cave. Toward Calypso, Odysseus felt the same attraction Gilgamesh had felt for the barmaid Siduri, for the woman who pours drinks behind a counter and talks, listens. What did that attraction conceal? Odysseus knew what would later be forgotten: it concealed the woman who welcomes us at the entrance to the kingdom of the dead.

In that world between worlds, suspended, the only place one might delude oneself, one was beyond life and beyond death, one drinks and plays dice. The conversation with the woman who pours the drinks goes on and on through an endless night, unthreatened by any dawn on the window-panes. After Odysseus, men would forget: but they still felt an obscure attraction to hostesses, barmaids, as if every counter where drinks are poured were the threshold to another world.

Odysseus spent seven years with Calypso, long enough for many of his subjects to decide to consider him lost. They were years when time sucked him backward into a fabulous prison that was also a floating sepulcher. If he looked at the ground he saw violets and lovage, plants usually strewn about the dead. If he raised his eyes he saw alders, cypresses, black poplars, willows: the trees of the dead. And everything had a primordial beauty that left even the gods amazed. Talking to Achilles in Hades, Odysseus had come up against the horror of death. Now, all around him, he found another death, one that presented itself in the uncertain guise of a better life but was in fact a static wallowing in time. For Odysseus knew that there was no better life. Like the Elysian Fields and the garden of the Hesperides, Ogygia was a place to acquire knowledge but not a place where you could live. Day after day, crouching on the beach, Odysseus told Calypso about the Trojan War. With a stick, he drew the positions of the camps and the armies in the sand. Every time he spoke, he changed the story or the way he told it. Calypso sat next to him, silent, concentrating. Then a wave bigger than the others would erase the lines in the sand. Once Calypso said to him: “You see, that’s what the sea does. And you want to trust your life to the sea?” After that Odysseus didn’t go to the beach with her anymore. Now he sat alone, on a rock, the most exposed rock of all, and wept. At sundown he returned to the cave as if after a day’s work. And every evening it was the same. Sitting on his golden stool, Odysseus would reach across the table for his human food. It had been placed next to the ambrosia and red nectar Calypso ate as she sat opposite, watching him. Every evening for seven years Calypso hoped Odysseus would try her food. Then he would become immortal, ageless, a semigod lost at the boundaries of the world. But Odysseus never touched it. Later they would twine their bodies together in the bed at the back of the cave, and on those nights Calypso would feel she was truly alive, because she was concealing Odysseus between her big body and the bedclothes. The rest of the time she was oppressed by melancholy and doubt, as if her life were no more real than the names of the warriors Odysseus spoke of, names that had now become familiar, impalpable presences for her.