CAUTIONARY MYTHS

SISYPHUS•SISYPHUS, son of Aeolus, married Atlas’ daughter Merope. He is known as the cleverest of all the Greeks or the wise one. •He owned a fine herd of cattle in Corinth. Near him lived Autolycus who claimed Hermes as his father. •Autolycus steals Sisyphus’ cattle and Sisyphus out of revenge seduces Autolycus’ daughter Anticleia. She bore Sisyphus a son named Odysseus, a clever person like his father.

•After Zeus’s abduction of Aegina, her father the River-god Asopus came to Corinth in search of her. Sisyphus knew well what had happened to Aegina but would not reveal anything unless Asopus undertook to supply the citadel of Corinth with a perennial spring. Asopus accordingly made the spring Perini rise behind Aphrodite’s temple, where there are now images of the goddess, armed; of the Sun; and of Eros the Archer. Then Sisyphus told him all he knew.

• Zeus, who had narrowly escaped Asopus’s vengeance(intikam), ordered his brother Hades to fetch Sisyphus down to Tartarus and punish him everlastingly for his betrayal(dhoka) of divine secrets. Yet Sisyphus would not be daunted(bad dil hona): he cunningly put Hades himself in handcuffs(hathkari) by persuading(kail) him to demonstrate their use, and then quickly locking them. Thus Hades was kept a prisoner in Sisyphus’s house for some days—an impossible situation, because nobody could die, even men who had been beheaded or cut in pieces; until at last Ares, whose interests were threatened, came hurrying up, set him free, and delivered Sisyphus into his clutches.

• Sisyphus, however, kept another trick in reserve. Before descending to Tartarus, he instructed his wife Merope not to bury him; and, on reaching the Palace of Hades went straight to Persephone, and told her that, as an unburied person, he had no right to be there but should have been left on the far side of the river Styx. ‘Let me return to the upper world,’ he pleaded, ‘arrange for my burial, and avenge(bdla leny) neglect(gflat) shown me. My presence here is most irregular. I will be back within three days.’ Persephone was deceived(fraib) and granted(hasil ki ja chuki) his request, but as soon as Sisyphus found himself once again under the light of sun, he repudiated(trded) his promise to Persephone. Finally, Hermes called upon to fetch him back by force.

• Sisyphus was given an exemplary punishment. The Judges of the Dead showed him a tall block of stone, and ordered him to roll it until brow of a hill(phar ki choti) and topple it down the farther slope. He has never succeeded in doing so.

• As soon as he has almost reached the summit, he is forced back by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounce the very bottom once more; where he wearily(afsurdgi se) retrieves(bazyaft) it and rolling begins all over again.

Camus’ philosophy of the Absurd

• Camus believes that there’s only one serious philosophical question—that is of suicide. Many people commit suicide primarily because life is not worth living, without any meaning and purpose.

• For Camus the Absurd lies in the divorce between the desire for clarity and the ambiguous nature of the universe, the divorce between illusion and reality, desire and fulfilment, actor and his setting, meaning and meaninglessness. (Example from Caligula)

•The Absurd is born of a confrontation—the confrontation of man and the universe. •Life would have made much more sense for Camus if he had been born as a tree or a cat. •The confrontation of the Absurd breaks the chain of routine gestures.•The confrontation results in revolt—freedom from future. •Man accepts the absurdity of the universe, and dies happily.

Extracts from the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”

• The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.

• You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.

• One sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face twisted up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward the lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

• It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

• There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

• I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.

•The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Daedelus and Icarus • Daedalus was son or grandson of Metion, younger brother of Cecrops, and

therefore a member of the Athenian royal house. He was a skilled craftsman and inventor; his assistant was his nephew Perdix. (Talos)

• Perdix, had already surpassed him in craftsmanship while only twelve years old. He happened one day to pick up the jawbone of a serpent or, some say, of a fish’s spine; and, finding that he could use it to cut a stick in half, copied it in iron and thereby invented the saw. This, and other inventions of his – such as the potter’s wheel, and the compass for marking out circles – secured him a great reputation at Athens, and Daedalus, who claimed himself to have forged the first saw, soon grew unbearably jealous. Leading perdix up to the roof of Athene’s temple on the Acropolis, he pointed out certain distant sights, and suddenly toppled him over the edge.

• His crime did not escape detection, whereupon the Areiopagus banished him for murder. According to another account he fled(frar hona) before the trial could take place.

• Daedalus had to leave Athens. He went to Crete, where his skill was employed by Minos and Pasiphaë.

• Minos, when ascended to throne, justified his ascension as a divine act. He prayed to Poseidon to raise a sacrificial bull from the sea as a sign. Minos substituted the bull sent by Poseidon, and sacrificed another bull instead. It enraged(mushtal) Poseidon, and he cursed the wife of Minos to fall in love with the bull.

• Some versions of the story claim that she mated with

the bull in real, some maintain that she fantasied

mating with the bull, but ultimately she became with

child. Daedalus, made a shallow cow of wood in which

Pasiphae could sit; the bull considered it a live cow and

hence mated with it.

• Pasiphae gave birth to a half human, half bull child, a

monster known as Minotaur.

•Minos ordered Daedalus to construct a place

where Minotaur could be hidden.

•Daedalus constructed a structure known as

Labyrinth (Cretan Labyrinth).

Cretan Labyrinth

• Athenians had killed Minos’ son Androgeos, Minos set out for revenge, and won the battle with the help of Scylla. After arriving his own city Crete in Attica, he pleaded to Zeus, his father and friend to plague the city of Athens. Zeus obliged and plague the city.

• Athenians consulted the oracle and were told to please Minos by any means possible. Minos asked for 7 boys and 7 girls every 9 years to be sacrificed to the Minotaur.

• Theseus, the mythological hero, offered himself for sacrifice.

• Ariadne fell in love with Theseus. She requested Daedalus to help her save Theseus. On the advice of Daedalus, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of thread so that he could mark his way out of the labyrinth. He tied one end of the thread to the door post and entered the labyrinth following the instructions of Daedalus that never to turn left or right. Theseus found the Minotaur sleeping in the middle of the labyrinth. A fight started but Theseus emerged as the victor.

•Minos upon realizing the treachery of Daedalus and threw him and his son Icarus into the labyrinth.

•Daedalus invented the waxen wings to escape the labyrinth.

•Before taking flight, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high.

Icarus, Daedalus & Labyrinth in Literature

Types of Labyrinths•Cretan (classical) Labyrinth•Maze•Rhizome

Dimensions of Labyrinth•Psychological•Cosmological•Philosophical•Literary

Dr. Faustus• Enter CHORUS.

Only this, gentlemen,—we must performThe form of Faustus' fortunes, good or bad:To patient judgments we appeal our plaud,And speak for Faustus in his infancy.Now is he born, his parents base of stock,In Germany, within a town call'd Rhodes:Of riper years, to Wertenberg he went,Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up.So soon he profits in divinity,The fruitful plot of scholarism grac'd,That shortly he was grac'd with doctor's name,Excelling all whose sweet delight disputesIn heavenly matters of theology;Till swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit,His waxen wings did mount above his reach,And, melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow;For, falling to a devilish exercise,And glutted now with learning's golden gifts,He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss:And this the man that in his study sits.

Enter CHORUS         85

  Cho.  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough,

That sometime grew within this learned man.

Faustus is gone; regard his hellish fall,

Whose fiendfull fortune may exhort the wise

        90

Only to wonder at unlawful things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To practise more than heavenly power permits.  [Exit.]

Extract from Portrait of the Artist

• APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

• APRIL 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

•Dante Alighieri's The

Divine Comedy

Jorge Luis Borges• The Library of Babel

• The Garden of Forking Paths

• The Two Labyrinths

• King and the Labyrinths

Narcissus•NARCISSUS was a Thespian, the son of the blue Nymph Leiriope, whom the River-god Cephisus had once encircled with the wings of his streams, and ravished. The seer(sahib e kashf) Teiresias told Leiriope, the first person ever to consult him: ‘Narcissus will live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself.’ Anyone might excusably have fallen in love with Narcissus, even as a child, and when he reached the age of sixteen, his path was strewn with heartlessly rejected lovers of both sexes; for he had a stubborn(zidd) pride in his own beauty.

•Among these lovers was the nymph Echo, who could no longer use her voice, except in foolish repetition of another’s shout: a punishment for having kept Hera entertained with long stories while Zeus’s concubines(kahanian), the mountain nymphs, evaded(bach niklna) her jealous eye and made good their escape. One day when Narcissus went out to net stags, Echo stealthily (chupky) followed him through the pathless forest, longing to address him, but unable to speak first.

• At last Narcissus, finding that he had strayed from his companions, shouted: ‘Is anyone here?’

• ‘Here!’ Echo answered, which surprised Narcissus, since no one was in sight.

• ‘Come!’ • ‘Come!’ • ‘Why do you avoid me?’ • ‘Why do you avoid me?’ • ‘Let us come together here!’ • ‘Let us come together here!’ repeated Echo, and joyfully rushed from her hiding place to embrace Narcissus. Yet he shook her off roughly, and ran away. ‘I will die before you ever lie with me!’ he cried.

• ‘Lie with me!’ Echo pleaded.

•But Narcissus had gone, and she spent the rest of her life in lonely glens, pining away for love and mortification, until only her voice remained.

•c. One day, Narcissus sent a sword to Ameinius, his most insistent suitor, after whom the river Ameinius is named; it is a tributary of the river Helisson, which flows into the Alpheius. Ameinius killed himself on Narcissus’s threshold, calling on the gods to avenge his death.

• Artemis heard the plea, and made Narcissus fall in love, though denying him love’s consummation. At Donacon in Thespiae he came upon a spring, clear as silver, and never yet disturbed by cattle, birds, wild beasts, or even by branches dropping off the trees that shaded it; and as he cast himself down, exhausted, on the grassy verge to slake his thirst, he fell in love with his reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but presently recognised himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened.

• Echo, although she had not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in breast, and also the final ‘ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!’ expired. His blood soaked the earth, and up sprang the white narcissus flower

•with its red corollary, from which an unguent balm is now distilled at Chaeronea. This is recommended for affections of the ear (though apt to give headaches), and as a vulnerary, and for the cure of frost-bite.