Dissolution and Augmentation

The caterpillar shakes in time lapse like one possessed. It shrugs off its skin, like an overcoat, wads it up and sets it aside. You’d think you would be able to see it now, the real thing, the caterpillar naked, shorn of ornament and true, but underneath the mask of colored bands lies armor. We can never see the transformation itself: the rearrangement of cells, the shifting of body parts, the dissolution.

Inside the chrysalis, nothing has a name, but then, before the conscious idea of a form even emerges, the goo inside the armor aligns itself, the unnamed and unnameable cells have been shunted into a pattern and suddenly there is a body. The wings are carefully folded in on themselves, like a parachute ready for use, except that no one has folded them. Instead the cells have just arrived in their places to tell a story.

Once upon a time there were wings. We don’t even know what they look like yet, but we are becoming these wings.

The story breathes and the cells remember. And in remembering, they discover what wings are. The breath of capillary action moves through the wings and they become what they always were, what they were even when the caterpillar was scrunching along eating leaves. It could feel their presence, on another plane, waiting, whispering their story. As the imago emerges from its armor, the cells remember and slowly tell the story of wings.

What story do your cells remember?

Meet Aphrodite Epistrophia

turn towards
turn your eyes or mind
to a thing,
regard

turn round, turn about,
constantly turning, as if to look behind
turned to gaze on something
a lion retreating

curve, twist, distort
of hair, curl
of a tree, crooked
of fir-needles, bent

turn about, turn round
put an enemy to flight
wheel about
of a wild boar, turn
upon the hunter

go back and forwards
wandering over the earth,
observing, studying
turn to the place
of the sun, revolve

wheeling about
tossing, of a restlessness
renewed assaults of ills unnumbered
wheeling through a right angle
of ships, putting about, tacking
have a relapse

turn from error, correct,
exact, strict, severe,
be converted, return,
conduct oneself,
behave, earnest,
vehement
bring into action

flexible, supple,
modulated, varied
of strands, twisting
of a bow, bending
of a river, winding
of a bay, curve
cause to return to the source
of Being,

pay attention

that by which all the revolving
spheres are turned
thus turned about, changed
returned to yourself


This is a found poem. I found its phrases among the examples given in Liddell & Scott, the preeminent dictionary of Ancient Greek, for the family of words that begin with epistroph-, the root for Epistrophia, one of Aphrodite's epithets.

Pausanias* tells us that Aphrodite Epistrophia had a sanctuary at Megara. In Pausanias’ passage about the goddess, epistrophia is translated as “she who turns men to love.” This is a translator’s best guess as to what the epithet means, but the family of words in which we find epistrophia has little to do with love and everything to do with turning. Aphrodite Epistrophia is “she who turns men’s minds,” and because the she who is doing the turning is the goddess of love, love has to be in the equation somewhere. We are, however, left with the question unanswered whether she is turning minds to love or with love.

Epistrophia \eh-'pis-tro-fee-a\ She who turns.

[*Pausanias 1.40.6]

Always Wear A Hat

A single name can't begin to capture a being as complex as a god. We're dealing with shorthand here. Any string of sounds or letters we humans put together is merely a finger pointing at the Moon.

But sometimes the finger, itself, is worth looking at.

Hermes has some wonderful epithets. He's the Thief, the Watcher, the Whisperer. (An epithet is a descriptive phrase that can substitute for a name. In the US these days, only wrestlers and career criminals have epithets, and each usually has only one for branding purposes. But back in the old days, gods could have several epithets and if you were too foolish to figure out that the Whisperer was also the Thief, well, whoosh! there went your lunch money.) My personal favorite is Polutropos.

Polutropos \pol-'ew-tro-pos\ Many-turned, much traveled, versatile, wily, manifold.

Polutropos often means “well-traveled,” and if you've ever had the joy of going on a long trip, you'll know this meaning well. Every unexpected set-back leads to either the most amazing memory you'll keep or total disaster. To deal with the kinds of twists that happen while traveling, one must become versatile, able to do a little of this or that as necessary depending on what fate has done to the trains. This kind of versatility can make one wily. You begin to see the next twist before you’ve reached the border patrol and are already working out exactly what to omit from your reason for entering the country.

The part of polutropos that holds all this together is that final entry: manifold. With many folds.

In Ancient Greek, some interesting things could be manifold: vicissitudes, actions, fate, desires, sacred rites and, um, kaka. (Kaka is Greek for “bad things”-and you thought it was just a childish word for crap.)

Our desires are what bring us vicissitudes. We can work with our desires through sacred rites (ritual becomes sacred when you want it to) to realize the connection between our actions and our fates and thus begin to lessen the kaka inherent in desire.

It’s nice to see this collection of intangible things as a family, all clearly sharing some essence while each is distinct and sometimes wildly different from the others at least on the surface. It’s also important to see that the shared resemblance, the secret mark that proves each one has a right to attend family reunions, is the nature of having many folds, seemingly random turns, switchbacks, loopdeloops. How quickly one’s desires turn into a source of sorrow. How often do we seek to rid ourselves of some trouble only to have our bane reveal itself in the next act to be our heart’s desire? This is the polutropos shape of the universe. It is the way the Laws work when they aren’t merely hanging around being theoretical, the form they take the moment we step onto the path and begin our travels.

Hermes Polutropos is that part of divine wisdom that is well-travelled. He’s the part of g*d (whatever that is) who knows that whether it’s rainy or sunny, he’s gonna need a hat.