Point of View: Before the Malls
I bought recently for our 6-year old granddaughter “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” and then started reading Robert Graves’s encyclopedic version of them, only to realize that while vastly imaginative they are bloody as hell too, to put it mildly.
I presume the D’Aulaires took the rough edges off for young readers, so as to inspire wonder rather than fuel phantasmagoric fears.
In this connection, I remember starting to read to my son, who was then about 5 or 6, “Le Morte d’Arthur,” and then, with his ready approval, putting it down early on because of the gore.
Yet, despite the rapes, incest, castrations, flaying of flesh, and cannibalism (some of that albeit inadvertent), you can’t help but be fascinated by the Greeks’ vivid storytelling and by how at one with nature they were, to such a degree that gods, demigods (my wife sometimes puts me in that category), and humans often metamorphosed into swans, kingfishers, crows, cows, she-goats, ash trees, serpents, lizards, doves, mice, quail, myrrh trees, anemones, laurel trees, hyacinths, olive trees, spiders, owls, golden cicadas, poplar trees, nightingales, woodpeckers, snow-white bulls, eagles, ants, mushrooms, stones, and so forth (though, fortunately, no ticks).
Nature was so much with them. (This was before malls.) It is still somewhat with us out here: I showered outdoors this morning and later parked under The Star’s mulberry tree, like the one where the starcrossedlovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, were to meet, its white berries dyed red by his blood.
Persephone’s about to rejoin Hades for a while. I wish she hadn’t eaten those pomegranate seeds, but a third of the year in the underworld is what the gods decreed for having done so, and so we must have winter.
May it be a time to reflect upon who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. E.O. Wilson, the antman, thinks there is yet time (though not much) for our “Janus-like species” to work toward restoring the inheritance we’ve largely spent. Will we evolve to that point, or will we remain at war with each other, ourselves, and nature?
What will we metamorphose into?