Water

 

     The world was once all water and all existing life was then at home in water.  Upon emerging from the seas, creatures in a way turned inside-out, such that we carry the primeval ocean about now on higher ground within us in bodily fluids, our great gangs of cells cooperating like a gang of walking jellyfish.  Water is an urgent requirement for all forms of life in spite of the fact that it contains no nutrients.   Long after life crawled onto dry land, just as the humanoid branch of great apes was developing, our ancestors continued to spend much of their time in the water according to the aquatic ape hypothesis developed independently by Max Westenhöfer and Alister Hardy, and our species adapted with such characteristics as hairlessness, fat attached (like blubber) to skin, and webbed fingers.  (Despite its imagination and suggestive power, this idea has received little support from other investigators.)

     Myths of origin using less scientific language most often begin in the water.  The opening of the Babylonian “Enuma Elish” describes the birth of the world out of an undifferentiated primal chaos when the waters divided into the fresh identified with Apsu and the salt which is Tiamat.  According to Genesis even before light the spirit was moving “upon the face of the waters,” and the Koran teaches that Allah made all living things from water.  The oldest Egyptian god was Nu, a personification of the watery abyss from whom the sun god Ra arose to order the world, first by hovering over them and calming them just as Jehovah had done.  Likewise in Hinduism the name of the archaic deity Narayana worshipped at Mohenjo-Daro is derived from the word for water and later accounts describe Prajapati’s emergence from the waters as the Hiranyagarbha or golden embryo from which the creation unfolds.  In the New Wiorld the accounts of both the Mayan cosmogony according to the Popol Vuh and the Zapotec version preserved by Fray Gregorio there was at first nothing but the expanse of the sea covering everything. 

      People did indisputably choose to live near water, and the growth of the earliest civilizations arose in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow Rivers where people could coax food production into surpluses sufficient to support idle aristocrats, administrators, and intellectuals.  Some think that extensive kingdoms developed primarily out of the need to manage water resources without undue conflict.  Interventions like dams, dikes, cisterns, sewers, and pipes were naturally first built for agricultural use, but even domestic arrangements for consumption and removal or waste appear as early the fourth millennium B.C.E. 

     Nonetheless, thousands of years passed before flushing water closets were designed in the sixteenth century by Sir John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth and translator of Ariosto, who included a description of his invention in his allegorical satire The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a work with enough bite in its non-hydraulic implications to cause its author to be exiled from court.  (He left it to his valet to write a practical manual for those who wished to construct such a device.)

     Though it took a very long time for people to organize systems to avoid being offended by our own stink, hydraulic engineers had been successfully managing water from the very dawn of the Neolithic.  Such work occurred not only in the cradles of civilization but in more out-of-the-way spots like Papua, New Guinea where nine-thousand-year-old drainage ditches have been traced at the Kuk site.  In the fourth century B.C.E. resident of Jawa in Jordan built a walled town in the middle of the exceedingly dry Black Desert.  Their extensive earthworks prevented flooding during the seasonally destructive overflow of the Wadi Rajil, directing the waters into reservoirs for later use. 

     Thales of Miletus believed water to be the basic stuff of the universe, the substance out of which all things emerged.  Aristotle noted that this was a demythologized version of the creative work attributed to Okeanos and Tethys.  He adds that Greeks take oaths by water as it is “most ancient is most revered, and what is most revered is what we swear by.”  Two and a half millennia after Thales, his regard for water was thought by Nietzsche to be a worthy insight in spite of its inaccuracy as it embodied a monistic view free from mythology. 

     Pindar’s first Olympian ode, celebrating the victory of Hieron of Syracuse’s entry in the horse race, opens by declaring that for some, “water is best” (ἄριστον), but this turns out to be only the first term of a priamel.  Pindar instantly amends this survival-based intuition with the socially informed recognition that some people would prefer gold, then moves to his theme, the even more culturally determined choice of prestige gained by success in games (ἄεθλα). 

     Doubtless the loftiest role played by water as a symbolic actor is that it assumes in Laozi for whom it conveys the attributes of enlightenment: purity, simplicity, indestructibility, naturalness, submission, and humility.  The transparency of water makes it uniquely suited to represent an apophatic spirituality.  The manifold forms of water make it suggest the constantly changing phenomena of experience, while its essence remains always unchanged, “a deep pool” that will “come clean like still waters.”  At the same time, it is “restless, like the ocean,” forming “torrents that flow/ into river and sea” descending always, unresisting, going “unmurmuring to places men despise.” 

 

Nothing is weaker than water,

But when it attacks something hard

Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,

And nothing will alter its way.

 

If somehow, one can sidestep the sparks of ratiocination on the roiled surface of consciousness, perhaps the water which is the majority of the living body may assume the lead and conduct the self, unresisting, into harmony with what surrounds it. 

     Though today people commonly carry small water bottles about, swigging now and then to maintain hydration, in the past certain waters were ascribed more dramatic restorative powers.  Herodotus says that certain Ethiopians attained an average age of a hundred and twenty due to their regular use of a fountain of youth and his story was confirmed by numerous others.  According to the legends of Alexander his veterans, upon bathing in a stream that flowed into the Euphrates, found their youth restored.  The idea of rejuvenating waters percolated then through numerous accounts of the east, including romances and travelers’ reports.

     Among the most influential is the twelfth-century “Letter of Prester John” which describes a spring located in India “at the foot of Olympus” (considered by some to be in Sri Lanka) but also “not far from Paradise” which renders its drinkers perpetually thirty-two years old and free from disease to boot.  In  a strange anticipation of the aquatic ape theory, children in that land, the author adds, are raised in water and may spend three or four months at a stretch submerged.

     Two hundred years later, the travel book attributed to “Sir John Mandeville” (a pseudonym) describes a well in Polombe (likely modern Kerala) that “hath odour and savour of all spices,” though this changes hourly.  Drinking its waters cures all illnesses as well as bringing youth. The author accounts for these extraordinary powers by the fact that the spring arises from Paradise. 

     After Renaissance voyages enlarged the world by half, the location of this marvelous spring was transferred to the new found lands.  The sophisticated Italian humanist Peter Martyr d'Anghiera who served the Spanish court recorded the reports of a fountain of youth in the Bahamas, though he expressed his own skepticism about their truth.   Juan Ponce de León was first associated with the magic spring decades after his death in the Chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo.  The story was repeated and received revived attention through the memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda who had spent seventeen years among the Native people.  Referring to Ponce de Leon’s supposed quest, he claims to have known the location of the waters of youth, which regained in the Americas its Biblical geography, as according to Fontaneda Florida was the true location of the River Jordan, flowing out of Eden.

     That language is a reminder that the search for physical immortality is only the vulgar aspect of the spiritual grace conferred by baptismal waters.  The Mandaean Sabians who revere John the Baptist and were perhaps the first to practice the sacrament continue to perform full-body immersion.  Until the Middle Ages baptism was performed with candidates naked to signify their return to a primeval state, but even today most Christians continue to undergo this ritual of healing waters.  Their cousins in South Asia fancy similar benefits from contact with the waters of Mother Ganges, foul though it might appear to the visiting tourist. 

     Even the appreciation of the more natural qualities of water can lead to connoisseurship.  The savants in Athenaeus discuss the qualities of various drinking waters, finding that Paphlagonian sources “winy,” while a drink from the Corinthian spring Peirene is the “lightest” in all Greece.  He quotes Herodotus’ description of how the Persian king drank only water from the Choaspes which flows by Susa on its way from the Kush toward the Indus.  The deipnosophists’ contemporary descendants may find an entire supermarket aisle made up of waters, many of them touting not only their subtle flavors, but no end of vitamins and probiotics, our contemporary version of the quaint Victorian patent medicines.   

     Almost a phantom element, water has the most mysterious qualities, lacking any fixed form, transparent, odorless, able to rise invisibly from earth to sky and descend again independent of human desire.  We bathe in it and consume it and, for the rest of the day, walk about in one level or another of humidity, observing, perhaps, mists in the morning and clouds overhead in the afternoon.  Though we recognize it as a primal force, we have an intimacy with water and daily contact that suggests our kinship.  Water is always at hand to remind us of beginnings, of sublimity, of the unfathomable mysteries of the most commonplace things.  

Praxilla

     Every artifact made by our species is shaped by our nature, inevitably recording human tastes and beliefs as well as needs and desires in the most subtle and precise detail. Thus not only the economy but much of the religion of the Proto-Indo-European peoples has been reconstructed largely through the tracing of the mere ghosts of words in linguistic roots. Poetry is the most densely information-bearing form of code. Every line holds the potential for expanding waves of significance that fade to silence at the margins of the reader’s or listener’s persistence with no clearly defined end.
     The reader wishing to understand the female poets of ancient Greece faces a paucity, though not an absence, of textual data. The twenty-first century knows of the existence, at least, of twenty-nine ancient Greek women who were celebrated in their own era, but of some of them nothing remains beyond the name and, perhaps, a few tatters of legend. The oeuvre of others has diminished to a few indirect mentions or a couple of phrases cited by grammarians to illustrate an unusual dialectical or grammatical usage.
     In antiquity some of these women were among the most highly honored of writers. They appear in vase-paintings and busts as well as in public tributes like statues and coins. Around the time of Christ Antipater of Thessalonika, who was sufficiently a part of the power structure to be appointed a local governor by the Romans, praised nine female poets as earthly Muses providing with their lyrics for “the undying delight of mortals.” They possess, he says, “divine tongues.” [1] The durability of these poets’ reputations is suggested by the fact that Antipater wrote his tribute roughly three hundred years after Nossis, the most recent writer on his list, and roughly six hundred years after Sappho, the earliest.
     Among these nine, Sappho has survived the loss of all but a few pages of her poetry and has today numerous admirers and translators, while the others remain little more than names. While we properly lament the disappearance of so much of the writing of antiquity, the work of women in particular, it is salutary also to make the fullest use of what remains. A close examination of the most fragmentary phrases might reveal unexpected beauty, like the delicate limbs of insects trapped in amber. Even a body of work consisting of only a few words might, like the pinhole lens of a camera obscura, project an entire world-view.
     The first poet Antipater mentions, perhaps because he thought her most eminent, is Praxilla of Sikyon, a poet of the fifth century BCE of whom only five fragments and three brief paraphrases remain from a once substantial body of work. Evidence of her onetime prestige includes the fact that she was honored with a statue by Lysippos, by a portrait and a few words of verse on a pot, and by allusions in Aristophanes. Even in the second century CE, she was popular enough for Tatian to denounce her and for Zenobius to record a proverbial usage making fun of one of her lines. [3]
     The bits and pieces attributed to Praxilla seem to fall into two unlike genres. The dithyramb is a pious public choral song accompanied with dance, sometimes by troupes of fifty, performed on cult or civic occasions. Dithyrambs in their original form were devoted to Dionysos, though they developed from cult usage to literary adaptation, most significantly, according to Aristotle, as the source from which tragic drama grew. Skolia, while also associated with wine, are social songs, sung by individuals at private parties, often passing the lyre around and sometimes “capping” each other’s verses. Though casual and occasional in this original usage, they became a polished genre in the hands of poets like Alcaeus, Anacreon, Sappho, and Pindar, and their characteristic meter was eventually used for more formal compositions praising gods and heroes. The identification of several of Praxilla’s fragments as skolia has suggested to some critics that she must have been a ἑταίρα or concubine as women were not ordinarily included in symposia. [4]

     A single line is all that remains from a dithyramb on Achilles.

i.
But never could I reach your heart inside.


     One can only speculate on the dramatic context, but the words alone suggest a conflict between Achilles’ subjective truth and what may be a well-intentioned advisor. Though the circumstances are unclear, the single line implies the hero’s brooding and sensitivity, his vulnerability to his own sometimes self-destructive moods. [5] The line, though, is nearly identical to passages in the Odyssey referring to Odysseus’ resistance to the perilous charms of Calypso and Circe creating a doubled-edged meaning poised between obduracy and fidelity. [6] Odysseus’ enduring affection for his mate and Achilles’ egotistical pique are both impressive in their heroic strength. This line suggests the ambiguous role of passion in shaping action and the misunderstanding that all but inevitably exists between one human and another.


ii.
O friend, let Admetus teach you to love
the good -- keep clear of thankless craven men.


     Though skolia are drinking songs performed at private parties, they need not have Dionysian or even convivial themes. Athenaeus cites Praxilla’s comment on Admetus as an example of the form, so it is clear that prudential wisdom of the sort found in maxims also appeared in such songs. (Though such content is unlikely in an American pop song, it is common in, for instance, such West African tunes as Prince Nico Mbarga’s “Aki Special.”)
     Admetus is a deeply ambiguous figure. Known as a just king, his role among the Argonauts and as a hunter of the Calydonian boar is clearly heroic. Euripedes’ chorus praises his piety and generous hospitality [7] and he is favored by both Apollo (in late antiquity called Admetus’ lover) [8] and Heracles. Yet to Praxilla he is despicable, so fearful of death that he was, in effect the killer of his own wife. [9] His name signifies “untamed” which might be taken as a heroic boast equivalent to unvanquished, but might also suggest one who had failed to control his own nature. In Euripedes’ Alcestis his father Pheres calls him hubristic and his wife is repeatedly described as outstanding (άριστος) while the epithet is never used of Admetus, yet the chorus continues to praise him to the end when Alcestis returns to the world thanks to Heracles as deus ex machina.
     The ambivalence is dramatized on the divine level. Though aided by Apollo, he is opposed by Artemis whose boar he had helped to kill. [10] On the occasion of his wedding, Admetus had neglected to sacrifice to Artemis who retaliated by filling his bridal chamber, which could represent the harmonizing of male and female, with hostile snakes. Artemis, Praxilla, and his wife’s partisans join in denunciation of the king of Pherae, though Alcestis herself is too loyal to criticize him.


iii.
Take care, my friend, a scorpion lurks under every stone.


     In this cautionary skolion the proverbial metaphor works as well literally as figuratively. The first impression enjoining caution in the natural and presumably the human realm as well, is complicated in the dialectical dance of mythology by a web of associations. Scorpion deities were well-known in the ancient Near East, nearly all of them goddesses. [11] In Greece Orion the hunter is sometimes said to be Artemis’ companion and a scorpion is the instrument of Artemis’ revenge against him. [12] Thus the scorpion is not only potentially arachnid or human, as a beast it is also associated with the same Artemis who was inimical to Admetus. He and Orion are both mortals pursued by the same virgin goddess.


iv.
You look so fine through window frame,
a girl’s fresh face, below a bride.


     The verb ἐμ-βλέπω, “to look,” “look at,” is often used in erotic contexts, and the words παρθένος (“girl” or “virgin”) and νύμφη (“bride,” “recently married”) are definitely sexual. The modern reader might take this skolion, a drinking song at a men's party, as as unkind satire, characterizing a "girl-next-door" type who already possesses experience "below," that is, "below the best." Though the Anthology contains ample misogyny, I find no parallel for such a poem there. A recent critic has made a good case that the fragment is part of an epithalamium, a rite of passage celebrating the transition from girl to married woman, a likelier reading, particularly given  the female author, all the more probable as Sappho is known to have written an entire book of epithalamia. [13]
     The three paraphrased references to Praxilla’s verse do little to clarify the influence of the sympotic setting. All relate to pederasty, one concerns the story of Zeus carrying of Chrysippus (whose rape is usually attributed to Laius) in Athenaeus [14] in a discussion of the origins of homoerotic love and the other two mentioning Canus (or Carneius), the seer who became Apollo’s eromenos.
     The three lines that remain from Praxilla’s dithyramb on Adonis the dying and reborn god of whom Frazer made so much in The Golden Bough are her best-known fragment. [15] Here, however, Adonis speaks not as a semi-divine legendary hero but rather as any mortal might, reflecting on what he most regretted leaving behind in life. To me it seems that ancient Greek poetry generally inhabits this palpable world and rests on perceptions and physical experience. The love for life, for wine and sex and sunshine, is always tinged with the sensualist’s regretful admission that all experience, even life itself, is transient, for all that it may be lit with pleasure and, perhaps in addition, with the glow of some fine abstraction from above. Praxilla begins with bidding farewell to the sun, a conventional way of speaking of death, but she then introduces a surprising trope.


v.
Most lovely I leave -- the light of the sun,
next, the luminous stars and the face of the moon,
then, too, cucumbers in season, and apples, and pears.


     The light of the heavenly bodies is a conventional sign of numinous glory, a glimpse of the divine available to anyone who gazes upwards, but the last line began to sound strange not long after its composition. In Zenobius’ book of proverbs, he records the phrase “more foolish than Praxilla’s Adonis,” presumably because of bathos of fruit following after semi-divine heavenly bodies, and, in particular the mention of one more often featured in salads than lyrics. [16] I think upon reading it of the many catalogues in the dedicatory book of the Greek Anthology which list specific objects – tools, toys, in one case a single quince [17] – that were significant for an individual. For a mystic, any object if considered deeply might be uplifting, and, for an agricultural people, a deep attachment to produce seems quite natural. At any rate, Praxilla’s Adonis expresses an immense affection for the things of this world and the tragic incongruity of mortal attachments.
     Surveying the scanty remains of Praxilla’s poetry, one would look in vain for a dramatic new vision or stylistic innovation (though there is the one original meter, the praxilleion), still less for an anachronistic feminism (though she did have an affinity with Artemis and took Alcestis’ part against Admetus). She has more in common with the didactic proverbialism of Theognis than with the sensual intensity of Sappho. No high-wire juggler of myth like Pindar, she represents for the most part the norms and received ideas of her time, no mean achievement itself. Skolia were popular at the symposia, thus she composed many, very likely on popular themes, including the prudential monitory lines that have been preserved.
     That marvelous cucumber of Adonis stands out, with every reading providing a delightful frisson of surprise. Just as the expected sun and stars do not vanish into insignificance with the mention of the surprising produce, the detailing of wholly conventional Greek beliefs remains richly meaningful, all the more significant due to accumulated tradition. Celebrating marriage and extramarital affairs alike, while also fussing over the imperfection of marriage and friendship, warning about betrayal with the voice of experience, these are all-too-human and very Greek. The most powerful image of Praxilla, though, on which her reader is likeliest to linger is surely her Adonis who loved both the large and small marvels of life. Neither the necessity of eventual farewells nor the sure sweet pain of clinging to the evanescent can dissuade this Adonis, or, presumably, Praxilla from a passionate love for this world.





1. Greek Anthology 9.26. The Greek phrases are “θνατοῖς ἄφθιτον εὐφροσύναν” and “θεογλώσσους . . . γυναῖκας.”

2. See Thesmophorizusae, 528 Wasps, 1238,

3. Against the Greeks, 33 says her “poems contain nothing useful.” In the same passage he calls Sappho “a lewd, love-sick female [who] sings her own wantonness.” He indicts as well a number of other female poets, claiming that Christian women in contrast are “are chaste, and the maidens at their distaffs sing of divine things more nobly than that damsel of yours.” Tatian notes scornfully fourteen women honored by Greek cities with statues. For Zenobius see note 6 below.

4. Wilamowitz was horrified at the idea of a proper lady writing skolia. Some have even suggested the existence of two Praxillas, one more respectable than the other. A somewhat more likely proposal is that Praxilla may have been, not a courtesan, but a sort of professional entertainer, like some of the Troubadours. Other critics have surmised that the skolia were falsely ascribed to Praxilla after her death.

5. Kleist’s Achilles in Penthesilea is dramatically more extreme, almost always in an erotic furor.

6. Speaking of Calypso: ἀλλὰ τοῦ οὔ ποτε θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἔπειθεν: “yet she could never persuade the heart in his breast,” Odyssey XXIII, 337. Similarly, VII, 258 and IX, 33 referring to Circe.

7. ὃσιος 553 (pious or in accord with nature).

8. See Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 934; Tibullis, Elegies 2.3; Callimachus Hymn 2.47-49; and Rhianus fr. 10 P.

9. The semantic range of the word δειλός extends from cowardly to base, worthless and miserable, unhappy, implying that courage is essential for a good character and that good character is a prerequisite for happiness.

10. In fact the story of the hunt includes on the human level the gender opposition of the gods. Atalanta, a virgin huntress like Artemis, was the first to wound the boar, but her prize, though allowed by Melagar, was taken by other men, jealous of her recognition. (Ovid Metamorphoses, VIII, 425-0450).

11. Among them were the Egyptian Serket (also Hedetet and Ta-Bitjet), the Hurrian and Hittite Ishhara (sometimes identified with Ishtar), and, some dikstance further afield, the Hindu Chelamma. A rare exception are the scorpion men Aqrabuamelu attested in reliefs and described in the Akkadian Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish but these are, after all, creatures of the goddess Tiamat.

12. Odyssey 5.121 ff. The same tradition appears in Hesiod (fragment 4 - Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Catast. fr. xxxii ). According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 25 Artemis killed him either for challenging her to a discus competition or for conceiving another love interest.

13. Vanessa Cazzato, “Glancing Seductively through Windows: The Look of Praxilla fr. 8 (PMG 754) in The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual: Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, vol. 1, edited by Vanessa Cazzato and André Lardinois. Sappho is known to have written many epithalamia.

14. Athenaeus 13.603a.

15. Among the parallels Frazer cites are Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus, and Jesus. For others see Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature A192 and A193.

16. Zenobius, Proverbs 4.21. Zenobius wrote in the second century CE. Many critics have offered justifications. Smyth in Greek Melic Poets, for example, suggests the poet was characterizing Adonis’ naivete. In addition cucumber (σίκυος) is surely a play on her city’s name Sikyon (Σικυών).

17. Greek Anthology VI, 252.

Riddles and Poetry

     When the Hatter poses a riddle, asking Alice, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” she is pleased and thinks “Come, we shall have some fun now! I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles,” but, when she gives up and asks for the answer, the Hatter replies, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” This annoys Alice. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.” The fact is that Carroll, for all his fondness for puzzles, had no particular solution in mind, and, indeed, people have found powerful reasons for posing answerless riddles, but he was asked to provide one often enough that he devised an elaborately clever possibility: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar [sic] put with the wrong end in front!" [1]
     Alice’s eager initial response indicates that riddling was a familiar party pastime in the Victorian Age; today it is surely more informal and likely to be restricted to child’s play, but riddles play a fundamental role in the structure of sophisticated cognition. In many cultures they have been a repository for religious mystery and a mother of poetry, a focus for displays of verbal elegance and wit.
     Riddles have this central historic role for good reason. The word itself, as Northrup Frye notes “was originally the cognate object of read.” [2] Though this is misleading in the sense that riddles can be purely oral, it does point to the form’s dependence on a material verbal formula, a text whether spoken or read. The earliest written characters are all pictographic, of course, and before writing developed, all language had been elaborated with metaphors, beginning with the entirely unmotivated correspondence between a sound and a meaning. A great many words, including all abstractions, lack visual representation altogether and can be built only upon direct signifiers of visible objects. One may imagine language developing through a very prolonged process of riddle-posing and solving. Even in oral cultures, verbal facility came to be associated with intelligence, leadership, and access to the divine, and riddles provided a framework for displaying advanced skills in both imagination and interpretation. To cite Frye once more, riddles require “a fusion of sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental activity in connection with it.” In this way they build upon the ability of language to evoke absent or nonexistent objects by adding openings that encourage the generation of new connections, different associations, and the ability to think things never before thought.
     In much of this riddles resemble poetry. One distinguishing mark of the aesthetic text is its use of rhetorical figures or sound, speech, and thought, the common property of which is the signification of something other or something more than the words might bear in a different context, allegory in the broadest sense. Metaphor is the most important figure, and every metaphor is a riddle. The reader of poetry, language’s most densely information-bearing code, must figure out how it is that a lover is like “a red, red rose.” Quite clearly, Old English and Old Norse kennings are riddles: whale road for sea, raven feeder for warrior. Expertise in riddles was considered a sign of ability in symbolic manipulation generally, that is to say, in thinking and was used by the intelligentsia both in training and in display. The Exeter Book contains nearly a hundred riddles as well as much traditional wisdom, noting that “Wise men should exchange wise words.” [4] The final term of this sententia is giedd which Sweet defines as “song, poem, speech, narrative, tale, proverb, riddle,” in other words, any literary or rhetorical use of language.
     The Rig Veda contains many riddles the solving of which “became a formalized demonstration of the knowledge of the priests taking part in the sacrifice.” [5] A brahmodya was a riddling contest between learned pandits or between a Brahmin priest and a lay sacrificer. [6] Mythic models for such verbal contention exist in the Mahabharata’s account of Aṣṭāvakra’s defeat of Bandī in disputation and Yudhiṣṭhira’s successful answers to a Yakṣa’s questions. [7]
     The same skills were prized in ancient Greece. One thinks of the riddle of the Sphinx (which, in fact, has been also reported in Bihar) [8] and the many enigmatic and ambiguous pronouncements of the oracles. The riddler Cleobulus was celebrated as one of the Seven Sages, and he has a reputed female counterpart in Cleobulina . [9] To Aristotle, riddles are at the root of poetry and thus of wisdom: “clever enigmas furnish good metaphors; for metaphor is a kind of enigma, so that it is clear that the transference is clever.” [10] In his discussions with the Indian sages the Greeks called gymnosophists Alexander is reported to have posed puzzled problems to rebellious wise men with the intention of executing those who could not answer. [11]
     By the time of Athenaeus [12] riddles retained some of their association with wisdom, but this use already seemed to some old-fashioned. Clearchus is quoted as saying “the solution of riddles is not alien to philosophy, and the ancients used to make a display of their knowledge by means of them.” (575) Yet they were an expected part of social gathering in late antiquity and not only among the literati. The same Clearchus defines a riddle in a way that clearly implies a party game. “A riddle is a problem put in jest, requiring, by searching the mind, the answer to the problem to be given for a prize or forfeit.” (531) People were required to offer riddles during drinking bouts (534) and then, if they failed to solve them, were obliged to drink wine mixed with brine. (575) The largest collection of ancient Greek riddles is that of Symphosius whose preface declares that they are to be used in gay festival celebrations during the Saturnalia.
     This late Latin text fascinated the early Christians and collections were made by a number of authors, including Englishmen whose own literary tradition independently prized the riddle such as Aldhelm, Tatwine, and Eusebius (the 8th c. Northumbrian bishop) as well as elsewhere in Europe. [12] Aldhelm based many of his riddles on Symphosius, but not his final, culminating poem "Creatura" which adapts a passage of the Corpus Hermeticum. [14] With its answer “creation” this final poem was clearly meant as a “master-riddle” the study of which would parallel one’s contemplation of the world itself as a meditative technique to further spiritual growth.
     Though a portion of “Creatura” is missing, its method is clear and systematic. Just as the typical strategy of common riddles is to describe something and then add a term that makes the apparent interpretation impossible, here Aldhelm weaves a rich texture of paradox and contradiction while bathing the whole in an exhilarated jouissance in both the older and the post-structuralist senses. The author seeks to enwrap everything in his words, the entire cosmos before which he can only wonder. [15] He uses terms like wrætlice (l. 6) to emphasize the artful beauty of existence and wynlic (l. 26) to signify the joy that comes from apprehending the creation’s “secrets.” (l. 39 deagol þing) The poem bristles with paradox in its ambition to include everything. The answer to the riddle embodies and surpasses all dualities: it is asleep and awake, timid and bold, hot and cold, large and small, stinking and sweet. This riddle is one of the purest manifestations of literature’s ability to express ambivalences, self-contradictions, the irrational, and the mysterious. It is a verbal enactment of Tertullian’s famous formula “it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd” or the contention of the pseudo- Dionysius that "Duality is never a principle (arche). A unity (monas) is always the principle of every duality." [16]
     Aldhelm’s last riddle is poetic not only in its exploitation of contradictions and its exposition of mystery, but also in its rich texture of specific images: a black and reeking fen, the boar rooting about in the forest, cast-up seaweed, comb dripping with honey. There can never be quite enough because they are meant to signify everything. According to a recent translator the riddles of the Rig Veda are meant, to be unanswerable and in that way to dramatically indicate not a revealed truth, but an area of unknowing. [17] There is no space here even to initiate a treatment of the riddles of all riddles, Zen koans. [18] In the thousand years since since Dahui Zonggao’s time and doubtless since the dawn of language, people have used riddles and other poetic devices to plumb the very deepest reaches if existence in a way that other forms of discourse cannot reach.
     I have focused on the kinship of riddles to poetry and philosophy, and, if my path has seemed leisurely, I have at least avoided such divagations as the Quechua-speaking peoples whose teen-agers hold riddle parties to flirt and meet the opposite sex away from adult eyes, the Indonesian and Filipino riddling at funerals, the vast field of Mongolian riddles, and the sizable body of Arabic work (such as al-Hariri’s Maqāma). A monograph could be written on obscene riddling, on riddling as political propaganda, not to mention the largest body of modern examples: children’s riddles.
     Figures of speech destabilize meaning only in order to render it more precise. The can be no end to metaphor because each individual thing has some things in common and some differences with every other individual thing. Riddling exposes the limitations of habit-bound thought, encourages new, leaping insight, and yet implies a skepticism about any firm ground for reality. Riddles are deeply implicated in language itself with its ability to represent lies, things not present, and things never before thought as well as in its secondary elaboration of poetry, the verbal technology by which people entertain themselves and seek insight and rejuvenated vision. Riddling, like poetry, both teaches and delights , wrenching language until a laugh breaks out, a preconception gives way, or, it may be, the soul feels, for a moment or two, buoyant.



1. Before and after Carroll’s preface to the second edition in which he proposed this answer, others have devised alternatives which range from the ingenious to the clumsy. Among them perhaps the most elegant is that of the great puzzler Sam Loyd: "Poe wrote on both." Though many had suggested “They both contain the letter ‘R’, it was Aldous Huxley who proposed "Because there is a 'b' in both and an 'n' in neither" which is to some fittingly absurd. In The Shining Stephen King provides, “The higher you go, the less of them there are” which seems disappointing. Many other ideas may be located with a few minutes searching, among them “because they both have inky quills,” “a writing desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens,” “they both stand on sticks,” “because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes,” and “because that which is never backward is always forwards, and a raven is nevar backward, and a writing desk is always for words.” The phenomenon illustrates the human propensity to find meaning and pattern in anything.

2. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (Atheneum: New York, 1967), p. 280.

3. Ibid.

4. Gleawe men sceolon gieddum wrixlan. Maxims I (A). For a treatment of the place of riddles in Old English see Rafal Boryslawski, “The Elements of Anglo-Saxon Wisdom Poetry in the Exeter Book Riddles,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies, Vol. 38, Summer 2002. W. P. Ker says “It is the proper business, one might say, of Old English poetry to call things out of their proper name.” (The Dark Ages, New York: Scribner’s, 1904 p. 92)

5. Rig Veda, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, OUP, 2014, p. 70

6. See George Thompson, “The Brahmodya and Vedic Discourse,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1, Jan. - Mar. 1977 and Louis Renou’s Hymnes et Prières du Veda.

7. For discussion of whether the questions and solutions are of Greek (Cynical) origin or indigenous to India see Aleksandra Szal, “Alexander’s Dialogue with Indian Philosophers: Riddle in Greek and Indian Tradition,” Commentationes, Eos XCVIII 2011.

8. Ibid.

9. Cleobulus was the author of riddles in poetry as well as of such simple maxims as “seek virtue and eschew vice," "instruct your children," and “avoid injustice.” Cleobulina’s work is described by Diotimus of Olympene according to Athenaeus. She is attested by many ancient references, cited by Aristotle in both the Poetics and the Rhetoric. At least two lost plays (by Alexis and by Cratinus) with her name in the title are known, and three extant poems are attributed to her. See Ian Michael Plant, Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology, University of Oklahoma, p. 29 ff.

10. Rhetoric 3.2.12. Aristotle uses the word αἴνιγμα.

11. See also the Ashtavakra.

12. See Charles Burton Gulick, editor and translator, Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Loeb Library, 1930, vol. 4, Bk. X, ch. 5. Page numbers in parentheses refer this edition.

13. Collections were made elsewhere in Europe as well and the scholarly Latin culture was to a certain extent cosmopolitan. Tullius, for example, the author of a book of aenigmata is thought to have been in Italy like his namesake Cicero, though he had perhaps come originally from Ireland. Aldhelm’s is contained within his Epistola ad Acircium as part of the treatise on meter, indicating the close affinity of riddles and poetry.

14. Its source is the Corpus Hermeticum, Treatise XI, 20, where the Divine Intellect, the Mind of God is addressing Hermes Trismegistus. According to Michael Lapidge Aldhelm’s poems should be called mysteries rather than riddles because of their religious content. See his Anglo-Latin Literature, vol. 1 600-899, A&C Black, 1996, p. 9.

15. The Greek word kosmos itself means well-arranged, orderly, beautiful, artful.

16. Tertullian, De Carne Christi, V, 4: "prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est." pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, 4,21. Compare the Buddha’s words in the Lankavatara Sutra “all that is of duality has its rise from the Mind.”.

17. See Wendy Doniger, The Rig Veda, Penguin, 1981. In my use of the term I am thinking of the English The Cloud of Unknowing.

18. I use the Japanese term in conformity with common American usage, though the three principal collections are Chinese: The Blue Cliff Record, The Book of Equanimity (or Serenity), and The Gateless Gate.

Professors Kick the Willy Bobo

     As a Greek living in Egypt in the second century C.E., Athenaeus of Naucratis straddled cultures. He was a littérateur, a rhetorician, and grammarian, with wide-ranging interests who literally wrote of “cabbages and kings” with equal relish. His single extant work, the Deipnosophists, is vast though incomplete. Using the form familiar to readers from Plato’s Symposium, Athenaeus portrays a group of scholars discussing food as well as health, music, pornography, and, above all, poetry and words. The dinner seems to stretch on forever, as the appetite of the guests for food and phrases and facts is never satisfied. Even at fifteen volumes, the work is incomplete. The title, “the dinner-wise-guys” is often translated as “doctors at dinner,” or something similar, but more literally means “the dinner experts,” that is, the gastronomers or, in the current American term, the “foodies.” In spite of the inaccuracy, I like my own version “professors kick the willy bobo,” because the talk covers many topics other than food, and the hiphop phrase carries the appropriate sense of expansive desultory recreational conversation. Athenaeus’ book defies genre. It is a mighty river of words, or perhaps a swamp, since it has little apparent direction. Why, indeed, would a reader choose to ramble in this trackless slough of dead language?
     Taste remains a mystery at the heart of aesthetics. Can any critic prove the superiority of Shakespeare to Superman? While some may be led to the café or the parkland on a bright summer day, others will lurk in the back corners of the less prosperous used book shops, perhaps vainly searching for Florio’s Montaigne, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or even Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists. All these texts are notable for their hungry inclusivity, their vain but worthy attempt to encompass everything. While an author like Wang Wei or Hakuin shows the universe in the glint of one discrete phenomenon, a sunset’s ray or a breath of breeze, and a troubadour or an Elizabethan sonneteer will chase the same ox through the nuances of love, a poet like Whitman describes everything under the sun, piling detail on detail, word tumbling over word, trying to catch up to the truth. Today’s cultural critics are not the first readers to whom every detail is meaningful and worthy of contemplation. Thus Montaigne discusses odors, drunkenness, “a monstrous child,” and “a custome of the ile of Cea”; the reader of Rabelais is thrown by the barrage of learned and vulgar material; the visitor to Jubilate Agno finds that to Smart the postal service and the stretching cat are equally numinous. And these works tend to go on and on, as though their very length in some way could help to reproduce the fascination of the cosmos.
     I read literature rather than philosophy because, while words are always slippery, experience seems a sounder ground for knowledge than authority or the syllogism, but experience may be processed to any point along a spectrum from unedited data to highly abstract, conventional symbols such as the World-Tree. At the limit one approaches monism: Parmenides, or Spinoza, or all is Buddha-nature. If every datum reveals the ultimate reality, each makes an equal claim on our attention, and thus the search for truth can become a wandering scan through the bewildering array of phenomena. Some writers have attempted to order this unmanageable field of information through the illusion of an exhaustive catalogue, which may take the form of epic or of anatomy. In the epic form the Mahabharata, the Iliad, Sundiata from Mali, or the synthesized Kalevala seek to include encyclopedic information: all the most relevant data about belief systems, behavior, and the received ideas of the culture.
     While epic is typical of oral cultures in which one mythological/philosophical/moral system is shared by all, the anatomy is the product of a less certain society, one more confident with details than with dogma. In Montaigne’s prefatory note, he declares his true focus to be not the subjects he discusses, but rather himself, i.e. his reactions to those subjects. Though one cannot know the truth about cannibals, for instance, to take one of his most exotic and insightful essays, one can know one’s own reaction. Montaigne sets this down with admirable precision, making a lesson even of error: “My imperfections shall therein be read to the life, and my natural form discerned.”
     Such a “natural form,” the “lineaments of my conditions and humours” (to quote another of Florio’s felicitous renderings of Montaigne) is for a skeptic the closest approach to truth. “Real” conversations such as those in television reality shows or those recorded in Visions of Cody or Louis Armstrong’s tapes of himself and his friends talking seem necessarily “true” because they sound like life itself. Even the marijuana (in the cases of Kerouac and Satchmo) appears to remove preconception and intention and bring the reader a step closer to Montaigne’s prelapsarian ideal: “my selfe fully and naked.” Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists reads like an ancient version of these wandering colloquies.
     Being scholars the guests’ table talk is filled with allusion and citation. In fact, for years the book has been valued primarily for its many quotations from works now lost. Though it has never had many readers, Casaubon published an edition in 1612 and Sir Thomas Browne wrote a lovely elegiac essay on it. In the Victorian age James Russell Lowell combined harsh imagery with literary sentimentalism in his declaration that “the somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-picker like Athenaeus, is turned to gold by time.”
     Gold or not, it is one of the most intertextual of works; topics are often viewed through the traces they have left in books. The guests are given the names of real people as though the event had really occurred, but this is a pose (though, like pastoralism, it gives itself the lie). In fact, Athenaeus projects circumstantial truth, a mediated and fragmentary reality. The text gives us an editor, a narrator, characters, and an author, none of whom claims authority. It is a highly artificial story told at fourth-hand, based on dubious memories, in a far-distant language. But is this not an accurate model for the greater part of our experience of reality?
     Just as the cubist painters, while highlighting formal experimentation, used as their content the daily litter of the pleasures of urban bohemian café life (newspapers, wine bottles, musical instruments), Athenaeus’ characters talk of food and sex rather than of Platonic ideas. They may seem to be loafing, doing nothing whatever, but their dinner is a studied affair. In the book dining is not just healthful and pleasurable, more even than an artful activity. In Athenaeus the dinner table centers an Edenic commune which promises not only an equal share to every diner in a kind of charming appetitive egalitarianism, but which reserves as well an extra portion for “strangers.” The very word for dinner is assigned an etymology from the words for equal distribution.
     Whatever else it may be, the book is a cabinet of curiosities, individualistic, whimsical, and eccentric. The word-play around tripod reads like nothing so much as a Abbott and Costello routine. One can learn, too, of Charmus the Syracusan who accompanied every dainty he offered his guests with appropriate poetic words. Athenaeus discusses the qualities, the taste, and the effects on health of more waters than Dean & Deluca could ever carry, and provides an explanation of the culinary use of swine’s uterus. The book is endlessly learned, its characters inspired by the pursuit of information, not toward the solution of a problem, practical or spiritual, but rather bits of information treasured like a child’s souvenir of rocks and shells from the beach, handled and examined as marvels. Where else might one learn that the same King Midas who was so fond of gold poured wine into a pond in an attempt to capture Silenus in his cups?
     And the loping syntax of association is as odd and natural as the facts: the praise of topers as good fellows leads to mention of a hero called the “drinker of unmixed wine” which leads to several cooks with nicknames derived from their cooking activities whose celebrity had reached the point that statues were erected in their memory. In a momentary return to the starting point of conviviality, drinking is praised as the source of dinner-table joking and improvised poetry, but the speaker immediately adds that it can also bring obnoxious boasting. Wine is linked to meat as a cause of verbal aggression because it feeds false consciousness, and then a catalogue of the delusions of intoxication is suddenly capped with the identification of wine and literature, and the word tragedy is provided a false etymology to strengthen the link. Athenaeus has constructed a semantic field charged with the tensions between truth and lie, discipline and self-indulgence, love and aggression. The code is rich and suggestive. Indeed, this free flow of ideas, which might become tiresome and aimless, is often animated in the text with a mild glow of revelation, not unlike that available from wine in the belly.
     Athenaeus is a late writer, as we, perhaps, are late in our own great imperial American Kali Yuga age. His fragmentary and circumstantial material, his close grasp on small and concrete facts and his coolness to generalizations, his tolerance of all and failure to claim access to Truth either religious or political, all these join him to our own time. His characters talk, not to pursue and finally capture the truth as Plato presumed, but to pass the time, yet their endless dinner escapes triviality. Signifying monkeys, as all men are, they talk as apes groom and the conversation has neither beginning nor end. Both eating and talking become arts, games, enough “human business” to occupy a lifetime.
     The oral societies of the past typically granted poets a vatic voice with a unique connection to divine inspiration. This view was still influential in classical times, though not universal. In the Middle Ages the church asserted its own didactic imperatives, though the flourishing of secular literature eventually led to lesser claims: the poet as sensitive and insightful, inspired, but by his own genius now. With Chekhov and Joyce fiction came to treat of the apparently inconsequential. The “unity of action” became instead a slice of life, and the poet’s attention shifted focus as time passed from the details of realism ever smaller to imagism, objectivism, minimalism, and finally to the level of the word in language poetry, while at the same time scholars have moved from “great ideas” to minutiae. Athenaeus’ diners would find themselves at home, I think, at the MLA Convention, and perhaps they even lurk between you and me, scanning this essay.
     Though the sloppier post-structuralists at academic meetings proceed as though every text were primarily self-reflective, concerned with its own verbal material, this is in fact true of Athenaeus. The speakers most often quote authorities, cite passages, and discuss words, their history, etymology, and regional variations. Whatever their putative topic they are skating on the edge of the semiotic resistance, uttering words not meant as transparent conveyors of content, but rather as material objects, whose procession bears within it the code of the cosmos, no less than the Milky Way itself. They live in citations, quoting one author after another, with the professorial conviction that, whatever the value of their own remarks, they have excellent taste in reading. But this pose only masks the conviction that keeps them reading, the conviction that reading, too, can lead to enlightenment. Their implied footnotes shape a map of consciousness at least as informative as their profile or the crazy pattern of gulls’ tracks on a beach.
     Since the work strives to be encyclopedic after a fashion, it includes even the antithesis of this worship of the word. Cynulcus the Cynic denounces the diners both for their hedonism and their erudition, saying: “You glutton, whose god is your belly . . . you have misused your whole time in asking ‘is such a word found or not? Is it used or not used?’ And you test every word that occurs to your companions in talk as one tests a smooth surface by drawing his nail over it, collecting all the thorny places, ‘like one making his way through prickly plants and thorny licorice,’ forever wasting time, but never gathering the flowers that are the sweetest.”
     Having gathered, I believe, worthy bouquets in Athenaeus, I would differ from Cynulcus. I fancy, for instance, the figure of a dancer called Memphis (a reference to “the oldest and most royal of cities”). This “philosopher-dancer” expounded, we are told, the Pythagorean philosophy in pantomime more effectively than it ever was taught in words. Whether such a dance is plausible or not, the implied glimpse of truth beyond words indicates that even Athenaeus’ professors, amid all the grubbing and eating and chit-chat through which they ordinarily attempt to sidle up to reality can also imagine a pole-vault into the beyond. If one person’s pole be meditation and another’s sex or sunsets, there are those, too, for whom it is words, and Athenaeus is a wordy writer indeed. But is it not often through words and the carefully constructed complexes of words that constitute literature that we can snare a new insight and even, on occasion, catch a glimpse of freshest vision just being born in our own consciousness?