Deucalion

Many myths derive from song & dance. The actions of myth fail when translated into language, because translation from bodily movement into words (i.e. into mental movement) is steeper than translation between languages. This gives written myth its surreal quality, which is not sought in itself, but comes about through translating the rhythm of movement into the rhythm of words. Myths are lived while constantly dancing.

It is likely that the Eleusinian Mysteries & the Orphic rites, rituals connected to the afterlife which induce a state beyond mortality, predate the myths they refer to (Demeter & Prosperpine, Orpheus & Eurydice). Through strange, repetitive, intentional movement, the initiate is placed into an exceptional state of mind.

Deucalion, son of Prometheus, who gave man the best cuts of meat & was bound to a mountain to be eaten every day, was warned by his father that Zeus would flood the Earth, to rid the surface of the Bronze Race who weighed it down with their heavy, plodding feet. He was advised, and he followed this advice, to build a chest, and enclose himself inside with his wife as the waters rose. After nine days & nights (man can outlast any celestial movement, which are in truth short-lived, even in a single, cramped pose. A man could last years crunched into the same position, this is equally godlike to movement, as seen in Odysseus’ 9 years spent crying, Achilles’ days spent refusing action, Penelope’s repeated weaving & unweaving, etc.) Deucalion & Pyrrha landed atop Mount Parnassus, the waters receded, like tears drying, and Deucalion asked of Zeus, who offered him one wish, to repopulate humanity with new men and women. Zeus agreed. Both Deucalion & Pyrrha took rocks and flung them over Zeus’ head (would he have ducked?) and the ones flung became men, if thrown by Deucalion, and women, if by Pyrrha. So, each must have thrown together, achieving in the end a rough equality of the sexes. The stone men, I imagine, were at first balled up and then opened like budding flowers, except from the material of hard rock they became soft, stretching, expansive, as they filled out over the Earth again.

In finding an ancestor for man, we think of apes and ape-like movements. With this unavailable, rocks are an equally valid candidate for pre-human animacy. Hunched, still, in hard, endless repose, dull & insensitive. Giving fire to man is less about the spark that allows for gathering around the hearth, telling flickering stories back-and-forth, cooking, more to do with hard human substance melting and becoming pliable, like gum, capable of incredible movement, moulded upright with waxy musculature, as we return to at our peak, resplendent and only slightly melting. Heroes are defined by hypermobility.

Muscles ache when they want to be strengthened. When Achilles sat away from the fold what in him hurt? It was not his spearhand which had butchered so many. It was not his legs, or his voice, which satisfied itself in songs and mourning laments we did not hear. It must have been his neck, since he could no longer bear the weight of his shield (the circle of Achilles’ shield = the concentric circles of civic life), and he had never before spent so much time lying down, which destroys the neck. When the neck and shoulders are painful, they must be strengthened with lifting exercises that use the upper back.

Homeric heroes experienced physical pain when they weren’t killing. The dance of violence, the revelation of the rules of combat in the moment of the encounter, the thumping rhythm of the battlefield laced with rattling chariots & exchanged blows, the communion with the gods experienced on the edge of fated death, all this functioned as a narcotic, a stimulant, a heightener of the profoundest & basest sensations. The most godlike reached an awareness of their imprisonment within the narrative. Hence Achilles finds his only means of expressing his displeasure towards society is by misusing the vocabulary of Homeric poetry. So, he proposes unequal exchanges, and places impossible conditions on the event of his returning to the fray.

Most actions are governed above all by gravity. It is only living beings which manage by some feat to generate their own movement.

Shade and Darkness – The Evening of the Deluge, J. M. W. Turner