“Yama said: The good is one thing and the
pleasant another. These two, having different ends, bind a man. It is well with
him who chooses the good. He who chooses the pleasant misses the true end.
The good and the pleasant approach man; the
wise examines both and discriminates between them; the wise prefers the good to
the pleasant, but the foolish man chooses the pleasant through love of bodily
pleasure.” – Katha Upanishad
The context for Death’s routine – Yama is
death – is the following: Nachiketas is the son of Wajashrawas, a man who had
reached that point in his life when becoming a sage took priority over all
else. So he gave away his property. Nachiketas, like the young man in Lewis
Carroll’s Father William ("You are old, Father William," the young
man said,/"And your hair has become very white;/And yet you incessantly
stand on your head--/Do you think, at your age, it is right?"), decided to
bother the old man and asked “Father, have you given me to someone?” After
being asked three times, Wajashrawas said yes, I’ve given you to Yama – death.
Recall that Father William also became impatient with his young man after three
questions ("I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"/
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs! /Do you think I can listen all
day to such stuff?/ Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"). Nachiketas
then proceeded to go to Yama’s house, and spent three days there without eating
and drinking. Threes, by the way, haunt this story, as they haunt all stories
involving wishes. Sure enough, Yama, impressed by Nachiketas’ ascetic regime,
grants him three wishes. Nachiketas’ first wish is to be reconciled with his
father. His second wish is for Fire. But Yama balks at his third wish, for
Nachiketas wants to know if there is something after death. To know what comes
after death puzzles even the gods. But Nachiketas insists. Thus begins the
second chapter of the Katha Upanishad, with the verses I quoted above, with
death making a primary distinction between the wise, who chose the path of the
good, and the foolish, who chose pleasure. In the translation made by Shree
Porohit Swami and Englished by Yeats, the verse goes; “Who follows the good,
attains sanctity; who follows the pleasant, drops out of the race.” I take this
to be teasing us with a sense of paths, tracks, traces – something that lets us
follow. But I also like the translation I am quoting: “These two, having
different ends, bind a man.” In Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”,
there is a nice passage about Ananke’s net – Ananke being necessity:
“According to Parmenides, being itself is
trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of
things, we find an immense light, “bound in the sky and embracing its whole
circumference, the way hempen ropes are gound around the hulls of galleys.” In
each case, knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curses back
on itself, a knotted rope (peirar0 that holds everything within its limits
(peras). Dei, a key work, meaning ‘it is necessary’, appears for the first time
in the Iliad: “why is it necessary (dei) for the Argives to make war on the
Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of
everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to deo, ‘to
bind’, and not to dea, ‘to lack’ as other philologists would have it. It is the
same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the
dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language:
‘it is bound to happen.’
Tracks do form nets. Reading this, I
thought surely Callaso would then reference Vernant and Detienne’s wonderfully
mysterious book on Cunning among the Greeks, which teases out a variety of
binding, rope twisting and corded words to fill in the semantic field of the
ruse – of metis. But he doesn’t. Myself, I am reminded of the fact that
civilization has long been identified with metalwork – the bronze age, the iron
age – rather than work with fabric. When the Spaniards conquered the Incas,
they conquered a culture that had inherited another set of assumptions
entirely, deriving from knots and nets. Charles Mann makes this point in 1491,
going over recent discoveries in Peruvian archaeology that point to the
privileged place of netmaking and weaving from the earliest times. And, of
course, there are the khipu, the Incan knot language that was assumed, until
recently, to be a form of accounting. Gary Urton, a Harvard archaelogist, is
the most prominent recent figure to say, not so – there’s words encoded in those
knots and filaments. But such a base for civilization, such soft technology,
blindsided the Europeans, who couldn’t even see that it was a technology. Even
though, of course, knots, strings, fabrics, weaving do have a lively underlife
from the Greeks through the Renaissance witches, and of course every marriage
is a knot tied. (Although there is a counterknot to prevent marriage – the
noueurs d’aiguillettes were persecuted by Parliamentary decree in France).
Everything here is so old that it happened
in your dreams last night, from the three wishes to the division between the
wise and the foolish, the path of the good and the path of pleasure, and the
bewilderment that came over you as you went down the path until a wolf
appeared…
que voy a hacer - je suis perdu…
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