The next day Alexander, relieved, left Gordion at the head of his troops.
A few weeks after the knot episode he received a letter from his master in Athens.
Alexander had previously read those letters as befits a pupil, with urgent attention and proper respect, but with the passage of time the dialogue had broken off, the conversation had inevitably turned into a monologue. The philosopher gave an account of the problems he was working on. Alexander gave his position on the expanding map of the world and limited himself to brief information on himself, banal as a war communiqué.
The Stagirite2, resident of a decaying provincial capital, a philosopher reflecting in the shade of small trees, could not understand his royal pupil, who hunted the fleeting ghost of Achilles without rest, driving infinite herds of mountains, deserts, and forests before him, riding a horse’s back as if it were a wave, in measureless space, in limitless time no days or nights could contain, plunged in the clamor of battle and the hush of battle sites, striped with light and blinding blackness like a tiger.
Philosophers probably need a stable point of reference over the swirling ocean of phenomena. But an unmoving leader would be a figure as absurd as a square triangle.
The Greeks—Alexander thought—most often contented themselves with their own surroundings, the horizons of their homeland; they also had a curious tendency to look at the cosmos from the perspective of a vineyard and to draw far-reaching conclusions from modest experience. Who was it who said they resembled frogs huddled by the pond of the Mediterranean?
Alexander was at first pained and later merely irritated by the pedantic chill and unruffled pomp of the Stagirite’s letters. If was as if there was no room in them for any heart’s emotion, nor any admiration, pride, recognition for his pupil’s extraordinary achievements. Sometimes it seemed as if the sage had lost his sense of humor, the distinctive mark of a sense of reality, when for example he wrote to his charge—then occupied in besieging a city—about the characteristics of odd numbers, the political system of Carthage, the theory of Nile waves, and the lives of bees.
Aristotle’s letters usually contained three well-balanced parts, like the parts of a treatise. In the first part, the philosopher reported exhaustively on his work and scholarly projects. Then followed requests for materials that might enrich his collection of specimens in the sphere of zoology, botany, and mineralogy, as well as—Aristotle’s curiosity being truly inexhaustible—a demand for detailed information on all unusual natural phenomena and on the customs and beliefs of barbarian peoples. The letter ended with what might be called the ethical part, which contained stern reprimands, reflections on the subject of the ideal ruler, models of rational behavior buttressed with examples from the lives of great men.
This time, too, the philosopher played the role of pedagogue. He wrote that rumors had reached him (in Athens, where people relished gossip about any defeat suffered by the Macedonian) of the curious business of the Gordian knot and he had rightly inferred it to have been an unfortunate idea of Aristander’s. He reminded Alexander that he had long advocated the dismissal of that unworthy adviser, who should be sent to settle down on a farm, although if the power of his muscles was equivalent to the power of his mind, it wouldn’t do anyone any good. His fierce contempt for soothsayers struck sparks of sarcasm.
It’s one thing, the Stagirite argued, to listen to irrational voices and views—we are all condemned to that—and a completely different thing to yield to them. Alexander faced an inevitable choice: either give up his inborn power of judgment and let himself be guided by the seer, in which case the glory of future actions would not fall to him—that blow was well-aimed and must have wounded Alexander—or act independently, directed by his own reason, which was his obligation as one of royal origin and great knowledge.
And now for the knot itself. Alexander was mistaken if he imagined he had risen to the level of the task (assuming even the minimal significance of that tasteless spectacle). The knot was supposed to be untied—not cut. Any mangy butcher could have cut it.
In closing, the philosopher asked Alexander not to give any publicity to the affair. Since even gods cannot alter the past, he could only count on kindly human forgetfulness.
It is a remarkable and disturbing thing that this unfortunate affair went on to have a great career in history. Individuals who wouldn’t be able to say much about Alexander’s true achievements, at the sound of the two magical words “Gordian knot,” fall into a kind of doltish ecstasy, foam at the mouth, roll their eyes heavenward, smile approvingly. And that is precisely what is disturbing.
The Gordian knot became a common phrase, entered the linguistic storehouse of so-called civilized peoples. Worse, it advanced to the rank of a symbol. But a symbol of what? Cunning stealth, intellectual courage, the lightning transformation of idea into act, the supremacy of spirit over matter? No one among those who blithely blather on about it has tried to give an answer to these questions.
Six years after the incident in Gordion, Alexander crossed the threshold into mysterious India. At that time, as we know, it came to—or rather could have come to—the first confrontation between the Two Worlds, when near the town of Taxila he encountered the oddest people, who enjoyed universal reverence: naked philosophers, to whom the clever Greeks attached the name “gymnosophists.” The news of them, included in chronicles, became legend in the centuries that followed.
One of the gymnosophists, whose name was Mandanis, is supposed to have said that Alexander was the first armed philosopher he had seen in his life. The Greeks took this as a refined compliment. But it seems to us an expression of astonishment, and perhaps even a politely veiled accusation.
This encounter of Two Worlds ended as do all international summits, namely with the participants and potential opponents parting fully convinced of the unshakable rightness of their own views. Language difficulties were no doubt a serious obstacle on the way to a true exchange of ideas. Alexander’s army interpreters commanded only a crude vocabulary in foreign tongues and a clumsy soldier’s grammar with its predilection for infinitives and imperatives, just right for requisitioning grain, fodder, and cattle, but not very helpful in conveying subtle shades of meaning.
There was a certain Onesikritos3 in Alexander’s retinue, a navy officer and amateur philosopher in one person. It is to him that we owe the account of the unsuccessful attempt to bring two great cultures closer together. For Onesikritos came to the conclusion that the Indian gurus were simply the counterpart to the Greek Cynics. That observation probably lifted his spirits, because he was a pupil of Diogenes and so the popularity of his master’s doctrine on the edges of the world flattered his vanity. It is hard to find a more revealing example of intellectual arrogance, that is, translating what is mysterious and unknown into one’s own terms and closing one’s eyes to the world’s splendid and instructive diversity. No one wished or was able to draw the real moral from the whole story, namely that the only clothing fit for a philosopher is defenseless nakedness.
In Gordion a lamentable, even reprehensible thing occurred. The tribunals of history treat this apparently trivial incident as a joke.
If the severing of the knot had been performed by one of the Oriental satraps, it would all have been understandable and clear, like an inscription on a rock declaring the tyrant’s will to the desert in a murderous alphabet of arrows, hatchets, and swords. From Alexander one might have expected something in better taste.
After all, he realized very well, and even made sure that all his feats, his whole life, became to posterity an edifying fable, an example worth following, a paradigm. An incomprehensible blindness compelled him to introduce an element of force into the process of thought. How could he overlook the fact that the untying of knots and problems is not an athletic exhibition but an intellectual operation, which assumes the willingness to err, a helplessness before the tangled material of the world, marvelous human uncertainty, and humble patience.
Alexan
der, unable to cope with the task, destroyed the problem with a sword. We can say with a sigh of relief: it all happened a long time ago and will never happen again. But how do we know? The Gordian knot ceased to exist as a real object, but it continues to exist, stubbornly, as an object of our imagination, a cognitive riddle. We cannot erase it from memory or exclude the possibility that in the very heart of that tangle so mistreated by the conqueror there was some important inscription, warning, wisdom, prayer, hope or even just a model of an ancient cosmology. Now no one can reconstruct the knot—for how could it be done? And that is painful beyond words. The Mystery was murdered.
With a heavy heart (for who did not love Alexander) we must admit that in some sense Alexander gave legitimacy to a certain repellent form of violence. The fact that in every century the Macedonian celebrates his shameful triumphs does not justify him. To him we apply the highest standards.
It is true that violence inflicted on persons differs from violence inflicted on objects, but in the end objects are our neighbors too and demand our care because they are deprived of the power of speech and the capacity for active resistance. And anyway, we don’t know where the escalation of crime begins. Words scrawled on an innocent wall, the breaking of fragile windows, the desecration of cemeteries, burning of temples…The moment of transformation, the liberation of the ominous elements of violence is most often elusive.
That’s why we can draw an analogy between Alexander’s insane exploit and what took place later on a sunny beach in Sicily, when a Roman corporal unraveled the body of Archimedes, who had been drawing shapes and geometric figures in the sand which the simpleton couldn’t understand.
And later on, too, those processions of darkness, burnings at the stake—of papyruses, pigskin manuscripts, books—stakes onto which disobedient authors were cast as if they were a mere afterthought.
1981
PACT
THE MELANCHOLY OF archaeology. Nowadays truly notable, revelatory discoveries occur only rarely. And what is worse, spiteful fate gave the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to wealthy amateurs; lucky fellows who dug with enthusiasm but blindly (Schliemann1), taking advantage of the fact that archaeology was a science in an embryonic state.
During one of my trips to Greece I happened to stumble upon an expedition that was excavating—if I remember rightly—somewhere in the environs of Corinth. A great big pit, and people were milling around on the bottom of the pit, delicately removing layers of earth with wire brushes. A large portion of the excavation had already been laid bare—a massive, not very attractive Roman theater.
On the edge of the pit stood a slender older gentleman—perhaps the head of the expedition—gazing mournfully down. Who knows, maybe he was dreaming just then of discovering some stone tablet with a priceless inscription. Early afternoon, the heat of the sun, drops of sweat ran down the gentleman’s face and one of them stuck to the tip of his nose in the shape of a drop. I felt a wave of compassion; I wanted to go up to him and ask him on behalf of the great mass of archaeology lovers if the theater they were laboring over derived from Hadrian’s time or was perhaps a slightly later construction. But I lacked the nerve.
Yes, yes. The work of people whom we naively envy for their dazzling adventures, their dialogue with the mysteries of the remote past, chiefly consists of tedious scratching around in the dirt, just to lay bare the foundations of a banal Roman villa lost on the edges of the Imperium, traces of a prehistoric settlement or a nameless city consumed by the desert, which now looks like an enormous flat stone grate. Afterwards the research results will be registered in scholarly journals and supplied with sketches of horizontal and vertical elevation, topographical and altimetrical photos (the latter showing strata). All told in a dry language, devoid of emotion, as befits the anatomists of history.
Recently an Israeli expedition working near the town of Malhalla had that sort of unglamorous task: to determine the reach and character of the cultures of Natuf (the middle Stone Age). What do we know about the people of those distant times, apart from the fact that they battled hunger and thirst, and subsisted on hunting, fishing, and gathering. We can’t even guess what their gods were like, or their magicians and leaders, what their great terrors, their great joys were—their dreams, loves, despairs. To us they’re like a long-extinct species of fungus.
Well, the archaeologists found the settlement and a small burial ground. A row of square tombs, surrounded by stone and gravel—the monotonous layout of a military cemetery. There were well-preserved skeletons of children, adult men, women, elderly people—with their legs drawn up, their faces turned to the earth-covered sky. No sacred objects, say, a clumsily carved circle of the sun, no tools, not even a fistful of grain—dry provisions with which the dead were sent into their long eternity.
When it had already been decided to wrap up the siege on that poor necropolis, the group happened upon a tomb which on the map of the expedition bears the symbol W.III.27. The skeleton had been damaged (its crushed pelvis was a consequence of the removal of a heavy rock). The dead man reposed in the same position as the others, shinbones drawn up, left arm alongside the body, but his right arm rested in a gesture full of tenderness on the mortal remains of a five-month old puppy. The absent skin seemed to converse with the absent fur.
Naturally (though in fact it isn’t natural at all) the finding did not become the sensation of the day. It’s true that it was more modest than the discovery of Priam’s treasure-house or Tutanchamun’s tomb, and in scholarly terms it yielded at most information on the early domestication of the wolf, which as we know finally went “to the dogs.”
However, it would appear that an extraordinary, heartening, unexpected thing had happened: Stone Age man spoke to us in a whisper full of love. He affirmed the pact made twelve thousand years ago, a covenant more lasting than all the treacherous treaties of tyrants fallen into the dust of oblivion and scorn.
1981
PASSO ROMANO
YOU WOULD ONLY have to cover the caption under that photograph, and no one, but truly no one would see anything odd in the scene immortalized on the light-sensitive field, nothing to arouse concern or even common curiosity. Here you simply have a banal folk holiday, a procession in honor of a local patron, a bowling club meeting in the open air.
The foreground is clear, in the background one sees only blurred outlines of heads; in the foreground there is the figure of a young man dressed in a black shirt and breeches. He is holding a whip and gives the impression of a horseman who has just dismounted or fallen off a horse. Shifting our gaze from the left to the right side of the image, we see odd individuals, with something of low-ranking officers on leave, something of jugglers at a fair, all standing in a line as if on their marks for a cross-country race. An old dignitary with a long beard split like a Byzantine saint’s and his chest strewn sequin-like with medals, a tall lean man with an extraordinarily lush sheeplike mane, a man in dark glasses with the mien of a dime-a-dozen gangster, and a handful of others with everyday faces.
In the center of that gathering, a familiar figure. But yes, it’s him—Benito1, the smith’s son from Predappio, soon to be the idol of crowds, head of an Imperium, Scipio Africanus2 and Julius Caesar in the paperback edition. Solidly built like a circus artist, handsome as a heroic tenor, he looks into the future with emptied-out eyes. His stuck-out chest is garlanded with a sash. On his feet he wears black half-boots, quite unsuited to a military expedition, and the white bootees of a provincial fop. Soon the summons will sound from the abyss, the overture of annihilation, and then they will set off.
One may reasonably reproach the Director of the Solar System, the Lord of the Clouds. He should at this precise moment, when it’s not yet too late, send down some inferior angel who with one crack of the whip, one lion-tamer’s shout, would drive this rabble back into the cage. As we know, it happened otherwise.
A crime in its embryonic state does not instill terror in anyone. The beginnings of evil are alw
ays ridiculous, trivial, like a dumb joke; they wear the guise of innocence.
It is virtually certain that the historic photograph we have made an effort to describe will be met by our heirs with a careless shrug, and its demonic dimensions will evaporate forever. And that—in the name of holy pedagogy—is understandable. Children should be raised to worship goodness and beauty, and the fairy tales of the Grimms—those gloomy ruffians—should be cut from their reading lists, teenagers should be given Dostoevsky thinned with water, and we should excerpt from history only what is edifying.
Unfortunately, another image has been preserved, executed with the same technical apparatus a quarter-century after the first. It represents the shameful epilogue to the escapade. Even if all historic documents and sources were suppressed, teachers of lofty ideals would not be able to protect their pupils from a suffocating sense of the absurd, for the contrast between those two scenes—between the innocent beginning and the cruel end—is truly beyond the endurance of the pure in heart.
Why do we—victims of enslavement—to whom it was given to witness the dark spectacle of humiliation and atrocity, why do we soften with the years? Sober judgment and lucid condemnation yield to quiet resignation. If I remember rightly, we made no pact with fate to keep a grateful silence if we managed to survive. So where does that reluctance, that feeling of embarrassment come from when our memory touches on those times? Called before a Tribunal to give testimony to the whole truth as the last eyewitnesses, we stutter horribly, muddle our statements, mix up dates, the sequence of events, the guilty seem hardly real to us, more fools than fiends, and when we go from the courtroom into the hallway, patting our sweaty brows with a handkerchief, we think: what’s all this for, it’s high time to be done with this masochism; in the end the only ones with the right to complain are the murdered. It is very bad, disastrous, when witnesses look at their own past in disbelief and are afraid to utter the words that what happened was not at all inevitable, that it could have been avoided with a modicum of collective imagination.
The Collected Prose Page 80