Ovid, Metamorphoses

I watch a lot of How I Met Your Mother, and I think one of its greatest successes is its ability to jump back and forth in time without displacing the viewer. It is, by virtue of the framing device of Ted telling his kids how he met their mother, a continual story-within-a-story, and the characters themselves are prone to flashbacks, digressions, and imagination. It's an admirable exercise in time travel, and they pull it off well.

I'd like to imagine that at the start of every season, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas sit at a long writers' table with individual copies of Ovid's Metamorphoses, furiously highlighting and diagramming all the story arcs, mumbling, "Shit, that's good, why didn't we think of that?" That's because Ovid's poem, stretching 15 books and almost 600 pages, is not just a compendium of Greek and Roman mythology, but a narrative that weaves all the stories together like the cult of Minerva sitting at their looms. Tying together so many disparate stories would be an achievement in itself, but there is even more to it. In a poem about stories, the characters themselves drive the action by telling stories of their own; the original threads often get lost in the fray, but you don't get hung up on it, because that's the point: one story begets another, and the effect is less like HIMYM's Matryoshka flashbacks and more like the titular metamorphoses.


Metamorphosis, or Universal Contiguity

Ovid has a specific goal in writing a book of myths connected by metamorphoses. To shed light on what that is, let's look briefly at the uses of metamorphosis in the poem. When the gods travel down to earth, they usually change their form temporarily (in Jove's case, so that he won't be identified as the serial rapist terrorizing Greece). More often, however, transformations are permanent, sudden, and imposed rather than voluntary. They can be punishments (Diana is particularly fond of this usage), but they can also be saving graces: Myrrha is changed into a tree when she is afraid of bearing her and her father's lovechild.

Metamorphosis also creates a connection between people. Pythagoras, the Greek mystic and mathematician, shows up in the second-to-last book to espouse his -- and likely Ovid's -- philosophy on metamorphosis: "For all things change, but no thing dies... Your bodies, whether they have been consumed by flames upon the pyre or worn away by time, can suffer nothing more, I say. But over souls – be sure – death has no sway: each soul, once it has left one body, takes another body as its home, the place where it lives on.” All this is to say that Pythagoras shares the belief, along with Buddhists, Father Zosima in Brothers K, and countless others, that time "is like a river, flowing on an endless course." It's fascinating how often this thought occurs.

Connections don't exist only between souls. Italo Calvino writes an essay entitled "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" that stresses the connection made between heaven and earth and among all earthly things. Metamorphosis is the means through which Ovid emphasizes that all is one, made up of the same basic elements. For example, "what most catches the attention about Daphne is her disheveled hair... so that in the flowing lines of her flight she is already predisposed toward metamorphosis into a plant." The transformations are much like those in Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast's servants are turned into household objects but retain their human characteristics, e.g. the boy a chipped tooth becomes a chipped teacup. Calvino quotes an essay by some dude named Shcheglov: "The event [metamorphosis] is no longer represented as a fable, but as a set of habitual and likely facts: growth, diminution, hardening, softening, curving, straightening, compression, rarefaction, etc." There are no wild metamorphoses, only those that could arise from natural processes. 

It should be noted that the focus on metamorphosis makes stories without a transformation stand out. When Procris, who suspects her husband Cephalus of cheating, secretly follows him on his hunt, she is pierced by his arrows when he takes her rustling to be that of an animal. Instead of a god saving her by turning her into a tree that is unaffected by the arrow or a bird that can dodge it, she is struck and dies, leaving her husband to grieve without hope. (He deserves it though: he basically forced her to cheat on him by turning into another man and seducing her and then being like, "Hah! I knew you were cheating on me, whore.") 


Love

Though Metamorphoses is an epic poem, it has little in common with the Iliad and the Odyssey, or ever the Aeneid. The focus is not on battle and bravery, although all three of those poems are featured and summarized. Ovid's preoccupation is with love, which isn't surprising given that he wrote a ton of love poetry.

Ovid gives love the treatment that war received in other Classical poems, elevating it to divine status, and he features the entire spectrum of human relationships: love at first sight, which men are particularly susceptible to; obsessive love, which afflicts women; incest; homosexual relationships; and self-love, in the form of Narcissus (whose lament, by the way, is really beautiful). His account of Pyramus and Thisbe lives on as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. (Theirs is arguably a better love story. The lovers live next door to one another, but are kept from being together, a prohibition they circumvent by speaking to each other through a crack in the wall: “The wall their houses shared had one thin crack, / Which formed when they were built and then was left; / In all these years, no one had seen that cleft; / but lovers will discover every thing.”)

I'll close this short section with just a few lines:

“Joy indeed can’t be complete, and happiness is always marred by griefs.”

“We lovers fear all things!”

“Sorrow has its origin in joys.”

“It is audacity that’s opportune in love.” 

And one of the best uses of iambic pentameter:

"Don’t let them write upon my sepulcher that I have died because of you.” 

Life

I'm really glad I stuck it out with Ovid because it finally allowed me to articulate what I love about Greek and Roman writing. From a passage about a wave capsizing a ship: “A wave, triumphant – proud of all its spoils and prey – heaves high, looks down upon the other waves, until – as if one were to tear away Mount Athos or Mount Pindus from its base – it falls headlong and, with its crushing weight, sends down the ship.”

It's rare to find this sort of fantastical personification in any other literature. In the midst of the hero's ship being swept into the sea, the wave is not portrayed menacing or evil, but triumphant and proud: it earns its own story, the tale of a small wave who dreams of being a monstrous tsunami and gets its wish. The Greeks and Romans seem to be able to find unfettered joy in all aspects of nature. It's too sentimental and over-the-top to find nowadays.

It reminds me of a quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude: on his writing being tagged as "magical realism," Garcia Marquez said, "reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs;" that is to say, realism is all well and good, but there's more to the realness than facts. The ancients seem to understand this, and a sort of everyday magic permeates their logic. 

Stray Observations

• Metamorphosis isn't always physical. When Daedalus' son Icarus dies because he flew too close to the sun with wax wings, he names an island "Icaria" in his memory. 
• Another example of over-the-top Roman metaphors: “As, when the axes strike the massive trunk, the tree will waver at the moment just before the final blow: one does not know which way it is to fall; upon all sides men now rush off – so, too, enfeebled by so many blows from many sides, the mind of Myrrha leans this way, then that.” 
• Personified Envy is all about opposites. “She never smiles except when some sad sight brings her delight; she is denied sweet sleep, for she is too preoccupied, forever vigilant; when men succeed, she is displeased – success means her defeat.” And: “It is hard for Envy not to weep, since there is nothing there that calls for tears.” 
• I saw a book at 57th Street Books called Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes and, damn, it's true, but not only of Zeus (Jove/Jupiter). The gods generally seem incapable of even basic insight. Case in point: Phoebus, god of the sun, is approached by his illegitimate son, Phaeton, who asks his father for proof of his divine heritage. Phoebus isn't sure what proof he can offer, so Phaeton, being a dumb teenager, asks if he can ride Phoebus ridiculous sun-chariot. Phoebus is unsure but ultimately relents, and Phaeton has fun until he loses control and burns up the entire fucking earth. 
• There's a very shot story about a wolf in one of the books that really stood out to me for a reason I can't quite explain. 
• It's been almost a year since I graduated college, so here's a cliche line about time: "The flight of time eludes our eyes, it glides unseen; no thing is swifter than the years." I might as well have quoted Green Day's "Time of Your Life."