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3. Pythagoras, Indifference, and the Beautiful Soul
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To understand the sense of memory in Orphic and Pythagorean practice and thought we need to consider experiences of ignorance. I don’t have in mind only a lack of information. I’m thinking of a sense of ignorance in a context of knowing that being alive is mostly a matter of misery and unhappiness, frequent sickness, infection, and unrelieved pain; simple not-knowing with depression and boredom, fear; mindless repetition, work that breaks down bodies. And staring ignorantly before occasional moments of transcendence in which people feel no pain or sorrow or fear. Ignorance in hearing rare people who hold vast stores of ordered words in their minds, who give accounts of undying things and who know the secrets of serenity, peace, and life without change. We should hold in mind, too, not knowing why water comes from the sky, the earth sometimes shakes, wind blows, and beautiful things disappear. To understand the sense of memory in Orphic and Pythagorean practice and thought, we need to think of lives lived without the order of writing, of stories that give at once order and order’s breakdown, of stories of wild and tempestuous things that no story can hold. And, of strange things: blood, intoxication, dead THREE Pythagoras, Indifference, and the Beautiful Soul She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need show only separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. —Ian McEwan, Atonement things with things springing from them alive. When we think of ignorance we should think of dumbness—muteness—in a world that holds but does not seem to hear or care for people’s stories about it. Is there Someone there who hears or cares? Some order of preservation? Is there something we can do to erase the chaos or to give us an edge, a knowledge of the way that avoids disaster? What holds still long enough for us to know it? What lasts long enough to conquer death? How do we reach that still point that we can sometimes almost feel, a point that seems to hold steady with a life that is indifferent—unthreatened, unmoved—by the sum of human catastrophe ? How might we hold things and ourselves still? Still enough to know fully, to see completely, to overcome change? Still enough not to deteriorate ? Not to die? The sense of memory that I would like to consider in the context of seventh- and sixth-century ... Greek culture constitutes the opposite of ignorance. It—memory—came as a vaguely maternal promise of salvation and then, in Plato, transformed into a form of nonritualized knowledge. Throughout this process, the indifference of the cycle of mortality and careless eternity remains constant, and ignorance is defined by the circumscription of generation and decay, and hence the need for care. A simple discipline that Pythagoras recommended—that of recalling at the end of each day what a person has done and left undone—is neither as simple nor as strictly psychological as it might seem to us.1 He is requiring a practice of memory whose purpose is only secondarily to allow people to come to know themselves. It is primarily a practice by which a nonmortal agency might come to force, an agency without ignorance, the very presence of Mnemosyne. “The very presence of Mnemosyne” is an awkward Pythagoras, Indifference, and the Beautiful Soul | 23 1. What Pythagoras in fact said or wrote is beyond reasonable determination. There are no extant documents that are clearly written by him. Many reports about him and what he said are available, however, and when I speak of “Pythagoras” I am referring to such reports. There are many discussions of these sources. Those that I have consulted include the following: Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001); Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge, 1983) and Mortals and Immortals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press...