Doors Unbarred to Mountains (On Thymos, Psyche, and Eros And the Figures Which They Cut)

Μῦθος is a memory — othered
and uttered in word and sound
like a dewdrop gleaned
from a vanished night

that left us of what was
emblems, only misted signs
from which a poem or a chant
then reaped and mixed

washed-out pearls and shells
garnered side by side,
not unlike what μῦθος meant
to Aristotle and his poetics:

“arrangement of the incidents” in tragedy
that needs to include something
that is stray, ill, deceptive, false —
the cause that brings about the doom.

And, in this, μῦθος mirrors the spirit,
its own consanguine twin — θυμός,
conscience-free Odysseus’
daemon-goad and inner voice,

the seat and throne of anger (orgē)
of the unjust, apt for a tyrant or a king.
Just as in the tale of “the best and most
beautiful city in speech (or argument),”

πόλις τῷ λόγῳ, θυμός is inserted,
similar to the “noble lie” — like a wedge,
a bar, a separating cut — between
logos and eros — as if to join

the two or to cross from one
to the other, one has to pass
through the thymos’ gaping jaws —
not unlike, in Symposium,

with thymotic Alcibiades trying to
insert himself between Socrates
and Agathon (“The Good”): Θυμός,
a “rising vapor,” sacrificial smoke

and offering for the favors of the powers
of the dark — and that’s also why,
in the Republic, in the “Apocalypse”
of Plato’s opus, Socrates unveils at last

the deepest feud behind all the other feuds,
“the ancient rivalry” between tragedy,
the poetics of thymotic infernal smokes
and its Eros-Thanatos, and philosophy

that, in this war over the soul of our self,
reads θυμός and its θυμοί, tales
and “poetry” — making of deadly
tragedies out of fates for men.

For, as the Bhagavad-Gita says,
“there was no death and nothing
to set off things apart till all
was obscure at first — dim

and dark in the dark — and all
but an endless, formless ocean —
the heart of nothingness which took
on being — born of severe heat.”