WHAT IF SISYPHUS HAD SUCCEEDED IN PUSHING
THE ROCK UP TO THE TOP OF THE HILL, TO LODGE THERE SAFELY?
I
desire the world to be covered with Greek statues and masterpieces --Albert Camus
The existential hero of ancient Greek mythology Sisyphus is a
good paradigm for the middle-class lifestyle. We rise in the morning, go to
work, labor, look forward to rest at home, then rest at home, then begin all
over again the next day. Sisyphus, for various misdemeanors (quite heroic ones)
was condemned after his death to push a huge, heavy rock up a hill in the realm
of Tartarus and watch it fall each time he reached
the top with it, a gargantuan effort. The French existentialist poet and writer
Albert Camus ennobled this for us, illustrating the everyman-aspect of this
hero and the importance of the effort rather than any end product. To him, Das Arbeit war alles; and many ideologies and rationalizations ennoble
the middle-class lifestyle. To ask what would happen if Sisyphus’s rock lodged
at the top of the hill may be quite similar to wondering what happens to
ordinary people who win millions at the lottery – that sort of thing. For many
of them it is destructive, disrupting their routines and confounding their
whole value system. Others are strong enough and disciplined enough to shoulder
this burden wisely. Some don’t touch their lifestyle at all. Others can move up
safely. In other words, there is little to be gained from analogues in this
case, though they do provide perspective on a myth which, like all myths, is
meant to illuminate and lend universal meaning to all of our lives in one way
or another.
I
picture the following scenario: Sisyphus does his thing and pauses at the top
to wipe the sweat from his brow, awaiting the usual, the drop. But this time
the stone stays. He has exerted that fraction of extra strength necessary to
keep it there. Sisyphus squints in disbelief. “Something is amiss somewhere,”
he thinks. “This is not in the script. Eternity [the term of his punishment]
has not ended. It can’t by definition.”
Like
most of us in situations where something is amiss, he wonders what to do and finally
summons the maintenance staff – probably Hephaestus in this case, the weapons
forger and blacksmith among the Greek gods. The hunchback, lame god scratches
his bald head in disbelief and decides to refer the matter to those in charge,
Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld. Other villains being
punished in Tartarus look over at Sisyphus in
disbelief and envy: Ixion on his fiery wheel,
Tantalus standing in the water he can never drink, beneath the fruit trees he
can never quite reach, Tityus whose liver is being
devoured by vultures. Sisyphus feels like Tarzan all of a sudden forced to put
on a three-piece suit, stripped of his role as atoning villain. The gods wonder
what went wrong and are wary to tamper with this miraculous event, entirely
counter to Zeus’s divine decree. Just as Sisyphus once conquered death, now he
seems to have pierced eternity. Sisyphus’s fate had risen to a linguistic
image, after all: Sooner will Sisyphus’s rock reach the top of the hill and
stay there than…” (fill
in the impossible event). An image has become invalid: the unsinkable Titanic sank – that sort of thing. There
is a huge puzzle no one can solve.
Sisyphus
contemplates existence (afterlife) free of his endless, cyclical labor, free of
absurdity. Will he, like Annie Dillard’s blind people, push the rock down the
hill again just to regain the routine? Will he move to be relocated to the Elysian
Fields to play shuffleboard with Anchises and
Menelaus? The image of Noah’s ark lodged on
Or
should he wait for the rock to fall down the hill again if there is wind? Or
has it lodged too firmly for that? Was this an act of chance or a deliberate
decision by Zeus? Perhaps the king of the gods needs an intelligent counselor
instead of a prisoner; he will receive more respect for meting out punishment
fairly and not simply removing those who threaten any of his godly faculties.
There
are scholars who believe Prometheus is the son Zeus refused to
father, having heard a prophecy
that the wily Titan would overthrow him and reclaim the Cosmos the Olympians had
taken from them.
One
notes the paradox that punishment has ennobled Sisyphus and that this hero,
bound to inertia like most of us, fears a sudden, even favorable change; will
Elysium be a curse? The old question intrudes again: is nobility symbiotic with
suffering? Can a human being live a good life surrounding by nothing but good
fortune? Job evidently did but God allowed him to become Satan's guinea pig.
Can one attain enlightenment under totally untrying
circumstances? Can God attempt another Garden of Eden and will we learn from
the past, innocence lost but millennia of civilization traversed and
comprehended in all their triumphs and failings?
Persephone and Hades, no intellectuals, refer the issue to the judges of
the underworld, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus (Achilles’ grandfather), St. Peter’s counterparts,
who direct newly arrived souls to where in the underworld they will inhabit.
Shall we allow Hercules’ mother to free Sisyphus? She married Rhadamanthys and at her death was conducted by Hermes to
her husband’s side to dwell with him. A body was never found and in its place,
in her coffin, Hercules’ godly children Cronus would
have devoured had their mother not saved them. Stones are symbols in Greek
mythology. If Sisyphus’s cyclical activity is some variant on Helios’s daily
journey (Homer provides us no time element for the rising and falling of the
stone, but Odysseus seems to be able to observe the entire process in a presumably
brief time during his journey to the underworld), then his assigned activity is
fraught with meaning. Stones replace people. Homer calls the stone “shameless”
for its weight and the effort it costs Sisyphus, presumably. We must figure out
where else in life or mythology one person pushes another up and then must
watch them fall until the process is somehow ended. The Orpheus myth seems to
apply, but there is certaInly nothing anaideÐs about Eurydice, a woman
in love.
At the
risk of curtailing the speculative spiral of the last paragraph, though, I
deflect my focus to the archaic word Homer applies to Sisyphus's rock, laas. It does not
occur often in ancient Greek epics, replaced by the more productive lithos and petreÐ.
There is a curious homonymity, an associative
phenomenon quite operative in Homer, between this term and the word for
"people,"
What
can we conclude? To my mind, both Prometheus and Sisyphus, in varying ways,
took upon themselves the elevation of their fellow humans and paid large
penalties. Hercules, another benefactor of humanity, appears right after Sisyphus
in Odysseus's account of his travails in the underworld. But Prometheus and
Sisyphus are both cerebral heroes, having outwitted the gods. Both attempted to
give us more - some of the things the gods enjoy routinely and take for
granted, fire and immortality. To explore what Prometheus gave us with that
gust of fire is another essay in itself.
Note the "Noah" connection again: he is the son of Iapetus, Greek for Japheth, the ancestor of the Caucasian
race, son of Noah. Sisyphus is claimed by mythology to be the grandson of
Deucalion and Pyrrha. Before there were Christian
saints, there were classical heroes, paragons of virtue, both punished right
along with true villains for having crossed the gods, which may explain why
religion evolved further, in an effort to improve God and improve ourselves in
this process, precisely the goal of these two very early martyrs.
Marta
Steele