Creature : garment

T

he orcas wear a salmon hat, is the summer 2025 dispatch on shenanigans in the ocean world. They—the grampi, Orciduses, bad mammals—apparently clown around by finding a salmon, balancing it on their sinister, flat-topped heads, and cavorting. We’re not sure if it’s a fashion trend, or a decoy to attract more poor fish into the gloating jaws, or just for the ghoulish pleasure. Uncertain, too, if the salmon is definitely dead, or if it’s terrified or coerced into silence and immobility, before the besporting starts. It’s hard to fathom the motivation.

Human : animal

Let’s loop back a little to the Circe episode in Homer’s Odyssey, book 10 (the one before the Book of the Dead) as recounted by the eponymous hero. He and his men have left Aeolia and got back to within sight of Ithaca, only to mess up with the bag of winds, and suffer at the hands of the man-eating Laestrygonians. Just one ship-full of men, weary and tearful, is left. They pitch up in an island and see red smoke coming from a fine, polished palace in the middle. Half the crew make an exploring party, knock on the door, and are welcomed in by the goddess Circe. She gives them fine food, but, as the 1946 Rieu translation says, “she introduced a noxious drug, to make them lose all memory of their native land. [. . .] Now they had pigs’ heads and bristles, and they grunted like pigs; but their minds were as human as they had been before. So, weeping, they were penned in their sties.”

Eating : carrying

Odysseus feels obliged to set out for the palace on a rescue mission, rejecting his crew-mate’s exhortation to just flee, with the decisive statement, “I shall go. I have absolutely no choice.” On his way, he encounters Hermes, who presents him with a pre-antidote to Circe’s poison; it will make him immune to Circe’s drug, and Odysseus must then extract promises of good behaviour from Circe before sleeping with her. That’s the helpful advice from the messenger god. It’s interesting that though many other moments of action from this chapter are told or even repeated in detail, the exact mechanism and process of this counteracting plant are a little vague. Hermes explains, “here is a drug of real virtue that you must take with you into Circe’s palace,” and Odysseus says that Hermes “handed me a herb he had plucked from the ground, and showed me what it was like. It had a black root and a milk-white flower. The gods call it moly, and it is a dangerous plant for mortal men to dig up. But the gods, after all, can do anything.” That’s it; there’s no close-up of him ingesting the plant. It looks as though he just has to carry it with him, this black-and-white preventative, prophylactic plant.

Hermes’ plan goes as stated. Odysseus shows admirable prioritisation by obeying Circe’s instruction to “come with me to my bed, so that in making love we may learn to trust one another,” but on the other hand he’s too upset to eat, until she agrees to reinstate the men. She smears them with “some new ointment. Then the bristles which her first deadly potion had caused to sprout dropped off their limbs, and they became men again and looked younger and much more handsome and taller than before.”

Everyone is pleased; the Ithacans stay there for a whole year, feasting and resting. Then all the crew want to get home; Odysseus agrees, and Circe concurs, saying only that they must first go down to Hades to confirm directions. This whole Circe adventure is not the worst, for the Greeks. Odysseus enjoys it. Only one sailor, Elpenor, falls off a roof and dies. The others have a pig adventure, but recover.

Bad days : good days

As well as classical literature (my regular readers might have divined by now), I’m interested in translation, and in proverbs and turns of phrase, from various languages. A recent Spanish one that pleased me was, a cada cerdo llega su San Martín—to each pig arrives his or her own Saint Martin. Saint Martin’s day, 11th November, was widely celebrated around Europe as a festival day marking the end of harvest and the onset of winter. There would be celebrations, bonfires, wine-cracking, and, to help with the feasting, the slaughtering of a cerdo, or pig.

At first glance I assumed that the phrase was similar to the English one, “every dog has his day,” with its positive overtones of, we will all be celebrated at some point, get our hour in the sun. Or, if you were feeling foolishly optimistic, you could read the proverb in a cheerful way, that even a pig gets to join in the party. But really, it means that the day of your own personal come-uppance will come, you’ll get what’s coming to you, one day. You have fucked around, and you will find out. A no-nonsense consequence.

Pig : sailor

Luckily, things don’t go as badly as this, not just now, for Odysseus’ men. They are reconstituted, recovered, healed, by Circe’s second ointment. We don’t know what this is: is it the same as the moly that Hermes presents? Surely of the same pharmaceutical group, able to repel and/or revoke the effect of the piggification poison. I’m interested that they return to their human form younger, more handsome and taller than before—the experience has perhaps frightened them but has improved them (from a conventional dating perspective). Also we don’t really know what moly is—a magic herb with a black root and white flower. Sort of orca-coloured.

Spanish : isiZulu

There’s another language that for residential purposes I’ve dabbled in, which is isiZulu, one of South Africa’s national languages. What’s the word for “shark,” I of course wanted to learn. One is imfingo, a “species of dark-colored shark” (says English-Zulu Zulu-English Dictionary, Wits UP, 1990). Imfingo also means, a “medicine used for counteracting a harmful charm.” This is cool. (Isifingo, “deep darkness preceding the dawn,” likewise.) So this is what Hermes presents to Odysseus to keep about his person (it seems), to stop Circe being able to translate him into a pig: the monochrome moly, which is imfingo. Looking further, the noun comes from the verb finga, meaning, “to render harmless, destroy the virtue of a harmful charm”, and, as a second definition, “to cause to forget, dull the memory.” There’s a lot of excellent concepts swimming about in the same etymological pool, here.

Remembering : forgetting

I like this from the isiZulu, the fact that the same word applies for making harmless, stopping it hurting, and, making someone forget. Imfingo, the thing that heals, by this linguistic chain of associations, is, forgetting. Letting it go, moving on in your voyage. If something hurts, the way to heal it is by forgetting. Or, there’s another common recommendation: time, as the healer. But who wants to wait. Odysseus’ men, fed up with the lap of luxury, prompt him to get going, not to dally longer. “It’s time you thought of Ithaca.” (I’d prefer it if they had said, how can you forget your homeland like this, but I have to admit, they don’t.)

But there’s one snag about the sailors and their memories. Odysseus says that Circe first drugged them “to make them lose all memory of their native land.” That’s fine, but we’re also told that “their minds were as human as they had been before.” So which is it: that they carry on, essentially the same as before but just trapped in pig bodies; or, that they turn outwardly porcine and they have no memory of before, of home. In that sense, then, though, in what way are they still human? It’s so much of who we are. The past, the memories. Even the painful ones.

And, they don’t permanently forget, as we can tell by the fact that when they’re back as humans they want to leave, home for Ithaca. I don’t think Homer has it quite right: with Circe’s first ointment (yes ok oinkment) the sailors don’t actually forget, they’ve just changed a bit. They are trapped in these bodies but internally the same, and the forgetting phrase is not factually about amnesia but is a turn of phrase or a metaphor meaning, I’m a bit different now. Todo cambia. Konke kuyashintsha. Everything changes.

Mind : body

All of which leaves me wondering (if not wandering, not quite so much as Odysseus), which I would prefer, of the two options that Odysseus and his sailors undergo: one is the protection of the gods, with sex and magic. The other is a painful process of becoming yourself again, a slightly scrubbed-up version. Both, would be good; I’d like to do both. And as Odysseus comments, “the gods, after all, can do anything.” But if that wasn’t available, if you had to choose only one of those two options? Divine pleasures, or transformation but it’s still always you. (Or maybe these are the same thing, after all.) Which is preferable, giving that we also factor in time, memory, language, substances, healing? We can think about this, ponder the literary, linguistic, mythical precursors. Maybe there’s an option. Or in the end maybe it’s not worth worrying about it; it’s just fate toying with us like a bad orca prances around with the sad salmon. Or maybe it’s like Odysseus says as he sets out from his ships, “I have absolutely no choice.” I’ll think about it. Unless I forget.

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Thanks to Jack White and Olivia Mole.