Connectedness: Another Way of Looking at Life and Death
I am an amateur at ancient Greek. I had a one year high-school course 58 years ago. But I’m fascinated by the worldview implied in its grammar and vocabulary. That’s why I am now, at the age of 76, taking a zoomed course in “advanced beginner ancient Greek” at University College London, which for me (because of the time difference) takes place from 5:30 to 10:30 AM every day for two weeks.
I love that ancient Greek has three different words for “knowing,” not synonyms, but rather signifiers of different ways of knowing — by what we perceive (oida), by what we experience (empeiros), and by reasoning (gignosko). And I love that they have a third voice in addition to active and passive. In active someone does something to someone else. In passive something is done to someone by someone else. The middle voice can express a reciprocity, a reflexiveness, each affecting the other at the same time, someone doing something to himself or two people connecting to one another by what they do.
For example, consider two words that evolved to be used only in the middle voice: to enslave (doulomai) and to watch (theomai).
Unlike our notion of slavery in the Old South, in ancient Greece, master and slave were bound together by ties of service and responsibility. The grammar seems to imply that what happened to the one had an effect on the other, that when you enslaved someone, you assumed responsibility for that person; the two of you became a unit, like parent and child.
The word for “to watch” was the same root as the word for god, as if the gods were involved in the act of watching, enabling perception. And use of the middle voice can imply a reciprocal connection between watcher and watched (like the observer affecting what is observed in quantum physics).
Admittedly, these are the wild speculations of an amateur, not established scholarly truths. But the implications are intriguing.
I played with such notions in my novel Breeze.
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Here is a dialogue between Breeze and Thetis, goddess mother of Achilles. Breeze is a college-age woman from the present-day who inexplicably finds herself in the body of Briseis, slave girl and lover of Achilles. She is scrambling to adapt to her new circumstances and not reveal she is from a different time and place:
“When Achilles speaks to me — and he hasn’t now for weeks, obsessed as he is with his personal agony — he uses the dual number and the middle voice. You, too, I’ve noticed, use the middle voice in the thoughts you send to me.”
“I’ve never heard the term ‘middle voice’; but, yes, gods have their own ways of thinking and speaking,” Thetis explains. “For us, everyone and everything is connected. We don’t just do things and have them done to us. Our actions continue and have consequences which have consequences in an unending chain. Yes, there was a time when everything was alive, even the rocks; and all beings had thoughts and emotions, and everything was connected.”
“So even violence led to connections?” Breeze asks again.
“Yes, even killing. The hunter in killing his prey was bonded to his prey.”
“Humor me, please. Tell us more. Teach us. That’s why we’re here.”
“Gods dwell in connections, in the connectedness of all things. Once men spoke and thought in a connected way, the way of caring; and in those days the gods dwelt among them. Over time, more men gloried in their separateness, and thought and spoke only in terms of what they did as individuals and what was done to them as individuals. They acted as if they were free and independent; forgetting the interdependence of all creatures.”
Breeze interprets, “The entire earth was a single eco-system, a single organism, self-regulating, self-perpetuating.”
“You use strange words, girl; but I sense your meaning is similar to mine. Gaia, yes, the Earth that was once alive. Everything on Earth had its own in-dwelling spirit. But today, earth is just the passive soil from which meager living things sprout for a few days or a few seasons. Today, the world is in a fallen state. Only a handful of heroes, mainly those reputed to be the children or favorites of gods, continue to speak in what you call the middle voice. And even they only use it rarely, at times of great emotion. The fact that Achilles addresses you that way indicates his special bond with you.”
Breeze replies, “If I understand you right, when Achilles killed Hector, that was not an act with a beginning and an end. From the moment Achilles was born, he was fated to kill Hector, just as Hector was fated to be killed by him. The act of killing Hector, didn’t end Hector; rather it affirmed their connection with one another.”
“Your turn of phrase implies that it was an act of love,” notes Thetis.
“But isn’t that what your words mean? There’s emotion in connectedness, even the connectedness of revenge and blood debt. Achilles and Patroclus were a natural pair, as close as twins. Hector killed Patroclus affirming his connectedness with Patroclus’ spirit. So Achilles in killing Hector in revenge became reconnected with Patroclus.”
“There’s some sense to what you say,” Thetis affirms. “Those are relationships we would express with what you call the middle voice.”
“So you would say that when Achilles killed the queen of the Amazons, that created a special bond between him and her?” Breeze asks.
“Yes, and that bond is driving him mad, for he can’t revenge her death when he’s the one he’d have to strike against.”
“And, by the same token, whoever kills Achilles will be tied to him for all time,” Breeze concludes.
“You must be mad, young lady. By that logic, if you killed him, that would be an act of love.”
“You say that he will die two days from now. And you say that whoever kills him will be connected with him for all time. If that’s true, I would rather that it be me than Paris.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Then why do you stay here and listen to a fool like me?”
“To a human, what can matter more than life?” asks Thetis.
“How you die, when you must die.”
“But that’s a matter of fate.”
“Only if you let it be. It’s a question of wiggle room,” says Breeze.
“Wiggle what?”
“We have to go from here to there. We have to be born now and die then. But along the way, we have some degree of freedom. We can sing and dance and whistle. We can wiggle our hips. Fate may control the outline of the story of our lives; but spirit, emotion, art, and love can fill it out. And within the limits of the fated story, we have the power to make changes, so long as the story, as publicly known and publicly told, remains the same.”
“You mean you could kill Achilles?” asks Thetis.
“A day before he’s fated to die.”
“And patch things up so it looks like everything went as fated?”
“Yes, I believe that. But, do you believe it too?”
“Perhaps. It’s intriguing to think that fate could be cheated. I’ve always wanted to cheat fate.”
“Then let’s do it.”
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PS — This notion of interconnectedness reminds me of a passage I quoted in my review of Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli:
“The discovery of quantum theory … is the discovery that all the properties (variables) of all objects are relational, just as in the case of speed. Physical variables do not describe things: they describe the way in which things manifest themselves to each other.” p. 83
