PAN AND HIS PIPES: NATURE ALIVE!

“The god that brings madness can also take it from us.” — J. Hillman

It was the Great Plague, the Black Death, that brought on the flourishing of the Renaissance, that expansive time of art and humanism held up as high culture. Fifty-million people died over a seven-year period, nearly two-thirds of the entire European population. A culture doesn’t easily forget such a horrifying atrocity. It is this very memento mori—a daily remembrance of death—that in fact precipitated this re-nascence. It is an acknowledgment of mortality that arises alongside rebirth, that guides our lives and actions towards a possible better future. The lesson from the Renaissance is: In order to live fully we must daily remember to die. 

Today we appear to have visions of rebirth without the dissolution and sacrifice that is coterminous with it. We want golden light without its shadow, the perfection of economic and political systems without upheaval, and the verdant garden without the composted rot. We want there to be a glimmer always at the end of the tunnel, always hope, always a way out. Yet, when has anything changed because it was hoped? 

In Greek myth, when Pandora visits Hades to retrieve a vessel of evils, she is instructed not to open it for fear that the pestilence contained therein would find a way out. She opens the box of course, as stories like these go, and the evils of the underworld are released into the realms above. However, acting quickly, she slams the lid shut and catches one last evil, Elpis, hope.

What are we to make of hope as an evil, as contained inside pandora’s box? Doesn’t hope give us strength to fight another day, to continue on? Isn’t it necessary for living a life worth living? Hoping has the peculiar tendency to project us into the future, sublimating our worried minds through a condition of idealistic denial. Hope is a balm, a bandage, helpful for a bleeding heart, but potentially preventative for feeling the depths needed for renewal. Problems superficially examined will produce superficial solutions, and too much hope can block the troubling insight of darkness.

Humor is much better than hope. It allows for catharsis within a dilemma without removing us from the tragedy. It sinks us deeper into our distress by replacing denial of the head with rumblings of the gut. To be humored is to be humble, open to receive the soiled messages percolating in the soul. Humors being fluids are also remedial for dryness, corrigent for hardened senses and unsympathetic eyes.

It is not deep-seated change that our culture seems to want. The culture at large hopes normal will be the new rebirth. It may be educative to know that the concept derives from the Late Latin normalis, a word meaning “at right angles” and "in conformity with rule.” 

No. It is not normalcy but time-out-of-time that affords renewal; not the tick-tock of chronological structuralism, but the cathartic wellspring of the opportune. It will come from being present at just the right time, ensue through making moves that wiggle with this rhythmic groove. And with luck Fortuna and her lot will cast out tokens of chance. So what, if given the chance, can we do in the nick of time? 

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“The great god Pan is dead!” called the sailor Thamus on his way to Italy nearly 2000 years ago, and it seems we have been wrestling with this proclamation ever since.

Pan was a figure in Greek and Roman mythology who appeared in the psyche, not literally, but imaginally, as a personified image. He resided over wild areas, fields and flocks. He was the unruly friend of shepherds, a companion to nymphs, and prone to rustic music or impromptus, offhand spontaneous songs (think quarantine music from the balconies of Milan). He played his Pan pipes, a string of differing lengths of reed tied together to resemble a mouth harp, the sound of which could woo and entrance listeners to dance to the tune. He is often affiliated with sex, fertility, spring. His figure has been depicted in art as resembling a satyr, with the lower half of a horse or goat and the upper half a man.

Pan brings panic. His time is high noon, when the light is direct and bright and everything is in full view. We are now awash in the intensities of pandemonium, pandemic, the omni-present issues that we can’t avoid or prove. Mania has the reins—we are meddling in conspiracy, cover-ups, deceits and mishandlings. We are forced into looking at the messes we have made. 

Carl Jung once offered, “The gods return as diseases.” We have so abused the cartesian dichotomy which posits the earth out there is dead, inert, and under our control, that now this very same nature is returning as a pathologized god. The thought is: archetypal patterns that govern the world, our culture, and our bodies cannot be suppressed indefinitely and eventually rear their heads masked as crisis. Those silly little myths the ancients brewed up come back as symptoms… Pandemic the invisible devil, the all-encompassing power of nature in its tyrannical (pathological) form. 

Yet, and this is important, “The god that brings madness can also take it from us.” 

This is the old remedial approach of “like cures like.” As the French saying goes, Les extremes se touchent (the extremes touch). The hand that kills can also be the hand that feeds. And if we put two extremes together, things move. The battery, the magnet, the earth all run on poles, and two connected poles can reverse the course of things spontaneously. We may now be in such a reversal, a collective enantiodromia for better or for worse, and if nothing else, it is kicking up our repressed material in order that we have a look. 

I am suggesting the pandemic arrival of Pan and the call of his pipes is harking back the power and aliveness of the world. 

There is a very old idea echoed throughout the ages: we are here to admire. We are here to be enraptured by the beauty of creation and this sanguine act itself lifts the world up. It makes meaning possible. It slows the mania down. It is admiration as activism—a radical aesthetic. It looks like being fucking astonished by the wonder of it all. In love. Moved. When ravished by beauty we are disabused of naivety, we are crushed and taken and thrust into the world.

In the tales told about him, it is a trick of Pans he plays on the nymphs—he fucks them into being. He ravishes them. They run and hide and fear and swoon. His actions have been described as rape in various mythological commentaries, but don’t get stuck on the literalism and harshness of that word. We can be metaphorically raped, torn away from our unconsciousness self-reflectiveness. We can be shocked into reality by the hard slap of a wound. We can be in awe, agape and marvelous, blown open by the unthinkable vastness and complexity of the cosmos. And in that place, when removed from our smallness, threads of light can enter like the fluted sounds of larks, like stars, like mountains—the experience of our home on this earth as unthinkably true.

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The alchemists of the middle ages held a final image of their work as a king and queen, rex and regina, sitting on a thrown: the sanguine, regal, bloody-mindedness of the lion; the richness of life in crimson-violet hue; absolute presence, no false pretenses, things displayed as they magnanimously are. Yet like the gods who return as diseases, this image can be pathologically skewed, and the tyrannical ruler can seize the earth it once aimed to uphold. 

Is it not a deluded fantasy to think life is about my coronation? Don’t we get lost in Narcissus’s pool when everything becomes my display? For it is the exaltation of matter, the crowning of the world, to which the alchemists point—exaltation is, “An operation by which matter is altered in its inclinations, and is elevated to a higher dignity of substance and virtue.” If we do not see the world as exalted, precious and true, then why save it? If the earth and all of its beauty does not move us to act, then what will? Statistics? Guilt? Hope? What? 

The now disrupted norms of the king-as-tyrant may offer us a fleeting but tangible moment’s chance. To the alchemists it’s an application of poison that instigates the crowning, a caustic that corrodes our manic defenses of hardness. In this way, the virus may be a cure which is both remedy and toxin, offering the time to dissolve the ego’s grip on what divides us. The dilemma we face is difficult, but if Pan be any clue, we must be pulled heart-long towards a life that moves us with the gravity of desire. Beauty, shock, and awe first, then action follows…in losing our selves to life we may then gain the world.