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Riddles, Labyrinths

Asclepiades of Tragilus, a fourth-century poet, records the Sphinx’s riddle: “There is on earth a two-footed and four-footed creature with a single voice, and three-footed, changing its form alone of all creatures that move in earth, sky, or sea. When it walks on the most legs, then the strength of its limbs is weakest.” It’s likely he took the riddle from other authors who have slipped back into anonymity—by which I mean, I guess, that they fell back into time. I have to remind myself those poets had thumbprints like labyrinths unique to themselves, just as I have my own. But it is the riddle, whose answer for each of us is the same, that gets to have an identity more or less permanent.

The Sphinx seized and devoured young and old, large and small. A scholiast, writing about Euripides, notes: “But also the handsomest and loveliest of all, the dear son of blameless Creon, noble Haemon.” How blameless Creon is any reader of ancient tragedy can decide for herself. No one seems very blameless. We sense in the riddle some compulsion to answer, though we know it might be wiser to keep quiet. The words seem to contain a secret just as we ourselves seem to contain one. Mostly we fear what we want—that the answer will let the secret out, and somehow, as if by magic, we’ll be released by letting go of the answer we had contained.

The riddle seems immune to mortality, and though to answer wrong is to face death in the form of the Sphinx’s punishment, to answer correctly admits to the same fact: a man begins weak and gains strength only to become weak again. The riddle is deathless, even when the answer is death. Nor does answering correctly release you from the Sphinx’s crisis. It just presses in the air an invisible button called pause.

Words that, for many years, felt to me they admitted intellectual failure, have changed their nature: I don’t know. Now they seem to me words of spiritual honesty.

When I read Oedipus Rex I say to myself a silent prayer that this time Oedipus, brash man of brilliant mind, might reach the gates of Thebes and in answer to the Sphinx’s question say, I don’t know, and walk past the walled city that he does not know is his home.

But the prayer never comes true.

Today a milk-white butterfly landed on the lavender to take her fill of nectar, and the humble-bee scared her away to sip at the same blossom. I guess they heard the same question though it was silent to me, eating honey on toast.

Such strange hopes persist in silence. The grief substitute. The alternate.

Riddles riddle silence. Pierce it. Bewilder it by betraying it. It is as if a question had been asking itself forever without being heard, somewhere behind the mind or deeper than it, somewhere within the intangible reaches of soul, and then so gradually it escapes notice until it can no longer be ignored, the silent thing called out into voice. The riddle says, Tell me what you know, and when you do tell, you open your eyes to the fact that you don’t know what it is you know.

Wisdom makes the problem worse.

An apocryphal fragment written down by Pseudo-Plato and attributed to Homer speaks to the issue: “He knew a lot of things, but knew them all badly.”

We think we’re talking about others, but later see we’ve been speaking the whole time about ourselves. It’s disappointing even as it’s a revelation. Just another one of Fate’s riddles, even if fate is no more than realizing you are yourself and have been, without interruption, yourself your whole life—even as one late night you cried when you left behind your lovely wife holding to her fragrant breast your son because you needed to return to battle, and as she wept the child laughed to see the sun shine on the bronze helmet, but even then, I wasn’t Hector.

Nor was Homer, of whom such stories abound that he seems to both exist and not at the same time, as if he is one man of many voices and is also nobody at all. I like to return to the stories of his death. Pseudo-Plutarch writes: “Not long afterwards, when he was sailing to Thebes for the Kronia, which is a musical contest they hold there, he arrived at Ios. There, while sitting on a rock, he observed some fishers sailing up, and he asked them if they got anything. They (having caught nothing but for lack of a catch de-loused themselves) answered, ‘All we caught we left behind, all that we missed we carry.’ The riddle meant that the lice they had caught they had killed and left behind, but the ones they had not caught they were carrying in their clothing. Unable to work this out, Homer became depressed and died.”

Subtle variations abound. Homer, hearing the fisherboys, calls out: “O huntsmen from Arcadia, have we caught anything?” One answers with the same riddle, and in this account by Proclus, Homer, who best understood the mysteries of human hubris set against the myriad realities of the heart, could not find the answer. He became depressed, wandering around preoccupied by the riddle, “and in this condition he slipped and fell on a stone, and died two days later.”

Of his blindness, there’s much to think but little to say, other than to mention that some authors suggest we make Homer blind to excuse our own blindness, for he saw more clearly than any man to ever live. He is blind because we cannot see.

Even such a man a riddle baffles.

More simply, from someone known only as Anonymous, “They say he died on the island of Ios after finding himself helpless because he was unable to solve a riddle of the fisherboys.”

Part of the riddle of Homer’s life is that all the biographical material is spurious past factual belief. He is in his way wholly anonymous, just as we are anonymous, or quietly on the way to becoming so. To wander through our days preoccupied by what makes to us no sense means we keep good company. It eases some the sorrow every riddle burdens us with, a weight I call sight-with-obscurity-included.

The Muses sang in my ear the rage of Achilles and the rites of Hector, tamer of horses. But a question a child asked has destroyed me.

Sing me the songs you do not know.

One is a song about lice.

But aren’t there other ways to think?

Riddle that doesn’t lead to death. Riddle that doesn’t seduce us into all those facts, damaged by desire, we call knowledge.

But, as Emily Dickinson says of eloquence, that it is when “the heart has not a voice to spare,” perhaps there is another kind of riddle one asks and answers oneself, not a work of words so much as a kind of deed doing and undoing itself forever, as night undoes day, and breath undoes breath.

At odd moments in life, waking up in the middle of the night and trying to find some trick to put my mind back to ease and sleep, I find myself thinking about Penelope weaving her shroud each day to keep her suitors at bay, and each night undoing the work.

She makes an image to cover up the face of death, and each night, undoes the image. The suitors must sense it. Death’s face all uncovered. It looks like nothing.

I like to think Penelope became so skilled in her art she could weave threads together with one hand while the other hand simultaneously took those threads apart. Her shroud might look like a thin black fragment briefly hovering in the air, thrilled occasionally by the gold thread of a star or the silver thread of water from a spring. But the whole could never be seen. It would be something like the trick of the famous philosopher who reportedly could write a question with one hand and with the other write the answer at the same time. But Penelope’s art would be finer, for she’d know the question and the answer are the same thing—one is just the disappearance of the other.

Unlike the Sphinx, this riddle kept men at bay, kept them silent, kept them apart from the “valor of action.” Not eliciting desire, her work put desire on delay, and by delaying desire, paused for many years the deaths of those she wanted to stop wanting her.

Such a riddle creates a rift in time. Beginnings and ends cease to oppose but become one. To do is to be undone. But there’s a strain of music. It’s just the hands working by themselves, sound of thread against thread, like the work of the Fates—if you can call that sound a sound, it’s the only sound.