Post-Fatalism

Greek Myths, Tetris, hydrocarbons, and a happy metanoia

I just fulfilled a long-cherished desire to visit the Acropolis in Athens and see the Parthenon. The legends of Ancient Greece captivated me as a child. I vividly remember D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, one of my favorite books as a kid. I was endlessly fascinated by stories of the Gods, Titans, Demi-gods, gorgons, and heroes. I felt empathy for Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from Olympus to help humanity. Zeus punished him for his intransigence, chaining him to a rock where an eagle devoured part of his liver each day for eternity. Many other stories stayed with me: Perseus using a mirrored shield to cut off the snake-filled head of Medusa, unleashing Pegasus, the winged horse; Hercules cleaning mountains of shit out of the Augean Stables, in between more glamorous acts of heroism; Daedalus crafting wings for himself and his son Icarus, who ignored warnings, flew too close to the Sun, and plunged to his doom; Persephone, imprisoned by Hades in the Underworld, tricked into eating Pomegranate seeds which tied her forever to the realm of the dead.

Reflecting on it now, I realize it was often the violent excesses and turbulent cruelties of the myths that made them so indelible — much like the original Grimm’s fairytales before they were Disney-fied and given trigger warnings. Overarching themes of the Greek myths include quests for power, immortality, transcendence — the masculine drive to control, overcome, or trick the daimonic, unruly forces of nature.

Zeus, leader of the Olympians, overthrew his father, Kronos, who devoured his children to avoid his prophesied fate. Through this act, Zeus started historical time. Kronos, for his part, had killed his father, Uranus — castrating him with a sickle and throwing his testicles into the sea — to rule over an archaic Golden Age. At its zenith in the time of Plato, Aristotle, and Euripides, democratic Athens was an Apollonian overcoming of Dionysian chaos and despotic tyranny. They knew they had accomplished something unique and unprecedented: They went to great effort to record and preserve their thoughts, ideas, and dramatic spectacles for posterity.