“I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
— Job 1:15*
Legends often depend upon a surviving witness to bring news from a disaster or defeat.
In the Biblical story of Job, four such witnesses arrive separately from the four cardinal directions to announce four tragic losses. Each breathless servant cries out in turn, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
Plato wraps up The Republic with a witness story from beyond death, the final defeat. It’s a legend told by Socrates, about a soldier named Er, and it begins, “Once upon a time he died in war.” Twelve days later Er’s dead body revives. The resurrected Er describes being singled out by spiritual authorities “to listen and to look at everything” in the afterlife and “to become a messenger to human beings.”
Back from death, Er bears witness to a vast divine cosmos. Within it our tiny, material realm is no more than the weighted whorl at the bottom of a celestial spindle. We are a mundane tool used in the work of Ananke, she who is the primeval goddess Necessity. Our mass, the whorl that is our physical universe, balances and stabilizes a ceaselessly turning shaft with which Ananke spins the fundamental thread of reality.
“The nature of the whorl is like this: … in one great hollow whorl, completely scooped out, lay another like it, but smaller, fitting into each other as bowls fit into each other…. For there are eight whorls in all, lying in one another with their rims showing as circles from above, while from the back they form one continuous whorl around the stem, which is driven right through the middle of the eighth.
“… The whole spindle is turned in a circle with the same motion, but within the revolving whole the seven inner circles revolve gently in the opposite direction…”
— The Republic of Plato*, translated by Allan Bloom
models of the mundane: spindle whorls from the Amuq Valley in southern Turkey, 900-550 BCE
The old story tellers intuited how very small our solar system is. Necessity’s whorl is made of eight hollow, nested hemispheres. The curved surface of each bowl defines a territory in our sky — one each for the sun, the moon, the five wandering planets, and a final outer receptacle for the fixed stars. On the rim of each bowl, revolving with it, “is perched a Siren,” Er testifies, “uttering a single sound, one note; from all eight is produced the accord of a single harmony.”
Listen outside at the dark of the moon, when the late night is cold and cloudless and without any light but the stars, and you may be one who hears them sing. Some say their far-away voices resonate like crystal, a secret hum, a distant ripple. Others say the Sirens scream their note, and the longer you listen the more sharply they cry until the pain is unbearable and you will do anything to deaden it.
The Sirens drone their perpetual chord, and in concert with it Necessity’s three daughters sing three interweaving melodies. They are the Moirai, meaning the Fates.
Clotho, like her mother, spins, but much finer threads on which hang individual human lives.
Lachesis winds and measures a length of thread for every life. Her name translates dispenser of lots, making her manager of the numbers game that is destiny.
Atropos cuts or breaks the thread. She is inevitable, unturnable. Regardless of one’s beliefs about determinism, about what must be or should be, Atropos’ blade prevails in the end.
Er says the sister Fates sing over the Siren chorus: “Lachesis of what has been, Clotho of what is, and Atropos of what is going to be.” It is for us to take their threads and weave the world.
If you listen and you do hear the Sirens, it will happen in a rare place as quiet as the archaic world once sounded. That was a time when one hour passed very much like another, a person’s day filled from dark to dark with arduous, tedious, repetitive tasks. A woman’s life was bounded by the relentless duty to spin and spin and spin — thousands of cumulative hours — thread for a shirt, yarn for stockings, cordage for baskets. She took the tangle of raw fibers and twisted them into a seamless line, beginning to ending.
Whether we believe Er or not, we are compelled to listen because he is the one survivor. There is no one left to contradict his story. He only is escaped alone to bear witness.