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Ovid's Anthropocene

From The Botanic Garden (1825), by Erasmus Darwin

Ovid’s Metamorphoses mostly is read today as a gathering of myth and tale, a source book for renaissance poets, and a compendium of strange Mediterranean lore. Writers find their way to its freshness again and again—recently in the furious, lacerating retellings of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, in which Nina McLaughlin dramatizes the uncanny estrangements women suffer in (and outside of) Ovid’s tales. I’ve come to think of these as stories of kinship and entanglement, too, as signaled in Ovid’s famous opening line: “Now I think of how bodies change form,”—or, as I have it in my version, “My thoughts turn to telling how things / change into other things.” True to its title, things indeed are ever changing in the Metamorphoses: heroes take the form of slain beasts; an aged couple entwines into trees; white fruits turn red to remember the spilled blood of lovers. We recall less often, however, that Ovid's astonishing opening kicks off a cosmogony: a story of the creation of the world.

Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses in the first years of our western age, a time when theories about the nature of things flowed together from across the Mediterranean world in fertile, uneasy patterns and overlaps. Roman views of nature were very different from our own, with the human world of striving fully contained within the natural realm, and such phenomena as lightning, flood, and famine arriving as messages from divine regions. Although ancient Greek and Roman ideas of creation can seem far removed from our understanding, I find Ovid’s vision haunting and provocative. His cosmogony lives at the fragrant, crackling border where flows and forces meet and make a world together. 

I sense a rich ambivalence flickering through his vision. Is world-making the work of a single, mastering god, or a clash of phenomenal properties, the foamy rising-up of the living world? Ovid’s line is, Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit—literally, “this (disorder), god and better nature settled.” My fancy falls on the “and”—the coupling of natural and godly agency. Across the poem’s many Englishings, translators have struggled with this holy ambivalence; singing of god and nature in the language of redemption or negotiation, Ovid’s dappled discourse and the inflectional force fields of Latin nourish my own great doubt. 

This is not a classicist’s Metamorphoses. I come to the poem as one raised amid the ransacking of the living world, with an imagination fired by cosmology and microbiology, filtered through a modern mythology of images like those conjured in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. My version of Ovid’s cosmology feeds on anachronism and ambivalence; here, the world begins as a bubbling batch of sourdough, the Big Bang and Genesis sing together, and ambitious apes make their belated appearance, bloody and foreboding. As the living world is stirred, fixed, bid to spread and sink and effervesce—whether by the work of godly hands or the swerve of emergent forces—the divinity of all this action is clear.

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My thoughts turn to telling about how things 
Change into other things. May the gods, who
In change have been changing all along, 
Breathe life into my notions and turn them into song.

Before the sea and earth were skinned by sky, 
Everything in the world had the same look.
Let’s call it chaos: a raw, disordered mass,
Ponderous and inert, a formless slurry
Poorly mixed. There was no sunlight to warm
This matrix, no moon to crown the night;
The earth unsupported by air, as yet unbalanced;
And mother ocean’s arms embraced no shore, for 
Land and earth and air were mixed. Unstable lands,
insolvent seas; nothing held its shape, and all 
opposed all: cold fought heat, the moist was dry,
The soft was hard, the buoyant bore down.

All this, some god or gentling nature redeemed:
Spun air from land and land from seas,
Divided the liquid winds and starry skies
Which, separate from the blurry mass,
Now moved together in uneasy peace.
The fiery weightless vault of heaven, 
Set in its place, became a binding wall;
Next the air arose billowing and filled it up,
And densest earth settled in below, sifting all
Its elements; and the waters flowed around, 
Encircling solid ground.

And then this never-known god at first of earth
unmixing this messy congeries
and separating its elements
gathered it all up in a great globe.
Then swiftly poured the seaways out, bid them swell
with the fleet winds, and wrapped the whole of earth in shore.
Then added springs and pools and soundless lakes,
crowned with crowding banks the slicing streams
that filter through fields in many places
until, arriving at the receiving sea,
they break from their banks to beat the shore.
Then bid fields to spread, valleys to sink,
wood to clothe itself in leaf, the stony mountains to rise.
And dividing the heavens, two portions at right, 
two at left, and a torrid fifth between,
this careful god so laded the earth as well.
Above it all: the air, lighter than earth
Or water, though heavy enough to ballast fire. 

Next fixed in air the mist and clouds;
Shook loose the thunder, which shivers us still, and with this
Forced lightning amid the Winds. For all their powers
The sky would be no free-fly zone: the worldmaker strove to restrain
Them, as they marshaled their forces along clashing courses, which
Would have shred the world with the bigness of their brotherly strife.
East Wind withdrew to farthest dawn, to Persian Nabataea,
And ranges immersed in morning light; West Wind went
To evening, to warm the farthest shores; into Scythia,
With its seven oxen-driven stars, North Wind and its horrors seeped;
South Wind withdrew to the opposite pole, spewing mist and showers.
Over all of these imposed the air: liquid, weightless, as yet unpolluted.
And as these forces drew back, the stars, so long
Hidden in the mix, foamed up across the whole of sky.

Nor would any region lack its living creatures, though the sky
And its stars keep only the forms of the gods.
Shining waves gave way for fish to dwell, 
Earth took the wild beasts, and the air was stirred with flight.

And now arose some lofty animal of hungry mind to dominate,
Though it wants for nothing. Was the human species born,
Or fashioned from some godly seed? Did our thingmaker think
to make the world a better place? Or was their purpose Promethean: 
to mold from earth so fresh, so newly wiled from air,
To raise up from this same stock, this holy germ,
To mix with rain and wave, and shape an image of the reigning gods?
Where other animals incline to earthly things,
The human yields only to the sublime, and entranced ever upward
Stands upright gaping at the stars.
So the world, arisen wild and unenvisaged, 
Now confronts this hominid’s ignorant-figured force. 

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Speaking of metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of memory circuits in Drosophila reveals a strategy for evolving a larval brain. The brains of holometabolous insects—those bugs with distinct larval and adult forms—have long presented a mystery. With the organism essentially liquefying and reforming in metamorphosis, what of the creature’s brain—and to a certain extent, its identity—remains intact? The authors of this incredible analysis followed the fates of most of the neurons in the fruit fly’s “mushroom bodies,” structures in the insect forebrain responsible for memory. The journal article is pretty heady; Quanta has a good breakdown of this work.

A Portrait of Tenochtitlan. Artist Thomas Kole’s haunting digital renderings of the Aztec capital ca. 1518, three years before the sacking of the city by Hernan Cortez and his allies, which led to the fall of the Aztec Empire. Kole’s landscapes convey the incredible achievement of the city—it must have been a sight to behold—and suggest the teeming humanity of the place as well. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the renderings, but given the Aztec’s ghastly reputation, it feels like a healthy corrective. This was a place where people lived and strove.