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Columns - Mythologies
by Matteo Trevisani



“How had it all begun?”. This is the question that emerges from the very first pages of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso. To retrace the world genealogically in order to climb back to first causes, to look directly at what has generated what lies before us—what we want, what we are. But once the answer is found, what happens then? Why do we think that the encounter with origin is so decisive as to make it the key for deciphering the things of the world?

I began to construct a genealogy to understand the beginning of a family curse—the guilt, the trauma, the hardship that produced deaths at sea and salted children, boats filled with disgrace and tombstones, tombstones everywhere, hanging on the wall of the pier in the port of the city where I was born. Now that I know the names of those dead, and that I have hauled the bodies out of the water to bury them in the dry paper of books, what has changed in me?
I call “fate” what I do not know how else to name, what has no name.
But how had it all begun? Who was there before Giovanni, before Giuseppe, before Maria?
And then what I believed to be the origin shifts, moves aside, splits in two.

Origins establish a sense of belonging, but also its continuity, its possibility, the sacred space that organizes and delimits events. Paula Philippson explains that in the genealogy of the Greek gods there is much more than a simple family history: it is the cosmos itself that resembles a lineage, the organization of power relations that act upon the real—a cosmic paradigm, the creation of a world. At the heart of this origin, in the Greek myth, the expansion of a duality pulses: that between Chaos and Gaia, between immanence and becoming, between day and night, sky and earth, yes and no. Will the reign of Zeus be enough to hold these polarities together? The truth is that within every origin there is a struggle—the same struggle involved in continuing to exist. A man fighting with his boat not to be crushed by the waves; soaked children kicking before the baptismal fonts; the first men and women watching smoke thicken on the walls of a cave painted millennia earlier.

And today, looking at the real life of the world, having within us an interior representation in which we must choose, each time, a posture as we attempt to return to the reasons for what we see, we cannot help but ask ourselves how it all began—knowing that any answer regarding origin is as impossible as the certainty of the future.