Greek and Roman reflections of Cogswell’s ‘Cosmogonic Tattoos’
‘Cosmogonies’, Jim Cogswell explains, ‘are our explanations for how our world came to be, reflecting our assumptions about the fundamental nature of the universe.’ Obviously, these stories about the origins of our world have been told through visual art for a very long time; some people might even tell you that these stories are themselves the origins of visual art. But then, I’m not an art historian or an anthropologist—so what I want to do in the time I have here is to show how I see the stories that Jim has told through his artistic poesis reflected in the stories of ancient Greek and Roman poetry (which is more my area of expertise). Some of the first readers of Homer’s Iliad saw such a cosmic story allegorized in book eighteen (Il. 18.478–608), when the maker god Hephaestus fashions a new shield for the terrifying return of the Greek warrior Achilles to the battlefields of Troy. The shield is forged from tin, bronze, gold, and silver—the four metals supposedly symbolizing the four elements—and decorated with images of earth, sea, and sky, with the sun, moon, and constellations—one allegorist describes it as a κόσμου μίμημα, a ‘representation of the universe’. Hephaestus then adds two cities: one at peace, with marriages and feasts and legal cases being tried; and another under siege, with an army of soldiers encircling the walls and the townsmen sneaking out into the countryside to ambush them. These contrasting scenes were interpreted as illustrating the universal opposition between φιλία and νεῖκος, ‘love’ and ‘strife’. Thus, at the beginnings of Greek literature, at least, the creation of the cosmos was imagined as the creation of an artwork.
Achilles’ cosmic shield isn’t just a work of art, however: even his own soldiers are afraid to look when he is first presented with it, and they shrink away trembling as anger takes over him (Il. 9.14–16). This is a work of art that will cover and adorn his χεῖρες ἀνδροφόνοι—his ‘man-slaying hands’, as Homer calls them—while he piles up the corpses of his Trojan enemies, ready to be stripped of their own valuables: hands destroying, looting, plundering—like the grasping, threatening, anthropomorphic hands sailing across a sea of tears to the windows of the museum in Jim’s tattoos. (I note that Jim appropriated the image of these hands from a vase painting of Athena—who grabs Achilles by the hair to stop him murdering the Greek commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, in Homer’s first book [Il. 1.193–8], but later conspires to help him to kill the Trojan Hector [Il. 22.214–47].) The arms of Achilles, products of Hephaestus’ godly hands, themselves change hands after Achilles’ own divinely-assisted death: Ajax, the most fearsome Greek warrior after Achilles, and Odysseus each stake their claim before a panel of judges. This story is not told fully in Homer, or any surviving Greek poet before the Roman Ovid, who includes it in his Metamorphoses. Ovid’s Ajax is horrified at the prospect of Achilles’ shield, ‘engraved with the image of the vast universe’, being worn on Odysseus’ ‘cowardly left hand, born for stealing’ (Met. 13.110–11); Odysseus snaps back that the brutish Ajax ‘does not understand the shield’s engraving—the ocean and lands and stars with high heaven’ (Met. 13.291–2). Of course, Odysseus, master of stories, who sees the shield more as a piece of art than as a piece of armor, gets the prize.
The contest for Achilles’ shield isn’t the only episode in Ovid’s epic poem that Jim’s metamorphic tattoos bring to mind—to my mind, at least. The project is, in Jim’s own words, concerned ultimately with ‘the mutability of all objects and meanings’; ‘if there’s anything that never changes,’ he says, ‘it’s that everything always changes.’ I think it would be fair to call this an Ovidian sentiment—but to be more precise, it sounds like the sort of doctrine set out by the philosopher Pythagoras in his long explanation of the transmigration of souls in the final book of the Metamorphoses. omnia mutantur, he declares, nihil interit (Met. 15.165): ‘everything changes, nothing dies’. Pythagoras reveals that in one of his own past lives, centuries before, he himself had fought at Troy as the Trojan hero Euphorbus; he claims to have remembered when he entered the temple of Hera at Mycenae and saw Euphorbus’ shield—his old shield—hanging on the wall as a votive offering (Met. 15.160–4). You don’t have to hold to the tenets of metempsychosis to agree with Jim’s assertion that ‘everything we know, including ourselves, is constituted by the same cosmic dust that originated at the… moment that our universe formed, in a continual state of dissolution and reconstitution ever since.’ So who can say if some speck of Pythagoras or Euphorbus or Achilles has not since made its way into the Kelsey or the UMMA, and come upon the images of its ancient past that are found there?
Sadly (for me), Latin mottoes are no longer a fashionable feature of our cultural life, but I would still venture to suggest that Ovid’s Pythagoras offers a felicitous label for Jim’s Cosmogonic tattoos (Met. 15.178): cuncta fluunt, omnisque uagans formatur imago. This is a line that poses some challenges for modern translators: ‘all things flow,’ writes Allen Mandelbaum (so far, so good), ‘all things are born to change their shape’. ‘Everything flows, is a vagrant form’, is how it reads in Stanley Lombardo’s translation. What these English versions don’t bring out is that the Latin word imago—an ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ in the broadest possible sense—can be used more specifically of a work of art—a picture or statue. Moreover, the predicate adjective uagans comes from the verb uagor, ‘to wander, roam; to go to and fro’ (hence Lombardo’s succinct ‘vagrant form’). With a little poetic license, then, we could render the line as ‘all things flow, and every image—every shape, every artwork—is formed wandering’. What I find evocative here is not simply the principle of continuous mutability that Jim has drawn to our attention in the objects in our museums—how things are altered in the context of who we are, and where we are, and when we are. I also like how it expresses the ideas of movement and migration that we see in Jim’s tattoos: artworks wandering over the world, flowing across sea, and land, and sky. I hope Jim will agree if I conclude by saying that a work of art—whether a shield, a vase, a statue, or an epic poem—is something that does not stand still.
