It comes down to us from the Greeks that Pandora unleashed great chaos into the world.
That is true, but it’s only part of the story, and not even the truest part.
In the mythology, Pandora is the first human woman. She supposedly carries a box, but that’s a medieval mistranslation. In the original it was a pithos, a large barrel or cask that was typically owned by royalty, filled with grain or oil or wine, held in the castle stores in case of famine or siege, sunk halfway down into the earth like a seed pushing up, or a soul descending.
In the myth, though, the pithos held not food and drink but quite the opposite: pestilence, plague, evil, and torment — gifts to Pandora from the gods.
The story is full of such opposites. It begins with the Titan Prometheus (his name means “forethought”) carefully creating men while his brother, Epimetheus (“afterthought”), quickly crafts all other creatures. Before Prometheus can give men any gifts, Epimetheus drains the great store of them for the creatures — a kind of photo-negative precursor to the moment later when his wife, Pandora, drains the gods’ destructive gifts from the pithos. So Prometheus requests that Zeus give men the greatest of all gifts: fire.
But Zeus says no. Fire is for the gods. Defiant, Prometheus grabs a spark and carries it back to men. The men build a temple to Zeus, and Prometheus tricks the god into choosing the worst portion of meat for his sacrifice, ensuring the better part for men. Humiliated, Zeus chains the Titan to a rock and sends an eagle to peck out his liver by day, regrowing the organ each night, for all eternity. (Prometheus later gets a reprieve, but that’s a story for another day.)
Unfortunately, torturing the Titan is not enough for Zeus, and he proceeds to punish men themselves, proclaiming, “I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.” (Hesiod, Works and Days)
He creates Pandora and gives her a jar – a pithos, filled to the brim with destruction – a container, essentially, for his own projections: jealousy, rage, violence. It’s a Trojan horse, to be sure, appearing nourishing and life-giving but bearing ugliness, despair, and threat for its recipients.
And so Prometheus’s act of tender, life-giving generosity is met with Zeus’s act of vengeful, impulsive destruction, in a package of vibrant beauty that belies its wrathful intent.
Pandora is the tension of opposites writ large.
***
We humans tend to experience the world in dualities – pairs of opposites that demand we choose one side or the other. Good and evil, night and day, female and male, creation and destruction. We draw lines all over the sands underfoot and defiantly dare anyone to cross them, hold ourselves behind them, shame transgressors, quickly retreat, draw new lines to justify ourselves. We cling to the side we consciously identify with, eschewing or repressing or projecting its opposite. The famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung recognized this tendency and dubbed the phenomenon the tension of opposites. He said the cure, as it were, was not choosing a side but transcending them both – integrating the opposites into something of greater purpose and meaning, living from that creative union instead.
In Pandora’s story there is one thing that does not get caught in the tension of opposites, one thing that suggests this kind of transcendence. Hesiod tells us that when Pandora lifts the lid, hope alone remains in the jar, caught under the lip.
Unlike gods, heroes, pestilence, and plague, hope lacks lurching, posturing, or drama, lacks even explanation. On the lip of the jar, hope suspends between the chaotic upheaval of the outer world and the quiet, maybe quivering, interior one. Hope perches in the space of waiting and not-knowing and uncertainty, that liminal bridge that spans two shores. Which one will it choose?
We might assume hope is best unleashed with abandon, early and often, against the approaching onslaught of fear and devastation. A shouting charge, a bolt of lightning from the fingertips, a trumpet-blast pushing chaos back behind the line. But we must be careful with this kind of hope. Donald Trump attempted it on February 28, before even the first COVID-19 death in the United States. “It’s going to disappear,” he promised. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” This kind of flimsy, baseless hope gets crushed under the weight of reality. It is too naïve. It is not strong enough to hold its own against real truth.
If hope is unleashed into a fearsome world, it must be specific and strong, tethered to particular proofs. This is how we gravitate toward heroes: they are the most obvious, most tangible proof that there is reason for hope. EMTs, doctors, nurses, and others who tend to the sick and the dying; drivers and workers who deliver the food and medicine we need; medical researchers and childcare workers and the army of volunteers sewing masks: This active, visible hope is less a loud call from a proud, solitary, brassy instrument and more a diverse and swelling symphony, countless musicians working together to compose hope out of many specific acts of courage and compassion and wisdom.
But that is only one side of the line.
On the other side, hope is at risk of falling back into the empty jar. We imagine if it does, we’ll lose it forever, and that is truly a danger. Hope held back, unexpressed, disconnected, unsupported, is more likely to succumb to fear, fraying, or resignation. It needs structure and encouragement and nourishment to thrive. If we treat hope like an unwanted or rejected child, meeting it with criticism, cynicism, derision – driving it back into the shadows of the unconscious, the unlived life – we run the risk of losing not just hope but our very connection to ourselves. We fall, then, into the trap of Zeus’s rage, believing his projections, wearing them like a heavy, corrosive mantle.
But maybe this image of the empty jar is all wrong. What if the jar were less a bottomless void, more a womb, or the dark earth itself, nourishing hope, growing it up strong? What if hope in the jar is – like the pithos half-buried in the castle storeroom – more like a tiny seed in the soil, growing slowly and instinctively toward the light, waiting for the moment it’s most needed, fully blossomed, ready to fruit? What if this kind of hope needs some time, some tempering, so it can emerge robust enough to open its arms to the hard, anguished truth racing toward it?
***
One small detail, though: In Pandora’s story, hope does not choose a side.
In the story, hope sits perfectly positioned at the meeting-point of all possibilities. It is tiny but mighty, like a neutron star, dense with everything at once: the quiet imperceptible growth in the dark ground, the brash running toward danger, the bearing witness to the anguish being wrought. Even the flimsy promise and the fraying despair.
What connects them all is not choosing which is best, it’s the heat at the centerpoint, on the lip of the jar, the threshold, the collapsing togetherness of the whole symphony playing at once, all of us, the way quick wishes are uttered, the way heartbreak sears through us, the way some hope is flung out into the world like a ticker-tape celebrating every small but hard-won victory, the way, in the other direction, it offers itself like Ariadne’s thread, pulling the weary heroes back – momentarily at least – to the porches and doorways where the quiet emerge to witness.
If collectively we all choose one side of the line over the other – everybody rushing out, or everybody staying in, everybody actively helping, or everybody standing back – then we are lost; we are ruptured. We cannot survive this on one kind of hope alone. What makes any kind of hope work at all is that all other kinds of hope are gathered in together in mutual support. All our individual ways of holding hope, the doing and not-doing that weaves it all together, that is what transcends.
The porch, the doorjamb, the six-foot distance, the opposite sidewalk, the curbside pickup, the plexiglass barrier, the postponed plan, the loneliness, the drive-by testing, the face mask, the goggles, the visor, the gloves, the video funeral, the entryway temperature-taking — the doctor who speaks each patient’s name aloud the moment after their death — these are the ways we balance on the lip of the jar. From these edge-spaces, hope can access both its own quiet, simmering, internal wisdom and the outer horizon of all that roiling, fearful work, can access its stark aloneness and its tightly-woven togetherness at the very same time.
***
The truth of Pandora’s story is that hope is neither monolithic, nor lost, nor simple; and that transcendence demands much of us. Hope stretches across its own terrible tension, pulled taut, connected by love and fear, by action and waiting.
And the truth, too, is that this unbearable tension of hope is in each one of us. At its best, it’s not flimsy or cynical — but often it’s uncomfortable. We may feel it as a knot in our bellies, a tightness in our chests, a quivering in our throats. We might mistakenly call it anxiety, which after all is just its underbelly, just the other side of the place where love meets fear.
Hope is no-contact, and contact that’s too close. It’s not-knowing, and knowing too much. It’s non-participation and overworked and understaffed. It is witnessing, acting, listening, speaking. It is having little choice, knowing no sure answers, and being driven to do what’s required anyway.
Hope is holding the thread that connects us across all those lines, promising not to let go until everyone is taken care of, one way or another. The way I read Pandora, this is the nature of hope.
We are the nature of hope.
We are hope.