I Prefer When Life Is Excruciatingly Meaningful

Between Charybdis and Scylla, the choice is clear 🌀

Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis, by Henry Fuseli (between 1794 and 1796)

I often think about this meme by visakanv:

The original illustration is by Roger Payne

On the right, Scylla, the six-headed draconic monster that lurks in a cave within a steep cliff, devouring six men from every ship that goes by. On the left, Charybdis, a creature of uncertain but horrendous appearance, hidden beneath the waves; three times a day it engulfs and then expels huge quantities of water, destroying anything caught into its eddies and currents. In the middle, Odysseus and his crew, going through the strait anyway, because what choice is there?

In the meme Scylla represents how life can be excruciatingly meaningful: too many things happen, they are overwhelming, painful, acute, sometimes joyful too but in a way that takes a toll on you. Everything is imbued with meaning, too much of it, when someone you love dies, or leaves; or when you meet a new person, begin loving them, or stop to; or when you have been wronged, or have wronged somebody; or when your work asks a lot of you, or when your country is at war and you need to flee, or when you are asked to take a difficult decision whose outcome will harm millions. Sometimes your life is a story, a six-headed one with that many plot arcs happening concurrently, and you secretly wish it were more boring because you just can’t take it anymore.

On the other side, the abyss of devestating [sic] meaninglessness. When Charybdis lurks close, the universe feels empty, without a point — because someday you’ll die, and what will you have accomplished? So little, so very little. Not that it would matter if you had accomplished anything, since you won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of your efforts, not for long; nor will anyone else, since we’re all condemned to eventual disintegration and oblivion. The abyss beckons, promising you, perversely, something that looks like peace, but isn’t, if you let yourself sink into it.

In the middle, Odysseus goes “ayy lmao,” because what choice is there?

The intent behind this meme is to evince the power of humor. In the face of two equal perils, just tread lightly; have fun; make jokes. The way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis is to take neither too seriously.

That’s a great point and I totally agree. But I want to leave our cunning hero Odysseus aside for a moment and focus on our two monsters. (This is, after all, a blog about monsters.) They are often mentioned as a pair, as above, and have made it out of mythology and into popular culture. To find oneself “between Scylla and Charybdis” is to have to make a difficult choice between two equally dangerous paths. A nice example is this cartoon from 1793, in which the personified British constitution, on its frail “Veſsel,” has to navigate between “the Rock of Democracy and the Whirlpool of Arbitrary Power”:

Other than this and the Roger Payne one, there is surprisingly little good classic art showing both perils together. Even the Fuseli painting at the top of this post, while intriguing, doesn’t quite capture the vibe; I can’t really see Charybdis in it.

But whenever I think of the meaningful/meaningless version of the mythaphor, I realize I don’t see two perils as equal.

Given the choice, I pick Scylla. Excruciating meaningfulness. Ideally there would be just the right amount of meaning, of course. But I’m pretty sure I am happier, in a sense that is difficult to grasp because it doesn’t necessarily match concepts like “joy” and “comfort,” when life feels excruciatingly meaningful, as it does at this particular moment in my life, than when there is even just a small deficit of meaning.

It has to do with feeling alive.

It’s the most important part, more than feeling good. Feeling, period. It is a great gift to be able to have strong emotions; most things in the universe cannot. So I’ve come to enjoy them, even when they’re negative, even when they’re legitimately difficult to manage. Even if it means being hurt sometimes (and worse yet, feeling that I have hurt someone). Scylla eats parts of you. It doesn’t leave you whole. When you live, you take hits, and you don’t make it to the other end unscathed. If you did, you wouldn’t have lived.

I am more scared of Charybdis, because Charybdis is about not feeling anything. There is no pain in drowning in the whirlpool; just nothingness. The problem is that it’s hard to recover from nothingness. If you’re dead, you’re dead. If you’re depressed, close to not feeling anything, it can take years to climb out of the abyss. Years of not quite being alive.

Get too close to Scylla and things definitely get somewhere between uncomfortable and alarming. Intense sadness, fear, anger, stress, guilt, or desire can cause terrible damage. But I would steer myself into the mouth of any of these monstrous heads than risk sinking forever into the maws of Charybdis.

As ever, the ancients had it all figured out, of course. Despite the popular metaphor of equal perils, it is quite clear in the Odyssey which of the two monsters Odysseus must pick. The enchantress Circe warns him:

See that you be not there when [Charybdis] is sucking, for if you are, Neptune himself could not save you; you must hug the Scylla side and drive your ship by as fast as you can, for you had better lose six men than your whole crew.

You had better lose a bit of your wholeness and joy than all of yourself. Odysseus heeds Circe’s advice, avoiding the sucking and belching whirlpool, and keeping close to Scylla’s cliff. Suddenly the monster pounces, each of its six heads eating one of the men “while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony.” This is, says our hero, “the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages,” and the gods know he has seen quite a few horrors. But it would have been far worse had the entire crew perished and the Odyssey just stopped there, in the middle of book XII, not even halfway to the end.

Odysseus hanging on to a fig tree above Charybdis, as Scylla looms in the background, from the second time our hero encounters this lovely pair. Engraving by William Bromley, apparently after a watercolor by Fuseli, although I couldn’t find the original. (1806)