The word matter contains the Latin word mater, mother, which seems to indicate its role as a primordial element at the origin of everything. In fact, its etymology conceals a number of nuances and is rich in multiple meanings.
When we think of matter, we are principally thinking of inorganic matter and thus imagining something inert and essentially arid. We fall into the trap of judging matter as something different from what we humans are, always rather presumptuous in considering ourselves to be made of a substance which has nothing to do with the ordinary.
It almost seems as if the question of matter has little to do with us, as if we were made of a different substance, which is much nobler, so-called animate matter.
This is a centuries-old assumption, which has given rise not only to great architectures of thought but also to arrogant attitudes which have made human beings prisoners of an infinite series of misunderstandings worth dwelling on. Everything stems from the role played, both in our lives and in our conception of the world, by our bodies, that is to say by the matter of which we are made, a role which we often tend to overlook, or even airbrush out completely.
The Greek word corresponding to the Latin materia is ὕλη (hyle), among whose meanings we find wood, timber. It’s the same etymological root as the Latin word silva, which indicates a forest, but also matter, substance, and is connected to the rabbinic hiiuli, prime matter.
Giacomo Leopardi talks about this in the Zibaldone, his collection of reflections on literature and philosophy. This original meaning of wood from the forest reminds us that in primitive societies wood was the construction material par excellence. After this, the Greek word shifted to imply any undifferentiated prime matter which, through the intervention of an organizing principle, gives rise to the multiplicity of the real world.
In the word “materia” there remains this trace of the female, of a passive, malleable element. In other Latin languages, like Spanish and Portuguese, wood is still named thus: madera, madeira.
If we relate this to the world of the peasant farmer, the madre (mother) becomes the stump of the plant, the inner-most part of the tree from which new trunks, new shoots are generated. A matrix, a vegetal womb which produces the new wood, which is soft and workable. Matter as the source of the most docile and versatile of all materials, capable of adapting to any function.
This intimate link to generation is echoed in the myth of Hylas (resonating with the word ὕλη, hyle), the beautiful youth that Heracles fell head over heels in love with, making him his personal companion. Together they set sail with Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece.
But during one break in the journey, Hylas, sent to draw water from the source of the river Pegae, encountered the nymph Dryope and her sisters, who in turn fell in love with the young man with the wonderful features. In order not to be separated from him, they led him into an underwater cave from which he never re-emerged.
The female divinities, the water and the submerged cave can only make us think of the creative principle. Of the body which in the darkness and humidity of its own belly generates, safeguards and nourishes life in embryo. That is how matter, a term paradoxically used to describe an inert, cold, inanimate component, acquires its maternal meaning from the first living matter with which we had a complex dialogue, for months: the female body which created us.
The rest of the story is simpler. Wood, the original primary material, lends its name to the more generic bodily substance which characterizes every distribution of mass in space.
But its total, tangible concreteness, its body and substance, becomes the subject of speculation, a philosophical discipline which runs through the history of mankind, since even we humans, conscious beings, noble animate matter, as we define ourselves, are made of matter and, moreover, matter in its most fragile form.
In the specific case of us Sapiens, a specific species of anthropomorphic monkeys, things turn out to be even more complicated. Our being social animals is something more profound and integral than the simple fact that we live in organized groups.
Our interaction with other members of the community, mediated through looks and language, bodily contact and exchange of food, acts of caring and emotional relationships, is a process fundamental to the growth of the individual. Effectively, we become truly human through the look and the exchange of emotions, interacting thus with other members of the social group.
The malleable and multiform brain of the newborn is formed in its relation to the world mediated through the adults who look after it, starting from its mother’s look. The child, who looks into the eyes of the person feeding it, modifies its synapses on the basis of the reactions which are produced in the course of this relationship.
The drive to nourish and protect our little ones has a biological origin; it is a behavior necessary to the reproduction of the species. We belong to the class of mammals, and this ingenious invention of evolution, whereby the females of our species are capable of nourishing for years little ones who would otherwise be incapable of surviving, has proved to be an enormous evolutionary advantage.
This characteristic, which in its primordial forms developed around two hundred million years ago, is seen by some as the reason for the planetary success of mammals which in fact quickly occupied all the ecological niches left vacant by the disappearance of the great reptiles.
This also happened to the anthropomorphic apes from whom we have descended. That primigenial exchange of food between mother and child, that interaction of glances in a silent dialogue of protection and gratitude, is maybe at the root of every social connection and language that will develop over the millions of years to come.
The astonishment at seeing nourishment for everyone—even for adults in the clan when the scarcity of food put at risk the survival of the group – pushing forth from the swollen breasts of mothers, can be found in the earliest artistic records of the Sapiens: dozens of prehistorical Venuses, all representatives of an archetype of abundance, goddess-mothers with swollen breasts and imposing buttocks.
But each person’s material body, which plays such an important role in the creation of our first social relationships, the basis of our identity, is also an essential symbolic element at the other extremity of our existence, the moment of our death.
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When an unexpected misfortune occurs, like the one that devastated my father’s family, the whole of the little community who knew the victim relive the most ancient of traumas. A young man, a robust body full of life which, in an instant, slumps and becomes something inanimate.
The extreme precariousness of human existence already resonates in the words of Achilles, the greatest of the heroes of Ancient Greece who speaks of life thus: “This thing which is so fragile and light; it lasts one instant and escapes so quickly through the mouth.” Deciding the fate of every mortal are the three Fates (Moirai), the daughters of Zeus and Ananke, the goddess of necessity, created out of the primordial Chaos together with Chronos, time, around whom she is wrapped like a serpent, to indicate an indissoluble bond.
When Atropos, the inflexible, severs the fine thread spun by Clotho and wound onto the spindle by Lachesis, there’s no escape; even the strongest of the heroes collapses to the ground like a lifeless puppet, reduced to a heap of random limbs. In the terrible clashes which take place around the beautiful wall of Ilium, the robust bodies of the young heroes, who until a moment earlier seemed immortal, are transformed into shattered bones, disfigured faces, blood and guts; and with them the dreams, emotions and passions that drove them vanish.
To relieve the trauma of loss, since the dawn of time, human communities have developed rituals for mourning and the burial of corpses.
Paying respect to the poor tormented body, washing it and anointing it with perfumed essences, coloring it with ochre-red, enhancing with makeup features disfigured by death, adorning it with the most precious ornaments, cladding it in its favorite weapons, beautifying it with death masks made from the most precious metals, placing around it best-loved toys or the jewels that had enhanced its beauty, the insignia of authority or the humble tools of an artisan.
And the monumental tombs, inscriptions, portraits, frescoed walls, hymns sung to accompany the deceased on their journey into the beyond.
At the center of every burial ritual is the body of the deceased, which the most ancient of all tabus protects from the mangling which wild animals could inflict, were it to be abandoned.
Achilles, the strongest of the Achaeans, has just pierced Hector’s throat with his lance. The Trojan hero just has time to say his final words while the most furious outburst of anger distorts the features of Peleus’ son. Achilles pulls out the bloody lance from his enemy’s throat and strips the body of the magnificent bronze armour which the Trojan had snatched from his friend Patroclus.
He considers leaving the flesh of his dying enemy to be torn apart and devoured by dogs and birds, then, without hesitation, he pierces a large hole in Hector’s feet to slip a rope through. He ties the young man’s still warm corpse to his chariot and drives his horses at full gallop right up to the walls of the enemy city. Achilles butchers Hector’s body in front of the Trojans who watch on in horror.
His enemy’s body will lie, abandoned for days, near to Achilles’ tent close by the huge, beached keels of the Achaean ships. Through divine intervention, no dog or bird will approach to relish the flesh; on the contrary, his wounds will heal, including those inflicted, out of contempt, by the Greeks on the defeated man’s corpse. Not a single sign of putrefaction will profane the body of the hero who had died in battle.
The miracle will continue until, after twelve interminable days, Hector’s elderly father Priam hastens in the middle of the night to his enemy’s tent with a cart laden with riches to beg for the return of his son’s mortal remains. The old man humbles himself in front of Achilles, clings to his knees, kisses his hands which are still red with his son’s blood, just to have him back, even dead.
Still today the suffering felt from having to weep over a death without being able to honor the corpse is intolerable.He wants to pay due respect to the corpse, as is right and proper. And at this point, Achilles, the beast, capable of throttling someone without pity or burning twelve Trojan youths on Patroclus’ pyre, yields to the old king’s plea.
It is of such importance, to the ancient Greeks, to reaffirm the tabu of the inviolability of corpses, that this episode from the Iliad will become an ideal point of reference for all successive armistices. Even in the bloodiest of conflicts, there will be a moment when armies cease fighting to exchange the bodies of the fallen.
It is impressive to note how this practice has survived up to our time; you simply have to look at the news coming from the Russia-Ukraine war. Even in the terrible conflicts of the twenty-first century, despite being fought with missile strikes and satellite technology, there comes a moment of pity, an ancient ritual in which weapons fall silent and soldiers load onto their shoulders the remains of their fallen comrades who had ended up in the hands of the enemy.
Still today the suffering felt from having to weep over a death without being able to honor the corpse is intolerable. This can be seen every time a flood or a tsunami makes it impossible to recover the bodies of some of the victims.
It is an unimaginable suffering for relatives not to be able to place together in a coffin the poor remains of their loved ones destroyed by acid, as in some Mafia crimes, or thrown into the ocean from a military plane as happened to many of the Argentinian desaparecidos.
When you want to inflict the most inhuman suffering, you commit murder and destroy the corpse or make it disappear forever, such that the relatives of the victims are denied even the consolation of crying and grieving while embracing what remains of their loved ones. Death transforms the bodies into a truly special material, impregnated with symbolic meanings, which we simply cannot do without.
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Matter: The Magnificent Illusion by Guido Tonelli is available via Polity.
