Orphic Hymn to Hermes
Listen to me, Hermes, messenger of Zeus, son of Maia with an indomitable heart.
Listen to me, judge in contests, lord of mortals, benevolent, cunning,
messenger of agile step and winged shoes, friend of men, herald for mortals.
Listen to me, thou who rejoice in gymnastic exercises and subtle deceptions;
thou who bringest serpents and bringest all proclamation and protectest gain;
thou deliverer from anguish, who hast in thy hands the blameless weapons of peace.
Listen to me, blessed, provident, eloquent, helper in works,
friend of mortals in need: thou
listen to my supplication and grant me a high fulfilment of life in deeds,
in graces of speech and in remembrance.
The Greek God Hermes, with his wings to feet, in Italian Mercury corresponding to the smallest planet and having the most eccentric orbit in our solar system, is the protector of communication, messages, trade and thieves. Moreover, he is known for his constant banter between Gods and Humans. In short, a powerfully ambiguous young god. Sometimes in lectures on narrative medicine one hears talk of ‘hermeneutics and many people look around a little lost, wondering what this hermeneutics is, a science often known only to a few insiders.
It is just that narrative medicine now likes to talk tough, adopting the same flaw that we put on doctors when they say they speak a sometimes incomprehensible ‘medical’ language. Narrative medicine is therefore also creating a complex lexicon, as if to say, I speak difficult too, I am a real ‘science’. Funny move of attack and defense.
Let us return to ‘hermeneutics’ and bring it alive and fantastic: the philosopher to whom the introduction of the name is ascribed is Aristotle: for him, hermeneutics is literally the interpretation of texts and messages. The word hermeneutics already in Greek times, which contains the god Hermes, means that interpreting narratives is important, that without communication one cannot live, but that narratives are ambiguous. In order to escape from uncertainty, in addition to paying attention to the contents of the text, narratives need to be placed in the context to which they belong: it is one thing to find oneself written in a patient’s story ‘my world collapsed on me’ in a diagnostic context, where for the first time we are confronted with unhappy news, and quite another to find oneself perpetuating this statement ‘my world collapsed on me’ in the context of a treatment pathway already underway. The diagnostic context generally, but not always (sometimes people feel relieved because they are able to give a name to those unknown phenomena lacking a name), destabilizes, and it is the moment of chaos, bewilderment and no longer feeling the ground under one’s feet, but when in a course of treatment the patient is objectively healing or getting his illness under control, resorting to this language can mean that he is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
To be good interpreters (revealers of meaning), a good dose of reflexivity is required, and not impulsive action: a patient’s narration, like any narration, requires the other, the reader, the listener: Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher of the last century, calls it the ‘re-knower’, that is, he or she who in the midst of the hidden and disordered message makes order and returns it with a completed meaning, which perhaps the storyteller had failed to verbalize. That there is room for ambiguous playfulness is certain, but no more so than the numbers, which also must be contextualized to take on meaning: if we want to give the example of which is the first and second party in Italy today, we will write two names with percentage numbers next to them. But the first party is that of the non-voters, with another percentage next to it. And so, we can deduce that hermeneutics should not only be applied to words but also to numbers, so that they make sense.
The process of recognition in the text is an echo of what the narrative can evoke in us, and a possible reformulation that makes it perhaps less poetic but more cognitive: the jumbled text dense with emotions and visions shifts to a more abstract and pragmatic language, almost a text that you get with Chat- GPT (which I am not using as I write this post). Here it is our cognitive functions that read the message, but also intrapersonal, interpersonal, natural, existential intelligence: it is a reflection that occurs from our multiple intelligences.
There is something more, however, when Aristotle set out to study hermeneutics, i.e. the interpretation of texts that were initially sacred ‘myths’, which later turned into religious texts such as the Bible, the Gospel, of Alchemy on the Philosopher’s Stone: the sense of the Divine, encapsulated in the very name Hermes. Storytelling is a divine act, even if imperfect, and interpreting it is also an act of ‘divination’, of ‘guessing’. Of course, we have long since left the art of soothsaying, but we still rely on the technique of interpreters.
And if we were to ask who the plural Hermes in narrative medicine is, the answer is simple: they are the patients, the family members, the health professionals, the helping professionals. Their message must be honored – as Rita Charon writes – honoring the stories of illness’, giving a sense of sacredness to the text. And we translators, we are a bridge between the place of the sacred and the pragmatism of interpretation that suggests how to act next to bring light and health.
These techniques of reflection and interpretation are learnt in the field and in training courses: self-taught is always a person worthy of esteem, the do-it-yourselfer is an act of great will, but mature and well-grounded competence leads people who wish to enter the ‘pragmatics of narrative medicine’ to turn.
Turning means acting differently in the visit with the patient, including the narrative in the context of the biography of the person we are treating, it means designing research that brings out what are the new pleasures that a person afflicted by an illness is struggling to obtain, it means communicating to the microcosm of relationships the ‘real how I am’ and not the one falsified by the mask of the stereotyped smile. Turning means educating in a different way, with fewer rules, fewer preconceptions, and more ability to recognize others. There is a cliché I wish to dispel: one is born to be empathic and to understand others. Not at all, these are scientific arts that must be studied with the spirit of the interpreter, asking the help of the God Hermes (at the beginning of this post there is the propitiatory hymn), with whom we will most likely have fun. And right now, we need his lightness given by his wings on his feet and his age of perpetual adolescence.
