Even with my heart beating rat-a-tat-tat, I couldn’t help myself. Intrigued by the word, which I had heard before but had never really heard, I pulled out the phone that is always at my side and looked it up.
ar·rhyth·mi·a
Noun: “a condition in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal rhythm.” Greek a-, “without,” and rhuthmos, “rhythm.”
I lay back and closed my eyes and let this Greek origin of the word roll around in my mind as I repeated it several times—rhuthmos, rhuthmos, rhuthmos.
Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm …
I tapped my finger to follow the beat of my heart, but of course I couldn’t, because my heart wasn’t beating in the steady and predictable manner that my finger could easily have followed before July 4, 2022. After all, my heart was built to tap out in a rhythm, a rhuthmos—not an arhuthmos.
Later I discovered that the Greek rhuthmos, ῥυθμός, like the English rhythm, refers not only to heartbeats but to any steady motion, symmetry, or movement. For the ancient Greeks this word was closely tied to music and dance; to the physics of vibration and polarity; to a state of balance and harmony. The concept of rhuthmos was incorporated into Greek classical sculptures using a strict formula of proportions called the Kanon, an example being the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) originally by the fifth century sculptor Polykleitos. Standing today in the Acropolis Museum in Athens this statue appears to be moving in an easy fluidity, a rhuthmos that’s somehow drawn out of the milky-colored stone.
The Greeks also thought of rhuthmos as harmony and balance in emotions, with Greek playwrights penning tragedies where the rhuthmos of life, nature, and the gods goes awry. “In this rhythm, I am caught,” cries Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, where rhuthmos becomes a steady, unrelenting punishment inflicted by Zeus when Prometheus introduces fire to humans, providing them with a tool previously reserved for the gods. Each day Prometheus, who is chained to a rock, has his liver eaten out by an eagle, only to have the liver grow back each night, a cycle repeated day after day in a steady beat for an eternity of penance, pain, and vexation.
In modern times, cardiologists have used rhuthmos to refer to the physical beating of the muscle in our chests that mixes oxygen and blood and pumps it through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries to fingertips, toe tips, frontal cortex, kidneys, eyes, everywhere. In 2006, the journal Rhythmos launched as a quarterly medical publication that focuses on cardiac electrophysiology. This subspecialty of cardiology involves the electrical signals animating the heart with pulses that keep it beating steadily—or, for me in the summer of 2022, not.