Orpheus and Eurydice

As an aside before I get to the heart of the day's post, let me say that I've reflected excessively on what I want and don’t want this blog to be. In the process, I’ve come face-to-face with some unsavory and ineluctable little truths. Before starting this blog, I was wary of letting it devolve into what I’d wager eighty-percent of most blogs eventually become: self-indulgent platforms for whining or driveling, more or less in the mold of any sentence that’s emerged from the mind of Julie Powell (of "Julie and Julia" fame). In the spirit of full disclosure, let me say also that that may have been a completely unfair appraisal of the nature of most blogs, but if I’m being honest, it’s a prejudice I don't think I've completely relinquished. And when it comes to Julie Powell, it’s not that I mean to pick on someone who’s an all-too-easy target, but facts are facts, and the truth is I don't share her penchant for freelance butchering and adultery, and I'm not under the delusion that, just because I'm neurotic and insecure, my every waking thought needs to be published and preserved for posterity. That's mean, I think, so I apologize, but really, she's exactly what I don't want to become if I’m going to make the transition to blogging and take it seriously. And yet she's basically what I fear the mold for bloggers looks like. But… aha! The epiphany I've had just today is this: there's something in the underpinnings of this sad, little enterprise of blogging that's innately self-indulgent, so it’s not the fault of people like Julie Powell as much as it’s the fault of the blogs that people like Julie Powell become enslaved under. To clarify, since it’s impossible to know what kind of audience I’m writing to or for, all I can do is write for myself, about what I find interesting or compelling, what I’m experiencing and seeing and thinking. The commonality among all those things is me, me, me, me. What that means, when you get to the bottom of it, is I’m being disingenuous when I promise (as I did in the first post) that I won’t be self-important or self-indulgent as a blogger. As it turns out, to engage in the act of blogging, as far as I can tell, is to automatically succumb to those vices. There’s no getting around it. But, guess what, I’m going through with this anyway. I have for years written and read by myself, all while accepting without exception the absolutely solitary nature of both of those delightful activities. I could--don’t get me wrong--go on like that till I’m an old, broken-down man with my feet in slippers and a book on my lap. But this little adventure we’re embarking upon here marks a subtle departure from that, and if I thought it was anything other than a good departure I wouldn’t be going through with it. From now until it ceases to be worthwhile, I’ll share right here, with anyone who wants to read them, the poems that are a permanent part of my life, the poems that sustain and invigorate me, the poems I read and re-read because they express the things I can’t. As I said before, I’ve been reading forever without feeling very much inclined to share my reactions to what I’m reading with an anonymous group of readers, and I’ve traveled relatively extensively also, never with the impulse to make my personal reflections public. But right now, for whatever reason, I want to give it a shot; I want to see if this works. And just in case you’re wondering, “Does he really think there’s a demand out there for poetry-based travel blogs?” let me preempt you by saying, “No, of course I don’t.” But in the off chance that there is, I’m about to corner the market.


Now, onward and upward to subjects you’re much more likely to find interesting. I’ve received a few questions aimed at the collage of photos at the top of the page. It’s really just four photographs I put next to one another because I liked them, but I’ll go into a bit more detail if only to humor you, readers. First, and probably least interestingly, the photos on the far left and right are just stock photos taken by God-knows-who. Since I’ve yet to actually set foot in China, naturally I have no pictures of my own of any Chinese landmarks. So I just stole those. I may replace them in a few weeks with photos taken by yours truly; we’ll just have to wait and see on that one. The second photo from the left is--and yes, there’s been some confusion about this--of a book. It’s a photograph by Abelardo Morell, entitled “Dictionary.” And it just looks cool. I could say it enhances the site’s design with a kind of age-old, erudite charm, but really, it’s just a cool-looking book, so it seemed apt for a blog that’s, at least in part, about books. And finally, the third picture from the left is a painting by C.G. Kratzenstein-Stub of Orpheus and Eurydice. And it’s one of my all-time favorite paintings because the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is probably my all-time favorite myth. If you’re unfamiliar with it, sit back and let me regale you with my version of it right now. I say “my version” because I’m not an expert on any sort of mythology, and my version may very well contain inaccuracies, but I’ll shoulder the blame for them because this is the version I know and it’s the version I like. First of all, Orpheus was the world’s first poet. This is itself a contentious statement because, honestly, who really knows? But I like to think the world's first poet was Orpheus, and I'm not the only one who does. His wife, Eurydice, was walking in a field when a snake bit her ankle. It was a fatal wound, and Orpheus was so distraught in the wake of his wife’s passing that he set off to wander the earth a listless, broken man, taking solace only in the poems and dirges he sang. Now, he carried with him a lyre, and technically, I suppose he was singing, so you could be saying to yourself, “I think he sounds more like a musician than a poet, Mark.” But I don’t care; he was a poet. (If it helps think of him as this kind of poet, with musical accompaniment and people snapping their fingers instead of clapping and all that jazz.) Before too long, because Orpheus’ lamentations were so sincere and compelling, inanimate objects began stirring—rocks rumbled, trees shook—and the gods and nymphs took notice. As a digression, the term “Orphic poetry” can carry a kind of occult connotation, but I like to think of it as simply poetry with physical consequences. And in that regard, there could truly be no higher aim for a poet than to be Orphic, to literally move what's immovable with only the power of words (that's a big part of why I like Orpheus). To get back to the story, the gods encouraged Orpheus to head down to the underworld and see if his poems were powerful enough to persuade Hades to give Eurydice a new life. Hades was indeed moved, and he told Orpheus he could bring Eurydice back to earth on one condition, that he not look back at Eurydice until they'd reached the surface. Orpheus led Eurydice all the way back up to earth, but misunderstanding Hades’ caveat, he turned around to check on Eurydice as soon as he reached land. Because Eurydice, two steps behind him, had yet to reach the surface when Orpheus looked back, she fell all the way back to the underworld where she would stay for all of eternity (that’s what’s happening in the painting above). Orpheus then went on to sing more dirges until eventually someone chopped his head off for reasons I don’t remember. But naturally, all of this has been terrific fodder for all kinds of literary and artistic pursuits for centuries upon centuries. Since I feel like I’ve been writing this post for far too long, I’ll leave you for now with two of my favorite examples from the world of poetry: a poem about Orpheus (“Orpheus Alone”) by the incomparable Mark Strand and one about Eurydice (“Eurydice Reveals Her Strength”) by A.E. Stallings, who’s good, but not as good as Mark Strand:
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Orpheus Alone

It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk
On the shores of the darkest known river,
Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks
And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;
Then to the great court with its marble yard
Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there
In the sunken silence of the place and speak
Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,
And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,
Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,
The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything
Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,
As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,
Against the water's will, where all the condemned
And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence,
Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled
Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled
Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,
To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light.
As everyone knows, this was the first great poem,
Which was followed by days of sitting around
In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes
Closed, trying to will her return, but finding
Only himself, again and again, trapped
In the chill of his loss, and, finally,
Without a word, taking off to wander the hills
Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken
The image of love and put in its place the world
As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure
Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed,
And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place
Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept
The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,
And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there,
And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain
And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light
Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing
Rose from its depths and shone as it never had.
And that was the second great poem,
Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest
Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable,
Invisible source of all longing to be; it came
As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard
Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement
Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep
Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame,
Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes,
Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees
By a weaving stream, brushing the bank
With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs
Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby,
With his severed head rolling under the waves,
Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl
Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language
Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,
Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift,
So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope
Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.

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Eurydice Reveals Her Strength

Dying is the easy part.
As you live, my dear, why did you come?
You should learn an easing of the heart
As I have, now, for truly some

Prefer this clarity of mind, this death
Of all the body's imperious demands:
That constant interruption of the breath,
That fever-greed of eyes and hands

To digest your beauty whole.
You strike a tune upon a string:
They say that it is beautiful.
You sing to me, you sing, you sing.

I think, how do the living hear?
But I remember now, that it was just
A quiver in the membrane of the ear,
And love, a complicated lust.

And I remember now, as in a book,
How you pushed me down upon the grass and stones,
Crushed me with your kisses and your hands and took
What there is to give of emptiness, and moans.

We strained to be one strange new beast enmeshed,
And this is what we strained against, this death,
And clawed as if to peel away the flesh,
Crawled safe inside another's hollowness,

Because we feared this calm of being dead.
I say this. You abhor my logic, and you shiver,
Thinking I may as well be just some severed head
Floating down a cool, forgetful river,

Slipping down the shadows, green and black,
Singing to myself, not looking back.
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