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Surprisingly, yes, but all their poetry ends with big explosions... |
Posted on 06/29/2007 1:27:37 PM PDT by blam
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Surprisingly, yes, but all their poetry ends with big explosions... |
I have it on good authority that poetry is uplifting and if the text is not uplifting it is not poetry but a pile. Typically, both words originally meant the same when the etymology is reattached.
I quoted that partly because Milton, according to tradition, connects the death of Orpheus with the geographical place where this tomb was found, when he speaks of the “wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard / In Rhodope.”
We see the same geographical background in Milton’s earlier use of Orpheus in “Lycidas”:
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Had ye bin there — for what could that have don?
What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore,
The Muse her self, for her inchanting son
Whom Universal nature did lament, [ 60 ]
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His goary visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.
All his life, Milton thought of himself in terms of Orpheus. He was the orphic poet, the civilizer, the order bringer. Indeed, a whole book has been written on this subject.
The story of Orpheus as it was continued by Virgil ended badly, with death and loss. Milton chose to become a poet when he gave up the idea of becoming a preacher, but he took Orpheus as his model, because Orpheus was the singer who could tame wild beasts and civilize wild passions. Thus the poet can serve as a kind of preacher. Yet in the end, Orpheus failed, nor could the Muse protect her son from being torn to pieces, which is not a good portent for what Milton wants to accomplish as a poet.
Milton calls his Muse Urania (the heavenly muse), but in effect Urania becomes a symbol for the Holy Spirit. Thus Urania has a power that no classical muse ever had.
The power of Milton as a poet comes largely from his deep use of the classical vision of poetry combined with the Christian confidence that in the end all will be well (as T.S. Eliot says in “Four Quartets.” So there is loss and death, but also final hope.
That's all that I have to know.
ROD: Ok, so you want to talk about the soul, culture and genius. Well, then, Walter, let’s get philosophical. You remember the myth of Orpheus! Often the artist searches for something lost in his soul, like his Eurydice, something he loves and this will cause him to suffer ridicule and shame. He will remain removed from the land of the living, will ignore reason, his friends and love ones, just so that he can bring up a rendering, a hollow shade from the underworld... ART... his one substitute for life! In other words, the artist is Orpheus a tragic figure who descends into the underworld of his subconscious, in search of an illusion, and he is compelled to go back, time and again. Life is meaningless to him if he is forced to live a normal life in society. He doesn’t have normal thoughts and urges. His mind is fixated on one thing. And like the drug addict he will escape normalcy at every opportunity. The myth of Orpheus tells us that this type of life can only lead to a tragic death. This is the price you pay for culture, genius and soul!
WALTER: I thought you said that the artist wants a job? Now you’re saying they can’t live in society? Well, which one is it!
ROD: They are in between worlds... Some artists are sold on fame and fortune and some couldn’t give a rat’s ass about it. Like Orpheus, good artists live between the land of the living and land of the dead. It’s almost a form of schizophrenia, being torn between two worlds. Even in the myth, Orpheus’ body was torn apart by the Bacchii followers. But art does not prepare you for normal life. It is a journey where you have to straddle two worlds and the temptation is always to return to the land of the dead. In fact, you might as well be dead to this world.
WALTER: And artists do it for love... to find something they love that is lost in their soul? Searching for their Eurydice? All for love is it!
ROD: Yes, love unites them, it makes them feel whole. It’s like what Aristophanes said about love in Plato’s Symposium. The Lover is in search of his beloved, the other half of his being that would make him feel complete. In the dialog, Socrates gives us his Ladder of Love image to describe an assent toward perfect completion. The Ladder of Love takes the lover or artist beyond the material world to an ideal, almost mystical consummation with love. The artist tries to transcend this world and it’s through love that he finds the missing half of his soul.
WALTER: But the artist as Orpheus is not about assent, but a descent into the subconscious to find his lost love. His love is in the underground, right. Not somewhere in the sky!
ROD: Yes, it seems like they are going in two different directions – the Platonic is ascending and Orphic is descending – but they are both leaving this world, the land of the living, to find something that is lost. Love is able to transcend our limitations in the world and give us a sense of completion and wholeness. It satisfies our deepest longings and shows that we’re not just material beings. We are spirits that are housed by our physical bodies and that our true home is not in the material everyday world of the living.
WALTER: So Love is the big saviour? It allows us to escape our limitations and feel complete?
ROD: Love allows us to conquer death, our greatest fear and limitation. Death is the possibility that limits all possibilities. Everything in this world changes... change is like a miniature death – one thing comes into being and another leaves it. If I take this beer bottle that I’m holding in my hand and smash it, the bottle would change. A bunch of shattered glass has come into being and the old bottle has left being — a death of sorts. Death of our physical bodies works in the same way. Death limits us so that we cannot be alive in the world as we once were. After we die, our bodies are just parts of rotting flesh and we are not whole like we use to be. We’re like the bunch of scattered glass and not the whole intact bottle...
WALTER: Rod you fool, we still die! How does love conquer death?
ROD: Love conquers death as Orpheus shows us through his descent into Hades. Orpheus was a hero and there weren’t too many heroes who could conquer death by journeying through the underworld and then return to the land of the living. It’s almost like Jean Cocteau’s film ‘Orphee,’ where Death was a beautiful woman who fell in love with Orpheus and risked the punishment of the gods by releasing him from the underworld. It suggests that love is a higher and more powerful force than Death which humans fear. The power of love can overarch and soften the terrible power of death. In the movie Death suffers more from love than humans. Death suffers by letting her lover escape to this world and by having to pay for the consequences of his escape. Death is like a heroine and martyr, qualities brought on by the higher power of love.
WALTER: This is all very mystical and vague.
ROD: Yes, it is.
WALTER: So if I understand you right Rod, Death fell in love with Orpheus and bowed to the higher power of love. And that suggests that there is something higher to which we return after we die, right? Some place where we feel love and feel complete, almost a Christian heaven of sorts. But what about the shades in the underworld, don’t we become like that when we die?
ROD: It’s hard to talk about the underworld, but there is also a part of it called the Elysian Fields which is a happy place and is the home for the shades of the blessed.
WALTER: Now that you’ve quit art you’re back in the land of the living.
ROD: Absolutely.
WALTER: You’re not in love with Death and the underworld, searching for your lost love?
ROD: No. I’m in the land of the living, right here in your living room.
WALTER: Great, Rod... Gab me another beer then before the icy fingers of lady Death shatters it.
***************************************************
You mention a book. Is it specifically about Milton as an Orphic poet? Did he have any thoughts on why Orpheus looked back? I could never figure that out. Plato says he was coward, which may be true. It seems like he didn't have a future after that point, his tragic life was set into motion or his character was defined, i.e., he could only look back in time. The Bible also has something similar in the story of woman looking back and turning into a pillar of salt. It's like being psychologically frozen to something in the past.
Many artist are inspired by their dreams. I think there is a language of the subconscious shown by way of dreams. A meaningful language that Freud recognizes and the Surreal artists draw from. There are other processes that are going on in the brain that assesses our world and informs us through the language of dreams. I always find it surprising that this process uses mostly visual imagery instead of verbal language. I don’t know what that means, but dream imagery seems to open to greater interpretation or misinterpretation by the conscious mind. I think it would be easier to have verbal statements like, “Don’t do that! Because if you do....” The symbolic content of dreams seems much too open and doesn't always clarify. Sometimes you may want a precise meaning. But there does seem to be communication between parts of the brain... or from the muse and what spirits there may be.
I think Christianity offers great hope. The Greeks seemed to like their tragedy a bit too much which leads into the Oedipus vs. Christ debate, but that is another discussion.
It looks like that Cave where Conan found his sword from Krom. :)
I think when Orpheus looks back, it’s a classic fairy-tale motif of being warned not to do something, and of course he can’t resist doing it. To which you can add, for Milton, the importance of moving forward through time toward the future and abandoning regret and nostalgia for the past. There’s an odd parallel with the story of Lot’s wife, although the meaning is slightly different.
That part was added to earlier versions of the story by Virgil in the Georgics. It’s a motif that runs through Virgil: loss and regret for human relationships. Reaching out for his wife as she is withdrawn from him echoes the passage where he tries to embrace his father in Hades, and the earlier passage where he has a vision of his wife while leaving the burning city of Troy, but is unable to embrace her. And that, in turn, is based on Homer’s passage describing Odysseus’s meeting with his father as a shade, who cannot be embraced or give human comfort. Milton returns to the theme in the last line of his sonnet about his dead wife returning to him in a dream: “I wak’d; she fled; and day brought back my night.”
Actually, by far the best piece on Orpheus in Milton was by Caroline Mayerson in an article she published in PMLA in 1945. The recent book is a bit too trendy postmodernist for my taste, and I don’t think adds anything to Mayerson.
I looked up Mayerson:
“The Orpheus Image in Lycidas”
Caroline W. Mayerson
PMLA, Vol. 64, No. 1. (Mar., 1949), pp. 189-207.
You can access it on JSTOR if you have a library account.
Just the ducks.
The film Orfeo Negro took the story to carnivale in Rio. One of my all-time favorite movies.
Actually, they were searching for the Tomb of Morpheus, but they kept falling asleep.........
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Wrong. You don’t have “restroom” on that list. You drink beer, you need that one too. Heck, I needed it in the three different countries I lived in where English wasn’t the major language, and I’m not a beer drinker. ;)
now that is interesting!
“What did they do, walk around and gather up all the little tiny pieces?”
Just don’t turn around, what ever you do!
“Is this the guy who wasn’t supposed to look at his wife?”
“Just don’t look back on the way out, dear”
“The story of Orpheus as it was continued by Virgil ended badly, with death and loss.”
That’s putting it mildly...ripped to shreds by man eating nymphs/furies. Your classic death!
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