Orpheus Tomb Discovered

Bad Santa?

I thought Orpheus was a 60s/70s rock group?

First thing I thought of upon reading the headline! Late '60's Boston band, part of the abortive "Bosstown Sound" promotion that major labels tried to piggyback on the success of the Frisco sound. Some nice if innocuous sunshine pop/rock with psych edges.

Dr. Oldies

"it's a classic fairy-tale motif of being warned not to do something, and of course he can't resist doing it."

Reminds me of Oscar Wilde's remark of being able to resist everything but temptation.

"Reaching out for his wife as she is withdrawn from him echoes the passage where he tries to embrace his father in Hades, and the earlier passage where he has a vision of his wife while leaving the burning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."

For me, embracing a shade means embracing art, which is a pale imitation of life and is never real. It almost seems that sorrow drove him to unnatural ends. Orpheus' music was powerful to charm wild beasts, yet the irrational aspect is never far off despite his civilizing qualities. To constantly try to embrace the shades of wife and father shows his irrationality to some extent. Or perhaps it shows Orpheus' feminine or weak side. I remember reading Bacon's essay on Love where he argues that men should never be weakened by love and he points to the ancients to back up his case (with a few exceptions, e.g.. Anthony.) "Love doth much mischief" is a line from his essay and, I think, used by Shakespeare as well. The comedies of Shakespeare all end in marriage and Orpheus, if written today, would end in possibly a gay marriage if weren't for the Bachii. As a myth it reinforces the stereotype that artists are effeminate, irrational creatures prone to wild outbursts of emotional behavior and whose lives end tragically. Milton embracing Christ is different type of love and one, I think, Bacon approves of with his example of the monk.

I wonder if Orpheus' heighten preoccupation of embracing his wife ever created a psychological, 180 degrees, flip in his thinking, to where he becomes narcissistic and self absorbed -- or maybe he was always that way. The hole the loss of his wife had created in him, in his soul, is perhaps the entrance to Hades. He fills it or it fills him with sad art, music, etc., but it ever yawns open to devour him like a malignant nightmare. And if he was narcissistic perhaps he would take the plunge into that abyss -- all part of embracing himself, his art or something image like within himself. In the end, physical death was a blessing. I think Dionysus felt sorry for him.

As you suggest, Milton embracing Christ is a move forward beyond the tragic, beyond tragic love, and suggests that there is salvation, that the repetition of loss stops and there is hope for the future. Is Orpheus as a tragic hero meaningless to most Christians? I don't know. Mind you, maybe not meaningless to Christ who called out in vain to his absent father while on the cross. Maybe Christ was as perplexed as Orpheus by his own sense of loss.

I like this song call Orpheus by David Sylvian:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb-kpK2sHeg

FWIW, Renaissance scholars now argue that Bacon was homosexual, in inclination if not in practice. I usually take such claims with a grain of salt, but in his case, the argument has some plausibility. His essay “Of Wives” is certainly very pragmatic.

Yes, shades are not fulfilling. Aeneas wants nothing so much as a good hug, but a shade can’t give it to him. The classical afterworld, even for the heroes in the best parts of it, is pretty dreadful. When the shade of Achilles appears to Odysseus, he tells him that he would rather be a living slave than the most heroic shade in Hades.

Only this CD art.

The only controversy I’ve read about Bacon was whether he was the real Shakespeare and apparently they recently found some manuscript in his library that provides further evidence of him writing the plays. I don’t know, maybe they were twins separated by birth, but it seems incredible that Shakespeare had access to a library to read Plutarch or to be so familiar with British history.

They have also claimed Shakespeare to be gay because of his poetry. But it seems like a tremendous waste of time. It’s total speculation... like arguing whether Hamlet’s ghost father was really a ghost or was it a design by Frotinbra to have Reynardo the spy act as the ghost to incite Hamlet to kill Claudius. One could speculate that this would be Fortinbras’ revenge against King Hamlet for killing his father and leaves him in a nice situation to take over the kingdom, which he eventually does. Fortinbras is then by far the greatest Machiavellian of the lot for persuading Claudius commit fratricide and then having him killed off by Hamlet. You can argue this but there is no proof — just speculation. If Hamlet is acting from the start so perhaps is the ghost. In fact, almost everybody is acting a part in Hamlet — a play within a play. Even the last scene of sword fighting involves deadly deception from this family of actors. Deception is the royal stamp of Denmark. So how can there be any proof? In point of fact, the play itself contains the more questions asked by its characters than any other Shakespearean play — and if the characters in the play don’t know much, how can we? And there has been as much speculation about Shakespeare over the years as there is about this and other plays. I doubt if we’ll ever know.

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